We are starting a new series here on the B2B Lead to bring B2B marketers new and/or remarkable products/companies/ideas that could make your life easier or are just plain cool.

Our first entrant in a series of many to come on this theme is BatchBook CRM by BatchBlue Software.  Now I’m fully aware that there are more CRM systems out there than you can shake a stick at.  What sets BatchBook apart from the rest is this simple assessment (IMHO): if you were to start a company to provide a current, modern CRM system today, BatchBook is what it would look like.  It sports an extremely easy-to-use interface and provides all the features and functionality that the primary end-users of CRM systems (sales reps) actually use.  But what makes it cool is the unique social networking and tagging elements that, whereas all the other CRM vendors are scurrying to retrofit their systems with it, has been built in.   Tracking relationships between social network contacts and keeping tabs on the social chatterings thereof are just some of the interesting capabilities on this front.  Their tagging capability, SuperTags, enables users to capture and search on ad-hoc information, such as “talked to this guy at EventForce”.

It is probably best suited for companies fitting the “S” in “SMB” (which most of their customers are), but the pricing model is attractive and I think we will be seeing some interesting things from this company in the future.

I got a new newsletter in my inbox this week, Sales & Marketing Watch.  Not sure they found me but they caught my attention.  The simple newsletter included a list of recent articles from Fast Company, Inc.com, Entrepreneur.com and a few others.  All articles very relevant to what I do every day, so I took a few minutes to checkout some of the articles.

One in particular caught my attention – The Top 10 Dumb Sales Questions During a Bad Economy from www.managesmarter.com.  The article’s author, Steve Giglio, lists 10 questions in every sales person’s normal process of understanding and moving a deal to close.  Here’s a list of the questions, check out the full article to see WHY you shouldn’t be asking these today.

1. How’s Business?
2. What are your goals for this year?
3. Who is your competition?
4. How is your company going to stand out?
5. How has your company been successful in the past?
6. Who is your customer?
7. Is there anyone else I should see?
8. Should I leave this information with you?
9. What is your budget?
10. Who should I follow up with?

And don’t forget to share this one with your sales team.

Yesterday on The B2B Lead, we talked about how marketing’s job has changed over the last couple of years from generating general awareness to tracking leads from cold to close.  Gone are the days of dumping lists of random names into the top of the funnel for sales to sort out.  Well, guess what, it turns out they weren’t sorting them out.

According to SiriusDecisions, 79% of leads generated by marketing are not followed up on by sales teams.   Of the remaining 21%, 70% are disqualified by sales because of lack of budget, timing, or other reasons.   Furthermore, 70% of those disqualified leads go on to purchase the product or service from another vendor.

There’s a lot of talk about leaky funnels and marketing’s role in driving more leads to close but is this really possible if leads aren’t truly leaking out, they’re being rejected and kicked out by sales?

This makes me wonder.  Can better targeted lead generation programs be the answer to everyone’s woes?
I think so.

Here’s a few tips to think about before launching that next great program:

• Before you kick off the next quarter, make sure marketing and sales TOGETHER define what a lead is.  Marketing leads are different than sales leads.  Be certain everyone on both teams understands this and how you’re handling the 2 groups.

• Ask the sales team what is working for them.  Where are they winning? Who are the critical decision makers inside of these companies?  Make sure you are targeting the right companies and the right buyers inside.

• What programs deliver the best leads?  And not just the best leads but leads that convert to customers.  Does this align with what sales says?

• Don’t forget to take a look at who is already visiting you. This can be a goldmine.  Target your outreach efforts back at those visiting, don’t just sit and wait for them to come back and announce themselves.

• For those that are disqualified by sales for BANT reasons, make sure sales is able to pass those leads back for more nurturing.  Budgets and project timelines change all the time.  Because they don’t need you now doesn’t mean they won’t ever (just make sure you have the right buyer engaged, marketing to the right company with the wrong buyer won’t get you very far).

At ReachForce, marketing and sales are 1 team.  We know one can’t be successful without the other.

This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

What do you arm your sales people with? A phone, a computer and a database of prospects (or worse, a phone book)?  How do you prepare them for what is to come, the rejection, or better still, the prospect who wants to buy?   How do we better equip our sales team and enable them to reach and exceed their goals? These are questions we recently decided to tackle at ReachForce…one of our answers came in the form of training.

