Entries Tagged 'allyforce' ↓

Wisdom of the crowds.

Imagine being able to apply a set of "spies" out in the field to tell you of potential opportunities that you may be missing.

Isn’t that the worst situation to encounter, where you could have competed, maybe even won, in a situation but didn’t even know about it?

With smaller and smaller sales staffs and harder and harder to reach decision-makers, the ability to get good, timely intelligence about situation where you could be selling is very difficult, but even more essential.

Good sales people collect information about the needs, the plans, the environment of their customer.  If your partners have good sales people and you’ve developed a good system for sharing, that’s powerful.  If you’re not doing this, your competition may, and where would that leave you?

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When I describe the feature to most non-sales people and a handful of actual sales people, the primary objection that comes up is, "Will people share contact information?"

The answer is a qualified, Yes.

I know because I’ve done it successfully.  And I was doing it without one key component which we believe is essential for a company trying to develop an Allyforce.

First, why will they share?

By making the value proposition clear and selecting good, quality sales people.  Almost all of the sales reps I have tried to share leads with, except for one, was more than willing to reciprocate.  Why? 

In part because I made sure that I knew companies that they wanted, and offered to help them first to get the ball rolling.  We know that just because we have a contact that’s not going to lead to a sale.

But faced with the option of dialing into the receptionist or trying to scour contact databases which may be out of date, it is much easier and reliable.

Second, sharing is a basis for building social currency.  It is the social currency among sales reps, in many ways.  Good sales reps know that building social currency is valuable and seek to maintain a balance.  Yes, they will in the end be looking for names that help them, but they know that working with the right partners, that kind of cooperation is a winner.

What helps encouraging successful sharing?

Management buy-in.  In the end, sales people do get guidance from management.  If management says that it makes sense and can paint a clear picture for how and why it will work, and also has a way to make basic metrics, it’s easier for sales people to comply.

A potential hurdle appears if the task at hand is also too bureaucratic, however.

Yes, sales people will still fill out forecasts and the CRM tool — although those activities don’t help to generate leads or opportunities and are very paperwork intensive.  So while there can be alot of resistance, if a company can establish ways to reduce that friction of exchanging leads while also being able to get basic metrics, it becomes a win for all parties.

Management support + simplicity + metrics + mindset of social currency = adaoption and success!

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One of the areas which I’ve noticed is the downfall for many B2B Alliances is consistency and metrics.  This isn’t the answer to all the lead-generation problems.  What it does is provide:

• contact — an update to date contact with information
• context — typically the sales person will know something about the company or contact
• connection — ideally, but not always, the sales person will have a connection with the company

Having these does not guarantee a qualified opportunities.  It still takes getting as many of these as possible.  But the alternative?

• using outdated lists with bad contact information and no idea where the person is on the decision-process
• limiting your scope of targets
• relying on other lead generation activities which either generate nothing or are non-existent

But both sides need to work on it.  And one important component of that is to have metrics.

These don’t need to be complicated.  It basically breaks down into two primary numbers (from a manager’s perspective):

• how many contacts have I received from an Ally?
• how many contacts have I been giving to an Ally?

You could get more granular, but these are the two primary numbers.  Why?  Because as long as these two numbers are relatively equal and growing, you know you are getting transactions.  Something is happening between your reps and the reps of your allies.

But what if they are just gaming me?

Well, let’s talk more about that later, but one key element to successful implementation is to have easy, readily sharable, real-time metrics on activity that does NOT impose more bureaucracy on your field reps or you.

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Building an Allyforce, both in principle and in execution, can work for a range of companies.  The primary criteria are:

• Are sales conducted by an individual person knowing the right person to connect with?
• Is finding the right person or right company a large part of the challenge?
• Do you have complimentary, non-competing solutions in the market who want to work with you?

So, for example, someone who sold to hospitals and there are only 5 hospitals in the entire area and the only person who could buy was the head of surgery would not benefit.  They know exactly which accounts to call, and there aren’t many of them.  They know the exact person within the organization to reach and already know the name and title.

Whether you were a big company or a small company in that scenario wouldn’t matter.

Let’s take a look at how big, medium-sized, and individuals can benefit from this approach and mindset.

The individual targeting individuals

If you are a chiropractor or a wedding planner, you might not thinking of proactively reaching out to people.  You could depend just on search engine marketing and blogging and that could work.

