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Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com

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Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com

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Building a Sales Machine that creates ongoing, predictable revenue takes: Predictable Lead Generation, the most important thing for creating predictable revenue. A Sales Development Team that bridges the chasm between marketing and sales. Consistent Sales Systems, because without consistency you have no predictability.

In high – productivity sales organizations, salespeople do not cause customer acquisition growth they fulfill it.

In other words, “working harder” translated usually means: “What we are doing isn’t working, so do more of it!”

It’s true that you need great salespeople to close customers, but the better your lead generation is, the less dependent you are on the quality of your salespeople and sales process. Better lead generation = more margin for sales error.

They won’t generate enough leads on their own – at least not enough to feed themselves. (Okay, sometimes, some salespeople will. Some people win the lottery, too.) Here’s why: Experienced salespeople are terrible at prospecting. Experienced salespeople hate to prospect. Even if a salesperson does do some prospecting successfully, as soon as they generate some pipeline, they become too busy to prospect. It’s not sustainable.

Why do CEOs and boards keep making this same dumb mistake? People, when under pressure or stress, tend to retreat to the safe place of what they know, rather than take the risk of trying new things. People tend to do more of what is not working rather than stepping back, taking a breather, and trying to figure out a new approach.

What works to generate flows of new leads: Trial-and-error in lead generation (requires patience, experimentation, money). “Marketing through teaching” via regular webinars, white papers, email newsletters and live events, to establish yourself as the trusted expert in your space (takes lots of time to build predictable momentum). Patience in building great word-of-mouth (the highest value lead generation source, but hardest to influence). Outbound Prospecting (aka “Cold Calling 2.0”):: By far the most predictable and controllable source of creating new pipeline, but it takes focus and expertise to do it well. Luckily, you are holding the guide to the process in your hands right now. Building an excited partner ecosystem (very high value, very long time-to-results). PR: It’s great when, once in a while, it generates actual results!

Do your executive team and board know how much new (qualified) pipeline the company needs to generate per month? (This is the second most important metric to track, right after closed business.) Is the “new pipeline generated per month” number tracked at the board level? Are there a common language, and common definitions, for “prospects,” “leads” and “opportunities”? One of the biggest problems is usually mis-communication and misunderstanding of terms and metrics between executives and directors.

What are your biggest or most recent failures? What is it about them that you can be grateful for? Can you anticipate how you will benefit by getting through your current challenges?

Instead, the inside sales team of outbound prospectors had a single mission: to generate (but not by cold calling; see Chapter 2) new qualified sales opportunities from cold companies (ones at which we had no prior activity or interest) and passing these qualified opportunities to quota-carrying salespeople to close.

The team only contacted cold new business accounts and past accounts which had been cold for at least six months. The team didn’t receive any new inbound leads generated by word-of-mouth or by marketing (these leads went specifically to a separate Market Response team to qualify and pass to Account Executives).

Your sales results are only scalable to the extent the CEO and executives are designed out of the process. Too many companies are dependent on the CEO or VP Sales for selling. How can you make the sales team and results independent of your direct help, except for coaching them?

Lack of money is a common excuse for not being creative.

The point here is that when you’re low on resources, by having a clear objective and looking at it as an interesting challenge, you can force yourself (and your employees) to GET CREATIVE. Constraints often lead to more creativity from both yourself and your people. Don’t let so-called “reality” stop you!

The biggest bottleneck in prospecting into companies that have more than a few executives isn’t getting to the decision-maker/influencer/point person… It’s finding them in the first place!

Mass emailing C-suite Fortune 5000 executives, with specific kinds of emails, can generate 9%+ response rates. Those high response rates (7-9% or more) from high-level executives have held true year after year, even with my current clients.

The tipping point of the Cold Calling 2.0 process was born: sending mass emails to high-level executives to ask for referrals to the best person in their organization for a first conversation.

Three key principles to developing a team successfully include: No cold calling! Prospect into cold accounts with new methods, rather than surprising people on the phone or trying to negotiate around gatekeepers. For example, use simple emails to generate referrals to the right people, who then expect (and often welcome) your call. A focus on results, not activities! That means that dials and calls per day, or even appointments set, are much less interesting or even important. Rather, track metrics such as qualification calls per day or week, and qualified opportunities per month. Calls per day and dials are usually only tracked during training periods, for coaching purposes, while reps ramp up their pipelines. Everything is systematically process-driven! This includes management practices, hiring, training, and of course, the actual prospecting process. By emphasizing repeatability and consistency, the pipeline and revenue ramps generated by a new Sales Development Rep become very predictable, and the entire team’s results become highly sustainable.

Making the field salespeople do cold calls means having your highest-cost (per hour) sales resource perform the lowest-value (per hour) activity.

Will the pipeline turn into revenue? In other words: Will the deals close? Can junior salespeople do this too; that is, can it scale?

Prospecting into accounts of marginal potential is the most common waste of time by Sales Development Reps and companies. Spend serious time on identifying and clarifying your Ideal Customer Profile. Define what companies are the most similar to the top 5-10% of your customers, defined as the ones likeliest to purchase for the most revenue, and develop focused target lists based on these tight criteria.

Whether they are inside or field-based, there are three problems with expecting your Account Executives (quota-carrying salespeople) to be the ones to do all the work developing new accounts: They don’t like to do it. They usually aren’t any good at it (or are even terrible at it). It’s a poor use of company resources to use the most expensive sales talent to do lower-value work.

Where and When Account Executives Should Prospect Here are the rules of thumb about where Account Executives should spend their precious time prospecting: A short, targeted “Top 5-25” list of vital accounts or channel partners. Their current customer base. The point is to focus your highest value people on the low-volume but high- value activities (building relationships at key accounts), and to specialize other roles and sales reps to take over low-value yet high-volume activities (prospecting into untargeted cold accounts).

What’s expected of a prospector at Acquia Acquia expects each prospector to do: 300-500 outbound emails per month 100 “quick conversations”/“call connects” per month with all kinds of people 20 longer Discovery Calls with influencers/decision-makers 15 Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) passed to and accepted by salespeople And they expect that activity funnel to produce, in pipeline and revenue… Average outbound deal size of 750K pipeline generated per month (This goal is lower than a more standard goal of 8-12 SQLs per month per prospector, because they’re specifically going after large accounts); Expected 720,000 in ARR per year per prospector.