Our typical training regime used to be comprised solely of a full-day quarterly kickoff.  During that time we would run through a few “sales” skills specific sessions, some background on our industry, and a piece on what we do and how we do it (for newbies).   Part team-building, part skills training, it was an exhausting day and by the end of it some of our more ADD inclined employees had mentally checked out.  Recently we decided to make some changes.  First, instead of only hosting training sessions on a once a quarter basis, each of our weekly sales meetings would be host to a mini-session led by a sales rep.  Second, our quarterly sales training meeting would be shortened to a little over half a day.

Some of the topics that have been assigned out (and presented) by our sales team are:

• Best Practices: Preparing for a first call – items to research/points to know prior to the call
• Overcoming Objections
• Winning Closing Techniques
• Managing Your Time Effectively
• Creating ‘Date Certain’ Decisions
• Call to action emails
• Bringing a proposal to life
• Upping the average sales price

Each of our reps was assigned a date and a topic.  There aren’t really parameters around what they prepare, some have used PowerPoint, some have just spoken and some have created handouts.  I can’t say that we’ve measured our results, but I can say that our reps have been able to put these things into practice as quickly as they are being taught.  One of the greatest things about this training is that it is led in a peer to peer setting.  We felt it very important to remove senior management from these meetings, thus alleviating the fear of looking stupid or asking questions.   Only our floor managers stay in the room with the sales reps, because our floor managers interact with our reps on a peer level, so they teach and learn alongside their fellow sales reps.

The topics listed above are just a few that we have come up with, our program certainly will continue to have fuel and the momentum of continuing education should have a great impact for us.  What kind of topics would your reps benefit from?

This tip comes from our very own Marketing and Sales Operations Manager, Lauren Kincke.  Lauren is responsible for integrating and managing our marketing and sales systems.  She spends most of her time working to make these systems and processes help us be more effective and efficient.  She is an integral part in our closed loop marketing and sales system.

Metrics, metrics, metrics…don’t know about you, but our sales team hates the word!  Some of them claim it’s the big brother feeling, some of them just hate having to keep track of one more thing, but for management, metrics are the lifeblood of our organization.

Here at ReachForce we have an inside sales model so we sell just about every deal over the phone.  We used to be content just tracking meetings set, proposals sent out and deals closed.  We felt like keeping up with these few metrics was enough.  We were at ease knowing most of what was going on, but when our sales team struggled we had zero visibility into why.

As we have grown as an organization we have learned that we can’t be lax on metrics, regardless of what someone “typically delivers”.  When we would notice a hiccup in our sales results, our initial knee-jerk reaction was to change how we approached things, re-visit our value proposition and the way we are communicating it to potential prospects, talk about what triggers, etc.  All great things to discuss and reinforce but it didn’t lead to the big change we wanted to see.  We went back to the drawing board.  We started looking at things a little differently and we noticed some trends among the metric conversion rates and numbers for our top performers, trends we had no line of sight into before.

Here’s what we did:

Displayed activity and metrics for the entire company to see.  It now was very obvious when someone is struggling.  Everyone’s information is updated every day – metrics reporting is now mandatory. Does our sales team like this?  Probably not but my thought is, if they are delivering then what does it really matter?  And, let’s face it, like most start ups sales is the lifeline for our business.

Since instituting mandatory metrics tracking and “the board” we have seen some pretty great results.  Having an instant, always available picture of sales activity makes tracking things through the funnel and forecasting much clearer for us.   Just imagine, if you know how many connects a sales rep has to make to set a meeting and how many meetings it takes to get a proposal, partner that with your proposal to close rate and bingo, you’ve got a good idea of how much activity will be needed to drive a close.  The cool thing about this is that for us, the reverse engineering of activity translates pretty well into results.

On the other side of the house, instituting mandatory metrics has made sales more transparent to marketing.  Our marketing team now has a much better idea of what our sales team needs to hit our company goals.  Additionally, our marketing team uses the same numbers to gauge:

• what marketing messages are the most effective
• what messages aren’t driving hand raisers
• what kinds of programs are needed to drive the leads sales needs
• how many or how big programs need to be so our sales team can spend time talking to warm prospects, not cold leads

Simply put, metrics may be a hassle for some but they are a necessity for both Marketing and Sales to keep a pulse on their ultimate challenge – driving more business faster and more efficiently.

What key metrics are you tracking?  Are they giving you the information you need to make the right decisions for your business?

I’d also love to know if anyone else is tracking daily or weekly metrics in a public place.  It seems to be working here.  In fact, it has really upped the competition among our sales team.

