Conversations Still Matter
Blog post by Erik Kubec, Sr. Account Executive at ConnectAndSell.
Your top sales rep walks out of the conference room after a call with a good prospect.
“How did the call go?,” you ask.
“Really good,” he replies.
Later, you will check his notes in Salesforce.com to qualify how good ‘Really good’ is. However, from his body language and his voice intonation, you know the information your organization needs to qualify a sales opportunity–BANT, business drivers, objections, competitors, stake holders, next steps (both for the prospect and the sales rep)– will be there.
He didn’t get to be your top rep by being sloppy or lazy.
And marketing has done a great job providing information to this prospect, and tracking—with Marketo or Hubspot—what white papers they have downloaded, what webinars they have attended.
Later, when you are prepping for the board meeting, you look at the notes from the call (it’s all there) and your spirits lift a bit as this prospect is a good opportunity.
But that is your problem—this call stands out too much because the number of quality conversations happening is too low.
What to do?
Some of the human processes of sales are as old as language: trust, commitments, asking, reciprocity. Certainly, new ‘sales theories’ come along every couple of years—from Dale Carnegie to Challenger Sales—and they add real value. They provide new ways of understanding and executing sales conversations to drive more revenue and improve results.
And the Internet has enabled new tools such as Salesforce.com and WebEx that improve productivity around sales. SFDC provides ways to track, organize, and report on sales conversations, whereas WebEx provides a cost-effective way to have remote sales conversations.
The ubiquitous adoption of these tools (or tools like them) by sales forces across the globe speaks to the industry-acknowledged belief that conversations matter. Yet there has not been a soup-to-nuts solution that offers the generation of quantity of quality sales conversations on demand, outside of increasing (expensively) head count of reps.
Until now.
That’s why I am pretty excited about the opportunity of ConnectAndSell.
And if you are accountable for revenue generation, you might be too when you see how Connect and Sell can improve real productivity of sales reps by 5x- 10x. And did I mention that the CEO of ConnectAndSell, Stu Schmidt, was responsible for global training of sales professionals at WebEx, and for bringing the Professionals Services team to market at WebEx!?