The faster you get started, the faster you learn what it takes to get results.

They brought in experts who’d done it before, rather than trying to recreate the wheel. They knew exactly what to do and when to do it, at every step, without wasting time or money.

and the way the math works out with prospectors, the bigger the deals you can find, the more total sales you’ll generate. As a rule of thumb, at Predictable Revenue we generally recommend that companies average the top 10%-20% of their customer base or deal sizes to gauge the kind of deals and companies to target with outbound prospecting.

To begin implementing the Cold Calling 2.0 system, you should know that: At least one person is 100% dedicated to prospecting (or you intend to have this person). Yes, you can start part-time, but it will be hard to get significant results until you have someone totally committed to it. You have some kind of sales system that lets your sales team share and manage their sales contacts and accounts. Salesforce.com is still the best system (in my humble though admittedly biased opinion) but what’s more important is that you have something beyond spreadsheets, whiteboards and email. Your prospects use email. You have a proven product or service that has generated revenue. The “lifetime value of a customer” is more than $10,000 (the more the better). The process will definitely work if your lifetime value is lower (especially if you’re a single-owner business doing this for yourself), but it becomes more challenging to make it profitable through hired salespeople.

If you want to take an important step towards turning your sales organization into a sales machine, start by letting your Account Executives (the sales reps closing business) focus on what they do best: work active sales cycles and close. Let a different role, Sales Development Reps, focus on generating new qualified opportunities for your Account Executives.

As a first step, dedicate a role (whether you begin with one person or a whole team) to ONLY doing outbound prospecting activities. Break it off from inbound lead qualification and from closing.

Implement a Sales Development function to prospect for new clients to ensure a predictable, sustainable supply of qualified leads for the field and/or telesales teams, and a Market Response function to qualify the leads that come in via your website, through the telephone, or other “inbound” channels.

One Sales Development Rep typically can support a maximum of 2-5 quota- carrying Account Executives.

it’s possible you could have even a 1-to-1 ratio or 2-to-1 Sales Development Reps per Account Executive and still be VERY profitable.

However, Account Executive closers shouldn’t spend their time making cold calls. They should focus on higher-potential sources of business: a small list of targeted accounts from which they can build relationships; a list of their current clients; plus a list of their own past dead opportunities.

Market Response Reps qualify incoming leads that reach the company through the website or phone (usually driven either by internet search, word- of-mouth or marketing programs), and route qualified opportunities to the appropriate quota-carrying salesperson.

A rule of thumb is that for every 400 leads per month that require human attention, a company needs one Market Response Representative.

By taking unqualified opportunities out of the pipeline early in the sales cycle, Market Response determines which accounts will be followed up by the sales force and thereby paves the way for increased close rates by the field and telesales reps, who spend their time only on pre-qualified opportunities.

The roles are very different – inbound reps receive leads to work to qualify, while outbound reps initiate calls and emails – and it’s very challenging for a rep to switch between the two mindsets throughout the day. The Market Response Reps become experts at efficiently qualifying inbound and marketing-generated leads, and the Sales Development team only prospects for incremental business at accounts that need to be pursued, where there is no active or pre-existing interest.

It was this kind of specialization that was important to helping achieve massive breakthroughs in results.

And CEOs, remember: people follow your example. The more you live in your system, the more your people will use it.

Here is the source your PREDICTABLE REVENUE comes from: predictable lead generation.

For b2b companies, the most predictable source of leads can be outbound sales prospecting. Even as the world gets busier and busier, and people drown in email, social and phone messages… outbound still works.

Revenue Predictability = The Funnel + Average Deal Size + Time

In addition to the activities and results in the funnel, you also have to know how long things take in order to have more predictability.

My advice: Put new reps through some kind of training program that has them working in other parts of your company first, talking to customers, before they go on active sale duty. This will make them much more effective salespeople and actually ramp them faster. Slow down to speed up!

How long does it take for a prospector to generate a qualified opportunity? How long does it take for those opportunities to close? Are small ones faster than large ones? What are some imperfect but useful rules of thumb for you?

Prospecting cycle length: Measure the time between (a) when the prospect first responds to a campaign to (b) when a quality opportunity is created or qualified; this means the quota-carrying Account Executive has re-qualified and accepted the opportunity that the prospector passed over. Incidentally, my rule of thumb is that it takes 2-4 weeks, on average, to qualify a new opportunity from an initial response. Sales cycle length: I like to measure the time from (a) when the opportunity was created or qualified to (b) when it closed. If you have trouble measuring this, just sit down with your reps and have a 15-minute conversation to talk about the last 10 deals that closed, to get a rough ballpark of the length.

The single most important thing you can do to make this program effective is to spend time getting clear on who your ideal customers are – both the kinds of accounts and the types of contacts in them. This is where most companies fall short from the start – by targeting the wrong prospects, at the wrong levels, going after too many kinds of companies, or not speaking in “their language”.

there is an opportunity cost to marketing to poor-fit prospects. Responses from people who don’t fit your customer criteria will just end up wasting your time and cluttering your database.

Send outbound mass emails or mass voicemails to prospects that fit your Ideal Customer Profile. These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML (though you can use HTML templates that look like text).

The main goal of this stage is to generate just 5-10 new responses per day. Reps can’t handle more responses per day than that without dropping balls.

Do this: Work your responses and referrals to make contact with the right executives, and then “Sell The Dream” by helping them paint a vision of what kinds of solutions will solve their problems. Then connect your solution to their key business issue(s) and their dream.

It is vital that you have a simple and clear process to pass new leads smoothly from your dedicated prospectors to your quota-carrying Account Executives. Don’t let anyone drop the baton!

What is the most important exercise you MUST do to get better results from marketing and sales? Answer: Get clear on your Ideal Customer Profile, including how to describe them and what their core challenges are. You’ll need to revise it many times before you feel “clear” – this is not a one-time exercise. The Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) helps us maximize sales and marketing productivity by: Finding great prospects more easily through smart targeting; and, Disqualifying poor prospects more quickly.

