Entries Tagged 'big picture' ↓

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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This book is so good, I’m going to be quoting from most of it.  It articulates real-life examples of how to put the partnership principle into play and why.

Developing a host-beneficiary relationship means going beyond the conventional sales and marketing routines and tapping into related products or services that your clients need.  It means offering your product or service to somebody else’s clients in a related field.

He gives an example where Xerox spends say $10,000 to bring in 1,000 prospects to whom they sell 10.  Every company experiences this, where they have leads and contacts, but only a fraction get sold to.  What happens to the other 990?

Nothing.  The money was spent to draw them in, but the Xerox got nothing.

The writer proposed that someone work with Xerox and say, "If you can’t sell Xerox solutions, sell mine, and you’ll get a piece of the profit.  Don’t want ot do that, just give me the leads and you’ll get a share of ever sale."

Now that 990 leads gets transformed into real money and recovers the marketing expense.  That is money which goes straight to the bottom-line of Xerox.

Allyforce lets you optimize all those leads and participate in the profits.

It’s a powerful idea.

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Partnership announcements come with great brouhaha and excitement.

Alot of work typically goes into them, particularly between technology companies.  A strategic discussion and a technical fit often needs to be worked out.

Often times, the partnership fills in a gap in the marketplace, and it’s typically a smart thing.

So regarding the earlier post, this type of product-oriented partnership fills in one need, which is reducing internal resources needed to build out the product.

But I’ve seen it miss the second shoe-dropping: generating more sales.

The concept is sound: non-overlapping installs or differing prospects can be exchanged and shared, as they should be.

But field-level execution is where partnerships fail.  How do individual reps extend the partnership?  And most companies fail at that.

We’re exploring how the Partnership Principle can enable companies to address this and extract fullest value out of partners.

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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 was reading a book on networking (my car was in the shop so I needed to kill time and it had a nice cover, okay?) and some points came out that I thought would be incredibly valuable in the year of a down-economy.

First, it articulated a painful truth that I’ve always thought (but management typically disagreed with), that most of the attendees at “networking” events are not high-level decision-makers, but people who want to sell something, as well.

For most people, I’ve found, that when they realize you’re just “another sales person” they disengage and start looking for the next person.

I usually try to start some kind of conversation, but until now, it’s been more generic, such as “How’s business?” and some will literally expand their chest, put on a huge grin, and talk louder: “It’s great!”  I’ve had others tell me right off, “It’s the worse I’ve ever seen.”

Well, being boastfully pollyanish or depressed are not good options.  For those who seem a little more proactive and creative, I’ll ask: “Think there’s a way we could work together to find prospects faster?”

An article which I’ve mentioned before (and will keep referencing) talks about the importance of indirect sales networks.  These are folks not in your immediate sphere (such as fellow employees or even customers) whom you can network with to access new accounts and contacts.

Other sales people are great for that.  In “investment” terms, if you can find reps who target similar accounts and contacts but have a low correlation to your existing contacts, that’s a win.

Tomorrow, I’ll share an exercise I do almost every day to keep up on partnerships and see how abundant they are if people would just do this one thing.

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A special post for those at early-stage b2b companies

I believe the notion of building an allyforce — exchanging securely and selectively account and contact information with other sales reps you know and trust — is applicable across pretty much any sales industry.

Early-stage (technology) companies get a little love and attention with this entry which has a good, comprehensive list of ways to develop leads.

I pulled a quote from one of the items from the blog: http://replytoall.typepad.com/reply_to_all/:

2.  Partner marketing

• Bar none, partner leads are the most qualified you can get.  If you don’t have partners, get some
• Keep in mind partnering is time and resource consuming.  It can also be perilous so don’t put all your eggs in one basket
  
• A referral selling agreement is a must have in the legal docs arsenal.  It should be short and sweet that allows both parties to get paid if they refer business to each other.  Either a fixed dollar amount per deal or something like 8-10%.  Maybe has a co-marketing or press release agreement as well.

Partnering is hard, and can be very time and resource consuming.

But the process of automating who has given whom what, what types of information, and when — as well as intelligently identifying which accounts and which partners you can Target saves crucial time while unlocking valuable potential prospects.

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The Harvard Business Review (July-August 2006) had an impactful article on “Better Sales Networks” with the following quote from David Godes and Tuba Ustuner:

Many salespeople waste a great deal of time cold-calling or trying to breathe life into old leads.  That’s because they can’t see clearly into prospective firms to know when the companies are getting ready to buy.  The right network strategy can make the process of finding good leads much easier.

One the the most effective ways to get such “marketplace networks” is through other sales people.  Sure, you could work with other types, but a rep to rep network is immensely powerful because of these characteristics of good sales reps:

• Proactively building their network
• Asking questions to understand the customer and their territory
• Can be aligned easily in a give-to-get economy

This is a great article from which I’ll be pulling more insights.

It asks the key question:

How good is your marketplace network?

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