We recently just had our 2009 sales kick off here at ReachForce. This time we focused part of the day on nurturing prospects in the sales opportunity funnel. Typically once leads are flipped into the sales funnel it means hands off for marketing. Sales people take over all communications at this point.

Here, we use Salesforce for our CRM and Eloqua for our Marketing Automation. We are able to push marketing campaign activities directly into Salesforce but once a lead is converted, it can’t be converted back to a lead if the prospect goes quiet or isn’t quite ready to buy. Why not salesforce.com? Why not? You’re making it so hard for us to really build a closed loop system. Anyway…

To help our sales team stay in regular communication with their prospects in the opportunity funnel we’ve (marketing) put together a few things to help them. Here’s what our sales team is now armed with:

• A daily prospect intelligence report – a news feed with any public news from companies in our sales funnel. This gives our sales team a little more insight into the company they are selling in to and gives them a reason to follow up if they run across some applicable news. You can do this with Google Alerts too. Set one up for your biggest prospects and see what they have to say or what is being said about them.
• Best Practice email templates in Salesforce – we (marketing) put together a series of emails and added them to Salesforce so our sales team can access them when they need them. My recommendation here was to periodically send best practice or thought leadership pieces to prospects to stay top of mind. These are not sales oriented emails, these are adding value emails. But, they can be customized to fit each prospect’s specific situation. I’m really interested to see if and how they actually use these.
• Blog posts – The B2B Lead is all about giving our readers good B2B Marketing and Sales tips to help them in their day to day jobs. So as we are adding new posts we’re making sure we are sharing those with our sales team. They can then forward these along to prospects when applicable. Not everything is for everyone but who knows, that one tip they forward on might just get them to move. And, who doesn’t want tips that will help them be better at their job?
• Newsletter – we have a very popular opt-in newsletter, in fact, our subscription list grew by 50% over the last 8 or so months. Our newsletter isn’t ReachForce promotional, instead we pull our best tips from The B2B Lead and put them together in a newsletter format. For this, we’ve just added a check box to the Salesforce contact record and if the sales rep wants us to include them in this group, they just mark the box.

So here’s what we just rolled out, what are you doing to nurture prospects already in the sales funnel? And who owns this nurturing? Marketing? Sales? Both?

I’ve been talking to a lot of people these days about database hygiene. Many have asked for best practices amounting to a “get well, stay well” healthy data routine. We do have a great white paper on this subject, Is Dirty Data Sabotaging Your Marketing Results?

One step is to make sure that users of your CRM system have a handy/easy way to “flag” inaccurate contact records.

If you are a salesforce.com customer, here is a way to help in this area:
The instructions/advice below requires administrative privileges in salesforce.com.

FINDING DIRTY DATA/EXCEPTION REPORTING

1. A field must be designated for data quality/lead quality to be reported through.  For instance, here, we use our “Lead Status” field and have created custom values in the pick-list to accommodate the error reporting.  Example: Bounce Back (Email); Wrong Phone Number; Contact No Longer There, Company Closed/Acquired.

a) A pick-list type field is best for this because it standardizes the options for reporting.
b) We have found it useful to go beyond the simple “Bounce Back, Wrong Phone Number” type of justifications for a contact being wrong and include information such as Company Acquired/Closed (with a custom field allowing users to input the company it was acquired by), Company No Fit: No budget/need, Wrong Contact: Need higher level contact/lower level contact, etc.  Once you have a basic infrastructure for error reporting customizing the field to your organization’s needs is easy.

2. After the field is in place and has begun being used, create a custom report that pulls the data you wish to report on.  It is typically much easier to report on the exceptions (the wrong data) rather than the correct data.

• Go to the “Reports” tab, select “Create New Custom report”
• Choose “Leads”
• Use a tabular report format
• The columns we use are:
• Lead Owner
• First Name
• Last  Name
• Title
• Company/Account
• Lead Source
• Lead Status
• Created Date
• Created Month
• Street Address
• City
• State/Province
• Zip/Postal Code
• Country
• Phone
• Email
• Website
• RF Internal Project (*Custom field, created to denote what project each
• contact came from)
• Nothing needs to be summarized on the standard summary fields
• Any changes in the placement of columns is strictly based on personal preference

For report criteria the following is important:
a) View – choose All leads.  Date/Duration/Start & End Date – leave the standard “Create Date” and “Custom” settings but delete the date in the “Start Date” field – leaving it blank ensures all possible data is captured in the report.
b) Advanced Filters:

• Field – Lead Status (or whatever field you have elected to use to report the error data in)
• Operator – contains
• Value – Whatever error messaging you have input, for example “Bounce Back, Wrong Phone Number, Contact No Longer There.”  If you have used a pick-list to populate the field then you will be able to use the look up (looking glass icon next to “AND”) to select all relevant information.