You can learn these easily – just by asking! Whether by phone or by using an online survey tool like SurveyMonkey, ask prospects and clients questions such as: What are your greatest challenges? What keeps you up at night? What are your main frustrations? What are you afraid of? What’s most important to you? What do you spend money on? What do you really, really, REALLY want?

“Targeted” mass emails sounds like an oxymoron. Here’s how they’re targeted: filter your list carefully according to the specific kind of account or contact you want to touch. Examples of filters include: Vertical (retail, finance, high tech, etc) Revenue Geography/Territory Employee count Business model (B2B, B2C, agency) Last Contact Activity Date Last Account Activity Date Contact Title (CEO, Director of Marketing, etc.)

Guidelines for Writing Your Own Emails These are guidelines for writing emails to cold prospects to start a conversation. Once you begin communicating, you can shift towards longer emails with more content, but in the beginning: These emails should look as if they are a single email that came from a salesperson. They should be text-based, not fancy HTML. State simply and clearly why you are reaching out. Make the email easy to read and respond to on a mobile phone. Offer credibility (e.g., examples of customers). Ask just one simple-to-answer question (such as for a referral). And BE HONEST in all your communications, whether by phone or email.

Send the messages either before 9:00 a.m. or after 5:00 p.m., and avoid Mondays and Fridays. (Sundays are okay.)

Learn to love “out of office” replies – those emails have the names and contact information for more people to target, such as executive assistants whose job it is to help route you to the right person in the company!

The goal of every mass email should be to establish and close a prospect on a next step. That next step should be either one of two things—but NOT both: Who is the best point of contact for …?” (to get a referral); Or… When is the best day/time for a quick discussion around…?” (to set up a conversation with the prospect). For goal #1, getting a referral, the objective is to confirm the best point of contact for a first conversation and get referred to them. Then, you can email the new contact (to whom you are referred) directly while mentioning (or c.c.’ing) the individual who referred you. This shows the new contact that you aren’t making a cold call and you’ve already been engaged with someone from his or her team. Internal referrals create the highest likelihood of getting a response. For goal #2, setting up a call, the objective is to set up a quick time to see if there’s a high level fit between your company and the prospect’s company. This call should be focused entirely on their business – not your business. You should lead the conversation and ask open questions that encourage them to talk about their business – not your business. If you’re talking more than 30% of the time on prospecting or scoping calls, you need to ask more questions or just keep your mouth shut more. If someone responds with a negative, “Not interested”, find out why. Remember, “No” doesn’t matter until you hear it from the CEO or your ideal decision-maker. And even then when you get a No, you should find out why to determine if it’s coming from an objection you can handle. Oftentimes prospects misunderstand what you do or what value you offer, and will say “no” out of confusion.

Assuming you are talking with a prospect who is a good fit for your service, the goal of “Selling The Dream” is NOT to “sell.” It is, rather, (1) to help the prospect create a vision of a dream solution that will solve their problems; and then (2) to connect your product to their key business issue(s) and their dream solution.

There’s interest – but are they ready to take action? Are you connected with the people with power or influence? Is there real interest in a next step?

Outbound prospectors shouldn’t just throw over lots of crummy opportunities that go nowhere – it is better for them to pass fewer, better opportunities to your Account Executives.

Here are a series of sample questions you can customize and use in a Discovery Call. Realistically, in a first conversation, a prospector might just ask 3-4 of these questions. They are roughly in order, starting with more general business questions and leading to more specific qualification questions: How are your ______ teams/functions organized? How does your ______ process work today? What system(s) do these teams use for sales and lead management? How long has the system been in place? What are your challenges now? (After each answer, keep asking, “What else?”) Have you been looking at alternatives yet? Have you tried and failed with other solutions? Why? Where does fall on your priority list? What is higher? What would an ideal solution look like to you? How will your decision-making process work? Why did you buy the old system? Who made the decision to purchase it? What is the probability a project will occur this year [in the next six months]? Why do it now? (Or why wait until later?)

More Tips for a First Call Main objective: get them talking about their business and then listen!!

Scheduling via email is a huge time-waster. Always work to schedule your next step while you’re on the phone.

If the prospect is interested but isn’t ready, or they need to convince more people on the team, then turn your focus to developing your contact into a Champion, who can do the selling for you at the account.

Apart from the qualification criteria, in order to be compensated for a new opportunity, the Sales Development Rep must find opportunities which: Have at least a potential of 20+ users (to ensure the sales reps were looking for large enough opportunities); Have no fundamental “red flags” or deal-breakers; The Sales Development Rep clearly generated (no poaching from “inbound” leads or other SDRs).

There is an opportunity cost to small deals – they waste time and resources that could be spent looking for or working on larger ones.

Fundamentally, when the Sales Development Rep feels it is worth the Account Executive’s time, and that the Account Executive would want to engage this deal, they pass the opportunity over. There were three guidelines for this: Does the company fit our Ideal Client Profile? Are we speaking with someone with influence or power? Is there a clear interest in a next step, usually in the form of a scoping or discovery call with an Account Executive? The opportunity is created and passed to the Account Executive still as a “Stage 1: New Prospect” opportunity. Even when passed to the Account Executive, it is not upgraded yet, and the Sales Development Rep is not compensated for it yet – not until it is re-qualified by the Account Executive.

How to Pass an Opportunity Smoothly Best: Hot-transfer the lead to the salesperson. Okay: Schedule a time on the calendars of your sales rep and the new lead for a discovery call. Last option: Make an email introduction, c.c.’ing both the sales rep and the new lead, with each other’s contact information in the email.

New opportunities are not upgraded to “qualified” until after the Account Executive speaks with and re-qualifies them in their own phone call. Do not let the Sales Development Rep get credit until this happens; this is so critical to quality control! After the Account Executive speaks to the prospect on the phone and feels good about the same basic outbound qualification criteria (Can we solve their problem? Are we in touch with the decision-makers? Do they want a next step?), the Account Executive can upgrade the opportunity to “Stage 2: Qualified”. Now the Sales Development Rep can get credit and be compensated for it.