But imagine if, for example, you were a wedding planner, and you build an Allyforce relationship with three Allies: a caterer, a florist, and an invitation designer.  And you felt their products and service were good.

Could you imagine setting up an easy way of sending (and tracking that send) contact information to the caterer, the florsti and invitation designer and enabling them to forward information to you.

You could do this via email or spreadsheet or with a proprietary tool (to address the logistics of it) but set that aside for a moment: do you see the power of building an Allyforce in your local community?

The small high-tech company targeting Fortune 1000

High-tech companies targeting Fortune 1000’s need to be able to touch as many account and touch the right people in those accounts.  Fortune 1000’s can be notoriously hard to navigate to find a decision-maker — wouldn’t it be great if you could collect and assimilate information from people who are doing the same type of prospecting as you?

Let’s take for example you sell traffic management software.  You could work with someone who does logging, DNS management, and maybe high-end routers.  You’re addressing the similar space of managing the traffic and speed of the network, but don’t compete directly.  Some of your customers could be great customers for those in your Allyforce; some of those were you lost deals could be equally great.

Plus, your Allies will know about accounts you  haven’t thought of and warn you of those you are.  It’s a good fit.

The small  low-tech company targeting SMBs

When targeting SMB’s, you can actually broaden your potential network because the decision-maker is often the same for many functions.  For example, an environmentally-friendly credit-card processor was paired up with a local advertising company and a restaurant-supplies company.  Why?  Restaurant owners made good shared targets for credit-card processing, for local advertising, as well as for restaurant-supplies.  Imagine the need to target a wide area of local business owners without an Allyforce behind you.

Large companies targeting large companies

Here’s where I initially got the idea: I worked at IBM where there are several reps each with their own lines of business and products…all calling the same companies in the same territory.  Problem was, there was no way to leverage each other’s meetings and relationships.

Large companies can often benefit by enabling individual reps in the field actually share contact information with each other at the prospecting level and provide real-time updates on accounts and personalities.

Imagine if a company that had a division hardware would effectively communication across its field sales reps what is going on with the division selling software.

The central premise of being able to truly share in revenue-generating partnerhip can apply in many instances, again, given the nature of the territory, the product being sold, and the partnerships being formed.

It’s a huge amount of unlocked potential waiting to be tapped.

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I read Guy Kawasaki talk, albeit briefly, about partnerships — the good and the bad.

He hit it on the nail by saying:  Partner for "spreadsheet" reasons.

The most important spreadsheet reasons are increasing revenues and finding new customers.

One of the key success criteria is whether these deals are "win-win."  We think the cleanest way to forge a relationship is one where both sides are able to uncover new leads, accounts, and opportunities for each other.

The concept is simple and powerful.  The execution needs several critical success factors which I’ve been discussing so far:

* visibility

* velocity

* reciprocity

* accountability

Put these in place for a good spreadsheet, win-win partnership and you’ll be seeing revenues increase.

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As I am discussing with companies why they don’t build a powerful network of referrals, one of the things that came up was the accountability.

Internally, the accountability is relatively easy to do.  The sales manager set metrics (such as the number of outbound calls) and measures them.  It’s pretty straightforward.

But the sales manager for Company A has no influence over the sales reps for Company B.  Company A can only really give names and accounts to Company B reps.  But do you see how there could be some initial distrust as well as just lack of momentum?

Suppose Sales Manager A gets his reps to start giving Company B reps contacts and access to their accounts.  What happens if they don’t see anything in return?  Where is the accountability?  You could say Sales Manager A contacts B and says, "Hey, we’ve given you a bunch of leads, what about your turn?"  There now becomes some sort of peer pressure to work it but notice that, first, there needs to be time for the sales manager to connect with all his reps and make sure that they have all, in fact, given leads and asked for some in return.  Now Manager A has the data to take to Manager B, who goes to all his reps and asks, what is going on, and needs to wait to see if anything is happening?

Meanwhile…Company A has lost interest…which makes Company B lose interest.

The issues: no "neutral zone", no clear metrics and no enabler for this kind of revenue-focused collaboration.

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The concept of "partnerships" has been around for a long time, nothing new.  The requirement to do partnership and do them well is reaching an urgent pitch.  And most companies, from big to small, do it poorly.