Here at ReachForce, we run this report on a weekly basis, but companies with less sales reps or reps who make fewer calls won’t necessarily need to run the report that frequently, conversely companies with lots of reps or reps who burn up the phones will want to run an error report more often.

RE-IMPORTING NEW/CLEAN DATA

To avoid lead duplication, it is best to export the bad data with a unique identifier (like the Lead ID provided by salesforce.com) and then re-import  the data using the same identifier. By using the Lead ID, you can ensure that notes and activity history that were previously attached to the record are not lost in the process.

It is important to remember to reset the Lead Status field once the data has been cleaned up (or whatever custom field designates the data as bad) so that sales reps calling on the data know it is ready to be called on again.  Here at ReachForce we also have a “born on date” for our refreshed data.  In that field we import the date that the records were updated in salesforce.com so that the rep calling on the record always knows how current the information is.

After data has been cleaned up, it is important to continue to keep the data up to date, using the error reporting discussed above and setting a time-table for how long it takes for a lead to “expire” allows you to keep all of the data in your database fresh.  For example, if a lead is new on 9/1/2007, it is safe to assume that by 9/1/2008 it might be in need of an update.

DATA SCORING/RECORD COMPLETENESS

We have found it useful to leverage a free AppExchange program put out by salesforce Labs called “Data Quality Analysis Dashboard 1.0″ to give better visibility into the completeness of records and what deficiencies exist. This package installs a set of dashboards and reports that give scores to each type of record within your CRM and then provide high level views of how your records score.  Using this tool can give you a better idea of where your records need improvement and/or if particular types of records are better kept than others.

This week The Funnelholic had a great tip for marketers getting ready to go into 2009, and we wanted to pass it on to The B2B Lead readers.

“Do ‘ride-alongs’ with sales as you consider your marketing plans.”  So often we are busy putting programs and campaigns in place without even asking sales (our customer) if it’s what they need to move leads to opportunities and opportunities to customers.  “If you really want to add value as a marketer, you have to identify the ‘have-to-have’s’ for your customers, the sales team. The best way to do it, is to see for yourself.”

He then goes on to list a couple of great ideas on saddling up with your sales team to help do your job better and drive more measurable results.

Check it out and thanks to The Funnelholic for the great tips.

This is GREAT! We are both customers and big fans of Hubspot, and they released a new video yesterday and we wanted to be sure readers of The B2B Lead saw it. It already has over 200 diggs and is Number 1 in YouTube when you search “marketing.”

A prospect raises their hand and fills out a contact form for a salesperson to contact them.  Woohoo, a marketer’s dream, but do you know how quickly your sales team responds or if they respond at all?  Insidesales.com conducted a ResponseAudit to test every exhibiting company at Dreamforce, salesforce.com’s user group conference, to see how quickly they would respond to a web lead.  The top three companies were winners in the ResponseAwards.  I can happily say that ReachForce received 2nd place by responding in 3 minutes and 12 seconds.

The sales rep who responded, Chase Nall, was with us at Dreamforce and received the award in person:

Here are some interesting stats from the ResponseAudit:

“39.5% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by phone with the average response time by phone of 44 hours, 31 minutes, and 8 seconds. Of companies that responded by phone the average phone attempts was 1.14 times.  53.2% of the Dreamforce Sponsors responded by email, with the average response time by email of 13 hours, 14 minutes, and 24 seconds. Of companies that responded email the average email attempts was 1.45.”

I found the most amazing statistic was that over 37% of companies never responded at all.  I cannot imagine as a marketer how I would feel if I worked at one of those companies.  We work so hard to get prospects to raise their hand, and for no one to follow-up when one is delivered on a silver platter would be seriously demoralizing.

For those that did respond, the average response time was still very slow.  “Recent lead response management research from MIT shows the odds of making contact with a Web-based inquiry increases 100 times if attempted within five minutes.”  We made the five minute cut, would your sales team?  Maybe it is time for an audit of your own.

To learn more about Insidesales.com and the ResponseAudit check this out.