As soon as an opportunity is upgraded, check it to ensure all of the following: Was this truly an incremental outbound opportunity? Not an inbound lead from your website? Was it re-qualified by the Account Executive by phone? (Sometimes an Account Executive would “do a favor” for their Sales Development Rep and upgrade opportunities before they re-qualified – a big no-no). Did the Sales Development Rep and Account Executive enter notes into your Sales Force Automation system appropriately? If it doesn’t exist in your systems, it doesn’t exist — and reps can’t be compensated for it.

Even if a salesperson takes just five minutes, they can quickly generate a list of objectives for their calls: What Answers do you want to learn in the call? What Attitudes do you wish the prospect to feel? What Actions should occur after the call?

Below is a typical “flow” for a qualification call: Opening (“Did I catch you at a bad time?”) and Introduction Discuss prospect’s current business situation (authentic curiosity) Probe for prospect’s needs (and confirm understanding of the needs) Position solution to meet those specific needs Handle objections Next steps

Use more role-playing training and fewer scripts to teach them how to think on their feet and have more natural conversations.

I experimented quite a bit with different compensation structures at Salesforce.com. The best was the simplest, with just two components: A Base salary: _____________ A Commission of _____________(targeted to be about 50% of the base, or 1/3 of their total)

The commission is paid monthly. It is made up of two parts: 50% depends on a goal for the number of qualified opportunities generated this month. 50% is paid based on deals that close, such as a percentage of revenue. This structure balances short- and long-term goals.It incents Sales Development Reps to generate many opportunities now, while also encouraging them to focus on the size of deals and likelihood of closing.

In summary, the most effective days begin with prioritizing key goals for the day, then a morning of responding to leads (“important and urgent” work), and an afternoon of calls and preparation for the future (“important, not urgent” work).

“Did I catch you at a bad time?”

“May I ask how your sales teams/ marketing organization/ research efforts… are organized?”

“If you were me, how would you approach your organization?”

“Do you have your calendar handy?” Never schedule by email if you can help it. Get on the calendar (whether it’s for yourself or you’re setting an appointment up for someone else) right there while you’re on the phone!

Call low/email high: Rather than going directly to your target, call a lower-level person to learn – or email high to get referred down to the right person. Attitude: You’re a non-threatening researcher, not a pushy salesperson. Favorite Questions (useful by phone or email): (Phone only): “Did I catch you at a bad time?” “Who is the right person to talk to about ?” “May I ask how your _________ [team/process/function] [is structured/works] today?” “Would it be a waste of time to discuss _________ to see if we could help?” Think “bite-sized emails”: Keep it short and sweet! Assume emails are read on cell phones. Ask one (and only one) question per email… Keep it simple. If they aren’t interested, find out why: Is (whatever problem you solve) just not a priority? No budget? Organizational change has the place in chaos right now? Is it worth your time to dig more, or should you move on? This insight is important because you will learn if the blocks are objections to overcome, or what and when your next step should be. Don’t give up too easily! (with ideal prospects): With ideal prospects, don’t disqualify them until you get a “no” from the decision-maker (don’t take “no” from others, even other executives). If you sell to the VP Sales and feel the account is ideal, don’t assume that because the CIO says you’re wasting your time that you are. As Winston Churchill said, “Never, never, never, never give up!” (with ideal prospects). Always set up a next step What next step will both help your process and create value for the prospect? Always frame a next step in a way that is valuable to them: “The best way for us to save time…”; “Here’s how I can help you get to a decision faster…”; “Your team will learn….” About one out of four prospects will have had a strong opinion on the next step they wanted to take. In that case they’ll often say, “I need to see a demo.” If you have a different idea about what you want, don’t fight them. Take their next step with them, and “enhance” their idea with what you want: “I’d be happy to set up a demo. As part of that preparation process, it’ll help make our time much more productive if you fill out these five questions….” The other 75% of prospects will look to you to suggest the best next step. You’re there to walk them through an evaluation and buying process. So be prepared to have one or two specific suggestions based on what’s been most efficient for your other clients: “What we’ve found as a best next step is to…”

Selling the Predictable Revenue way is about “Selling To Success.” It’s about hiring and training salespeople who are totally committed to their company’s vision and values. It’s salespeople helping new prospects connect with that vision, and then helping these new customers succeed — and generating lots of revenue as a byproduct. These salespeople don’t close customers that aren’t a good long-term fit. They work with a team of other great salespeople, all helping each other improve and learn as a team. Compensation is important, but it’s not the most important thing.

“ABC Selling” skips two essential steps: creating a Success Plan before negotiating an agreement, and focusing on Ongoing Customer Success after the close.

When anyone gets paid to do something, and has managers breathing down their neck, it distorts behavior. Empathy with prospects is lost in the push to “Just close the deal!” Trusting, capable managers can help protect their salespeople from these distorting effects by focusing on doing the right thing; fear-driving managers exacerbate the problem.

Is the high pressure you’re applying today generating short-term results at the expense of long-term results or client/employee trust?

Success is not when your service is launched; it’s when your service successfully impacts the customer’s business, such as when your software is adopted (not just deployed).

Selling to success helps pull a prospect through a buying cycle by helping tie their goals and desires to your company’s ability to help achieve their goals.

One of the tricks in “selling to success” is to not care too much about the close. Caring too much about the close will cause you to give off subconscious signals to the customer that you really don’t care about their success, and that you care more about getting paid or getting your manager off your back. That’s the irony of stressing too much about the close itself: the stress can reduce the likelihood of it happening. The Close Becomes a Natural Step in Achieving the Vision If you and the customer create a joint vision around how your company will make them successful, and they believe you, then the close becomes just a logical step in the progression to achieve that dream. You can remove the artificiality of “closing,” and make it feel natural.

Two Steps to Help Your Team Sell to Success First: Include a SIMPLE “Success Plan” step before you close. This is a plan (almost a vision) that paints a picture of the basic steps beyond deployment to actual client success. It should include a definition of what success means to the client, a few key milestones, and some responsibilities of both your company and the client. This “plan” can literally be a half-dozen bullet points in an email, agreed on with the client. It should be simple enough that anyone can quickly grasp its essence and vision. Do not create a complex plan.