The term "partnership" has lots of implication, but the definition of success that I will be looking at focuses on creating value: more customers and more revenue.

Why are partnerships essential?

For the vast majority of companies that don’t have market dominance and scale, partnerships is essential because of constraints or challenges in these areas:

• internal resources: don’t have enough resources to do all things
• customers: customers have more choice or higher buying criteria

Those two areas are the areas where a partnership needs to develop and plant the seeds for growth.  If someone cannot articulate how both parties can reduce constraints around one or both of these areas, the partnership from a value-creation perspective is limited.

Let’s see why most partnerships fail…and how we can develop true partnership principles

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It’s happened to me more than once, and it’s the best.

A rep sent me the name, phone number, and email of a guy and said, “Call him.  He may be looking for what you’ve got.”

So I did.  And he was right.

It was a big multi-billion company in Southern California, which was technically part of my territory but I was only working with a select number of companies because I thought it would get re-assigned to someone else.

But he was actively looking for this particular solution.  I had, in fact, made a few dials in, spoke to someone, but it was the wrong group entirely!

Anyway, this is probably one of the best ways to get a contact short of the customer contacting you and saying that they are in the market for your product.

So why did this rep do this for me?

Because I gave him a few contacts to call.

It’s the Give-to-Get Economy.

To jumpstart it, you’ve got to Give first.

But I’ve done the same thing with another rep.  Gave maybe five good names and contacts to call, all solid.  Then I asked him, “So, what have you got for me?”

His response, via email:  “Uh…nothing, I guess.”

Wouldn’t it be great to not only track what you’ve given and what you’ve received, but see how they treat other sales reps as well?  I’d go with the rep who has a solid track record of both receiving and giving contacts anyday.

And I’d like my partners to be automatically notified of new contacts I could offer them without me going to them.

That’d be sweet!

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I came across one of those quotes that made me think back to my career and current status and went: “Oh boy.  Gotta take the game to a whole new level.”

The old stand-by for both sales and for your career has been: “It’s not what you know, it’s who you know.”

Okay, I suppose when you’re calling on people all day and having meetings and trying to do the networking thing, I guess you build a career around who you know.

But here’s what made me think (maybe you already know this, but this was a new twist for me).

It’s not who you know, it’s who knows you!

To me, that was a very different value proposition and way of going about doing business.

Part of the exercise is how do you get known…something which I’m still exploring.

But I realized that my existing habit of already trying to make introductions to reps I know could be accelerated to a whole new level.

I want to be known by as many people as possible as someone who can make the introductions (by sales reps) and who can continually add value (by prospects and customers).

Not easy but that’s how Allyforce is being designed, to make playing the role of network-maker a click away.

Check it out.

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As a sales rep trying to break into enterprise accounts, the primary way has been through cold-calling.

In an ideal world, the information that you can get from web-sites would be sufficient, but when I started informally asking my partners — sales reps at companies with complimentary products — to suggest names of people they’ve sold to, it worked.

Meaning, I would get a conversation going, sometimes a full-on meeting.

Did that always result in a sale?  No.

But you’re alot closer to a sale when you can discuss and talk with someone than bouncing around in voice-mail.

What are three elements why exchanging information with a partner rep worked so much better, anecdotally 5-times better that the traditional route?

#1: Contacts

In almost all cases, I got a name of someone I wasn’t able to drum up myself.  I had no idea who the right person was in the organization.  In many instances, the person was not only spot on the right person, but looking at a potential project.

Yet, I had no idea of the name, the title, and calling the CIO and the gatekeeper wasn’t getting me there.

#2: Context

I would get alot of information that was absolutely essential before calling that I couldn’t get elsewhere.  For example:

• They have a problem that you may be trying to solve
• He’s not a tough negotiator, but will have a long cycle
• She’s the actual decision-maker and she loves our product
• I heard that they are big Open Source shop

#3: Connection

This would vary based on the contact and the sales rep, of course, but if it was a product they knew and loved, being able to mention the sales rep’s name and product would help instantly give me relevance and credibility.

Of course, I would need to make the tie-in as best as I could, but it was better than coming in completely cold.

It worked so well that I tried to do this more often…but I had a hard time.

It was cumbersome…and that’s when Allyforce was born.

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