Second: What is your plan for a client’s ongoing success? Do you have a role in your company dedicated solely to helping customers become successful in using your product or service? It’s easy to want to push all the responsibility for success onto the customer, but it is equally your responsibility to help them succeed, because happy customers will help your business. It’s both the right and the profitable thing to do.

“Pick a niche, get rich.” If your marketing and sales efforts aren’t focused on your Ideal Customers, you will spend way too much time and energy on prospects who don’t really need what you have to offer (or they don’t understand yet why they need it).

No Sales Process Do you have a sales process? If you don’t – get one. ANYTHING is better than no process. A consistent process that isn’t working well is better than no process, because you can improve consistent systems; you can’t improve random systems.

In pipeline reviews or one-on-one coaching sessions, be merciless in finding out how much energy reps are putting into mapping out decision-making processes and people. If they aren’t directly in touch with decision makers, how can they help their Champion or main point of contact sell for them? (Never assume your internal champion knows how to or sell internally for you!) When doing outbound sales, start high – one or two levels higher than your decision-maker. Have reps practice role-playing with people at your company who can think and speak like decision-makers. It will give the reps confidence, and teach them how to have better conversations with senior people. How can you position your product and marketing to resonate and sell higher?

If your prospect (or market) has an average six-month buying process, there’s no point in getting impatient at month three. “What’s your usual process to evaluate and buy products like this?” “What would it take to close in [30/60/90] days?” (Or by a certain date?) “How can we get this done?” (Later in a sales cycle)

Instead of telling them how great you are, or what a leader your company is, how can you prove it? For example, a trial can create a first point of entry in the “getting to know you” stage and give buyers a sense that you have the credibility to help them. Don’t just throw free stuff at them. Tailor what you’re offering to whatever their needs or problems are, or else it’s likely to be a waste of time for both parties.

Now, the “decision-making process” is more important than “the decision-maker.” Avoid questions like: “Who is the decision-maker?” “Who signs the check?” Ask questions like: “How have you evaluated similar products or services?” “What is the decision-making process?” “Who is involved in making the decision?” “How will the decision be made?” “What are the steps to have a check cut or funds released?”

In other words, sales reps shouldn’t wimp out and avoid trying to build a relationship with the decision-maker, but it’s not always urgent to get there from the beginning (though it is a big help). Is reaching the ultimate decision-makers any less important? No! Win over your internal champions and coaches first; build the case. Then you’ll be perfectly positioned to win over the final decision-makers. You do want to build a relationship with the decision-makers early, but don’t “sell” them until you’ve begun winning over the influencers – or at least until they’ve begun to agree with the value of your business case. Build some credibility and understanding of the business first.

Busy salespeople tend not to ask enough questions (or ask bold enough) around how the prospect’s internal processes work. If you’re a salesperson: With your current top five deals, how well have you mapped out their internal buying process? If you’re a sales executive: If you sat down with your team and had them talk about their own top deals, how clear are they – not just on the current status of the deal or the next step, but also the prospect’s actual internal process to get to a decision?

If the trial is successful, then what? Answer that question before you begin the trial.

Most success comes from expectations – did you over-promise and under- deliver? Or vice versa? Expectations are incredibly powerful, and can make or break trust with your prospect… and make or break the sale.

Just as important as sales cycle length is how many hours of selling time per rep does each sales cycle require? How can they be much more efficient and effective, in order to handle more deals with higher close rates?

Step 1: (15 Minutes) First Contact: ‘Is This a Waste Of Time?’ Imagine you are referred to someone, or get a response from a prospect and have a first chat with them. You can take fifteen minutes with them to figure out whether or not it’s a waste of time to speak further.

Step 2: (One Hour) Qualification/Discovery Call: ‘Is There A Fit?’ This is a call with one or two of the prospect’s point people, the ones that usually check out new vendors. They want see if they like you and what you’re doing enough to spend more time on your company and introduce you to more people involved in their evaluation. You are qualifying or disqualifying them as well – remember, if it’s not a good fit, you should move on!

Step 3: (Two Hours) Group Working Session: ‘Should We Work Together?’ In this session, you want to create a joint vision together. Walk them through a design process on how they can and will become successful with your product. Coach the vision out of them rather than telling it to them.

Killer Salespeople Uncover True Problems Behind Desired Solutions When asking prospects about their challenges, their pain, they will usually in fact actually tell you their desired solutions, which sound like problems: “We need a new marketing system,” or, “Our marketing system is dysfunctional,” is not a true problem, it’s a solution masked as a problem. What they are really saying is, “We want a new marketing system.”

Here is a sample of how asking “Why?” or “Why is that important?” or “So what?” can lead you to the true business problem: “We need to integrate our financial and sales systems.” That is a desired solution, not a pain or challenge… Why? “Because our reporting is inaccurate.” Still not a root challenge yet… Why? “Because our executive has presented reports to the CFO that later turned out to be wrong.” Aha! Now that is a real pain: unable to make effective plans or business decisions because of inaccurate reporting.

Prospects Should Earn Proposals Does your sales team give out proposals and quotes like one of those people standing on the street handing out flyers? “Here, please take one!” There is a cost to giving out proposals or paperwork too soon – the prospect doesn’t value it or your time, and you lose the chance to set up a specific next step that would help them earn the proposal. Example: You do a demo. At the end of the demo, they ask about pricing or a proposal. You say you’ll include a proposal with a follow up email. They say, “Thanks.” You send the materials. You never hear from them again.

If you’re not winning at least 50% of the proposals you’re giving out, you’re too easy. Instead, the next time a prospect casually asks about pricing or getting a proposal, don’t give it to them until you know they want it. Tell them you’d be happy to, and to do that, you’d need to set up a scoping call with them and the key people, to ensure the proposal is accurate and meets their needs. If the prospect declines, then either they aren’t a great prospect, or you didn’t prove your value to them in your prior calls or demos.

The most common mistake is lumping all the types of leads into one bucket and then making future projections based on past results.

Seeds take a lot of time to cultivate and to ramp up, but once they get going they are unbeatable, with the highest conversion and close rates. Seeds are created by developing happy customers, organic internet search/SEO, public relations, local user groups, most social media, and publishing expert content.

Nets: Nets are classic marketing programs, in which you’re trying to cast a wide net and see what you get, whether through email marketing, conferences, advertising, or some forms of Internet marketing (PPC).

Spears involve targeted outbound efforts (such your classic “hunting”) that require some individual human efforts (such as business development, “Top 10 Targets” programs, and Cold Calling 2.0).

Prospects (or names) A database of names or a list that you are marketing to, in which people have not responded positively yet. If you buy a list from a place like InfoUSA, Data.com or Hoovers, this is a list of prospects (or names), not “leads.”

Leads A lead is a prospect that has responded positively in some way to show their interest in what you have to offer, such as registering for a white paper or attending a webinar. Whether or not they are a high-quality lead isn’t the point – if they’ve registered for something, they are a lead.

Opportunities After someone has qualified a lead through email or the phone, and the lead meets your set of qualification criteria, it becomes an opportunity. A common abbreviation is “oppty.”

Clients They have given you money.

Champions A champion can be a client or non-client who has referred business to you, offered a testimonial, or has actively supported you in any other way. Be sure to give them love!

Go With It – Let Prospects Do the Work! Instead of resisting this trend and staying attached to how potential customers used to or “should” get to know your company, just go with – it and give the prospects the control over how they want to get to know you.

If you see prospects getting stuck somewhere in your “layers,” consider redesigning your next-step offers. What is the next “juicy morsel” they would want if you showed it to them, that would help them take another step forward? What new layers, content or products can you create that are compelling and relevant to who the prospect is and where they are in their evaluation and buying cycle?

Inbound leads are leads that come to you, typically registering on your website in some way or asking to be called back. They are the ones that find you before you find them.

Which Inbound Marketing Methods Work? Each of these activities is ranked in order of its ability to generate leads more easily: Referrals Free Tools/Free Trials Organic Search Engine Optimization Blogging Email Newsletters Webinars PPC (pay-per-click marketing) Affiliate Marketing Social Media However, all the activities are complementary and can be hard to separate from each other. For example, blogging helps SEO and email newsletters. Collectively, they create an inbound marketing strategy in which each piece complements the others. Also, pretty much every one of these methods is responsible for doing two important things in inbound marketing. They attract new prospects. They help nurture existing leads.

It’s the same way with a blog. It’s imperative to be a resource for people and to pro-actively network with your blog by reading other blogs, linking to other blogs, and leaving comments on other blogs, if you want people to do the same thing for you. It’s not necessarily the law of reciprocity, but it’s the law of participation. Set a simple goal, such as meeting one new blogger per week.

Permission-based direct email marketing is still THE most important marketing technique, both to develop new leads and nurture old ones. Email marketing is important to establish your expertise, build relationships and trust with your audience, promote your webinars or live events, and promote your products.

Webinars Webinars are a great lead-nurturing practice. Webinars get them coming back and interacting and learning from you, and offer an easy and compelling reason to spread the word to their friends about what you’re doing. 80% of webinars are not for selling but for teaching: TEACH people something useful in the webinar. How can you help them do their jobs better? Webinars establish credibility and communicate what you do in an educational and neutral setting. Webinars are especially valuable as part of a series, where people know to keep looking for the next piece of your story and can tell their friends about it, too. Make webinars “bigger than you” – make them about the attendees, not your company. An ideal format: hold webinars in which customers are the presenters, and they are sharing with your audience lessons learned in your area of expertise. Some of these lessons are related to your product, and some lessons are not.

Studies have shown that less-educated people tend to click on pay-per-click ads, while more-educated people click on organic search results. While PPC sometimes can be a source of leads-on-demand, be careful to track their quality in terms of conversion rates to qualified opportunities and to closed deals.

If you’re selling to more sophisticated buyers, you’ll be better served with focusing on SEO and blogging as your primary activities, and using PPC in experimental ways as you figure out the best online marketing mix.

The best partners are bloggers or companies with large and trusting email audiences, and whose interests and values align with yours. Better than buying lists from them is placing a compelling offer on a targeted site or in their email newsletter. Even more ideal: you can partner with them on a (disclosed) pay-for- performance basis, in which they help promote your company in exchange for a pay-per-lead or percentage-of-revenue basis. Both partners win this way: the blogger/organization creates value for their audience and earns extra income or revenue, and the company generates leads or sells product.

This is a really important lesson about blogging and marketing: Marketo doesn’t “pitch” their own products on the blog. There’s no selling. Marketo’s blog is popular and successful because they provide a platform to share all kinds of modern marketing best practices and thought leadership. They invite all kinds of other thought leaders to share on their blog (I’ve been a guest writer). They’ve become a trusted authority. Creating a company blog is a great way to establish brand presence, drive SEO rankings and give prospects and partners an easy way to get to know and trust your company. It is a place to prove your company as a thought leader in your vertical or industry. Your blog is not the best place to directly promote your business or service. When people get real value from your blog (and events, newsletter and webinars), they will come back to buy and they’ll also refer friends.

Marketo differentiates “prospects” (colder) from “leads” (warmer). Why? It is highly inefficient to evenly spread sales’ time across all leads. Marketo wants to prioritize where its sales team spends its time on lead follow-up. They tell them apart by the “lead score,” which rates how hot or not someone is, on a scale of 1 to 100. Potential buyers with fewer than 65 points are called “prospects”; potential buyers with more than 65 points are called “leads” – the higher the number of points, the hotter the lead. To wrap up this section on “Prospects”, let’s get into the lead scoring details.

One of the five critical metrics you must track is lead conversion. What percentage of new leads turn into qualified opportunities?

After the 21-day process there are three possible outcomes. A lead is either: Disqualified: A small fraction of leads that will never be a good fit. Converted to Opportunity: Inside Sales rep hands off lead to a Account Executive. If this lead is something the Market Response Rep deems pursuable, they convert it into an opportunity. Recycled: These leads receive ongoing nurturing through email marketing. Sales reps can either go back or take the initiative to reach out to these past leads, or reps can wait until a lead takes a new action and is flagged as an active lead.

You need a process that emphasizes quality of leads over quantity of names.

There is a real cost to keeping low-quality leads on sales reps call list: (1) it makes it harder to find and focus on the good leads, and (2) sales reps will be wasting their time calling on low-quality leads.

Fatal Mistake 1: Not Taking Responsibility for Understanding Sales and Lead Generation

Everything begins with the CEO. Even when a CEO hires executives to run lead generation and sales, the CEO cannot delegate their own understanding of how lead generation and sales work. The CEO must understand the fundamentals in order to set effective goals, coach executives, and solve revenue problems.

Solution: The CEO takes full responsibility for educating themselves, whether indirectly through coaching, or directly by getting involved in actual projects.

Fatal Mistake 2: Thinking Account Executives Should Prospect (Making Account Executives Jacks-Of-All-Trades)

Account Executives should prospect for new clients less than 20% of the time and only to a Top 10 Strategic Accounts list, with partners, or to current customers. The bulk of prospecting into new accounts should be owned by a separate, dedicated prospecting role. Even for businesses such as consulting that depend highly on relationships, much of the early work of new account research, development, and qualification can be handled by cost-effective, focused Sales Development Reps. Solution: Specialize sales roles. You only need two salespeople to begin specializing. This is so important that I discuss this in multiple places in the book.

Fatal Mistake 3: Assuming Channels Will Do the Selling for You

You have to control your own destiny. You have to build your own sales results first, and prove your success, before you’ll be able to benefit much from channel partners. The channels will come AFTER you are successful.

Solution: First control your own destiny by building direct sales success before counting channel chickens.

Fatal Mistake 4: Talent Fumbles (hiring, training, incenting)

Solution: Stop reinventing (and breaking and reinventing…) the wheel on your own. Get coaching on how to hire, train, and incent, or find local companies to emulate.

Fatal Mistake 5: Thinking ‘Product-out,’ Not ‘Customer-in’

If your sales or lead generation efforts are struggling, first look to yourself. How clear is your Ideal Customer Profile? Have you identified their core challenges? Are you marketing to and speaking to those ideal clients, or are you speaking to too broad an audience, and diluting your voice? Executives hate to do this because they feel they are shrinking their market opportunity, but the wisdom says, “Pick a niche, get rich.” Think of a fire hose: If it’s on a wide spray, it doesn’t go far. But tighten it to a laser-thin stream and it will punch through a wall. It’s the same amount of water and energy, just with a different focus. Think of your messaging the same way. Is it tight enough to punch through a market’s noise and indifference?

Executives need to spend at least 25% of their time with customers, so they stay connected with “what it’s really like out there.”

Solution: Talk to customers to get clear on what you do for them, rather than how you do it. Put this into a simple, clear one-page document you can share with the entire company. Regularly connect with customers by phone or in person.

Fatal Mistake 6: Sloppy Tracking and Measurement

You can’t have predictability without having repeatable processes. You can’t make what counts repeatable if you’re not regularly measuring what matters (and that doesn’t include the number of dials per day your salespeople make). How effectively are you measuring your sales and marketing activities and results? If you aren’t… why do you keep putting it off? “We’ll do that next week, quarter, year…” Unless you understand what works and doesn’t work, you are only guessing at how to improve.

Track as many of these as you can in your Sales Force Automation system’s dashboards: New leads created per month (also, from what source). Conversion rate of leads to opportunities. Number of, and pipeline dollar value of, qualified opportunities created per month. This is the most important leading indicator of revenue! Conversion rates of opportunities to closed deals. Booked revenues in three categories: New Business, Add-On Business, Renewal Business.

Solution: Start tracking 3-5 key activities or results now. Keep experimenting with new metrics, old ones, and how you can use them to improve your business. Review them weekly with a core team.

Fatal Mistake 7: Command-and-control Management

In Reality… Most employees have ideas and want to contribute beyond their roles. Most employees want to be inspired and make a difference. Most employees want to be helpful, trusting, and communicative. For most employees, it’s just as exhausting for them to be told what to do all the time as it is for management.

Solution: Read The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler; visit www.worldblu.com to learn more about democratically-run companies; or read my book CEOFlow: Turn Your Employees Into MiniCEOs.

Bonus Mistake: Under-investing in Customer Success

CEOs and executives, mostly in the early years of a company, are too focused on getting new customers, and frequently ignore current and past ones.

Solution: Hold the hands of your first 50 customers; give them lots of love. There’s no process or magic to this: call them, visit them, talk to them! Ask them what they need, if they have any improvements or ideas to suggest. Ask their advice. Then do something about it.

Sales in the “Attraction” world we live in now isn’t about being passive. You can still be as aggressive as ever – except the tone has changed. Rather than being pushy, all about money, and often coming off as fake, it’s about being respectful, purposeful, and adding real value to prospects, even before they become customers. Salespeople should be “pleasantly persistent.”

Sketch out how things work and what your processes are on a flow chart. What is your lead generation or sales process? Can you sketch it out simply, on paper or a whiteboard? If not, that’s a problem.

Five of the most important metrics in lead generation and sales development: New leads created per month. Number of qualified sales opportunities created per month. And the total dollar amount of new qualified pipeline generated this month (the best indicator of future revenue). Percentage conversion rate of leads to qualified opportunities. Total bookings or revenue (broken out by “New Business,” “Add- On Business,” or “Renewal Business.”) Win rates. What percentage of new pipeline resulted in won deals?

Pay special attention to “batons” that cross functions. Whenever a process crosses teams (Marketing handing leads to Sales, or Sales passing new clients to Professional Services, etc.), a “baton” is passed. These handoffs are the cause of 80% of the problems and defects in your processes. Redesign how the batons are passed to ensure they are passed smoothly and aren’t dropped.

Companies think that they can make bigger changes than they can, faster than is possible – and end up biting off more than they can chew, creating a “one step forward, two steps back” syndrome.

Separate the Four Core Sales Functions

One of the biggest productivity killers is lumping a mix of different responsibilities (such as raw web lead qualification, cold prospecting, closing, and account management) into one general “sales” role.

“Inbound” Lead Qualification: Commonly called Market Response Reps, they qualify marketing leads coming inbound through the website or 800-number. The sources of these leads are marketing programs, search engine marketing, or organic word-of-mouth.

“Outbound” Prospecting/Cold Calling 2.0: Commonly called Sales Development Reps or new business development reps, this function prospects into lists of target accounts to develop new sales opportunities from cold or inactive accounts. This is a team dedicated to proactive business development. Highly efficient outbound reps and teams do NOT close deals, but create and qualify new sales opportunities and then pass them to Account Executives to close.

“Account Executives” or “Sales”: These are quota-carrying reps who close deals. They can be either inside or out in the field. As a best practice, even when a company has an Account Management/Customer Success function, Account Executives should stay in touch with new customers they close until the new customer is fully deployed and launched.

Account Management/Customer Success: Client deployment and success, ongoing client management, and renewals. In today’s world of “frictionless karma,” someone needs to be dedicated to making customers successful – and that is NOT the salesperson!

The second person you hire, after a salesperson who can close, should be a sales rep who is dedicated just to generating leads for your first closer.

A second rule of thumb is the 80/20 rule. When your reps, as a group, are spending more than 20% of their time on a secondary function, break out that function into a new role.

You can find information on inbound lead management, Cold Calling 2.0, and more at www.PredictableRevenue.com

The quality of your people means everything to your team’s success and to yours. As an old Chinese proverb says: If you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees. If you want one hundred years of prosperity, grow people.

What are you doing to help your employees actually enjoy their work? The example you set as a CEO or leader will ripple out (positively or negatively) through the company and culture…

Combine one part veteran with three parts young, smart and adaptable… and mix in a system that keeps challenging people to learn new things, to stretch, step by step. The best salespeople are the ones who have grown up in your company, and know your products, your customers and your company, inside out.

Timing Depending on the role, you’ll want to move people up the ladder (or rotate them into another group) anywhere from 6-8 months – on the very fast side, early in the first stages of the system – to 1-3 years in the other stages. Any short-term transaction cost/effort in moving someone into a new role is really outweighed by the benefits of getting a more well-rounded, developed employee who has another learning curve to keep them energized, and has a broader understanding of what customers need.

The best salespeople are more like consultants or business people who can sell. In addition, they are the ones who: Listen much more than they talk. Are problem-solvers. Understand their customers’ industry/business/needs (key to both building trust with customers as well as understanding how to help solve their problems). Believe in their product and company. Demonstrate unquestionable integrity. Can get things done in their own company (via internal networks).

How are you training and developing the people you’ve already hired? If you don’t have some kind of training or development program in place, it’s probably not happening as much as it should. Even having a one-hour team training session once a week (Tuesday or Wednesday afternoons) can make a big difference in your team’s sales skills.

If you want to build a solution-selling, high-value sales force, commit the team and company to invest in their success just as much as you expect them to invest in the company!

What Works A program with an ongoing, regular format. Exercises/role-playing and useful feedback. Designed effectively, to make it worth your reps’ time. Follow-through on everything: maintain the schedule, check progress, keep it fresh and don’t let things slip.

“One-hit wonder” programs without follow-through actually detract from performance: 1) any progress isn’t lasting, (2) you’ve wasted the time and resources invested in the one-hit wonder, and (3) your team will see that you or the organization aren’t really committed to training… so why bother?

Example: Embedding Training Into Career Paths Use internal promotion paths for additional opportunities to train people. When a salesperson wants a promotion, put them through a mock sales situation depending on their level of experience. For example, the most junior people can go through a “first-call customer pitch” presentation (the first in- person presentation to a prospect company) as their promotion interview. This gives the interviewing sales executives a chance to assess potential, and also incents salespeople to invest in developing the skills they need in order to get to the next sales level (public speaking, objection-handling, etc.).

Nothing so conclusively proves a man’s ability to lead others as what he does from day to day to lead himself. ~Thomas J. Watson

6 Responsibilities of a Manager A no-nonsense management model: Choose people carefully Set expectations and vision Remove obstacles Inspire your people Work for your people Improve it next time

Inspiring is not cheerleading; it’s understanding what helps your team and its individuals find their own reasons (not your reasons) to excel and to achieve their full potential (not your potential).

How satisfied would you be in your job if there was no opportunity to learn, grow or be promoted? Does your own manager take the time to help develop you? Your people want the same things. Take time to proactively understand their individual life/career goals, then work to help them achieve those goals. Help each person find their right fit and path in the company rather than on automatically getting them to the next rung on the promotion ladder. Treat any mistakes as learning and coaching opportunities.

There’s a great way to measure the satisfaction of your key employees. Buckingham and Coffman’s book, First, Break All The Rules: What The World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently, outlines 12 key measures for employees: Do I know what is expected of me at work? Do I have the materials and equipment I need to do my work right? At work, do I have the opportunity to do what I do best every day? In the last seven days, have I received recognition or praise for good work? Does my supervisor, or someone at work, seem to care about me as a person? Is there someone at work who encourages my development? At work, do my opinions seem to count? Does the mission/purpose of my company make me feel like my work is important? Are my co-workers committed to doing quality work? Do I have a best friend at work? In the last six months, have I talked with someone about my progress? At work, have I had opportunities to learn and grow?

Team: “It’s ‘easier’ to work harder than to work smarter.” Putting in longer and longer hours is a crutch for people who don’t know how to redesign their work or process to make it easier to get results. In our culture, it’s easy to backslide into two habits to solve problems: “throw hours at it” and “throw money at it.”

Your people aren’t lazy, stubborn, or process-averse. They are just averse to complicated processes that don’t make sense to them, weren’t explained properly, or don’t help them. In fact, they love intuitive processes and tools that help them sell more.

Can you force your customers to do things? No. You have to design a product or service that they appreciate and that improves their business. In doing so, you earn their business and attention. The same can be done for your internal “customer” – your salespeople.

For example, here are some common key responsibilities of a VP Sales: Goal-setting and achievement Personal involvement in big deals Culture Compensation – designing, calculating, reporting Talent – structuring roles, hiring, firing Coaching Analysis and reporting Budgeting/expenditures Process design and improvement

The more a sales team can manage itself, the more the VP Sales can focus on developing the “important, not urgent” aspects of the team, such as talent, culture and vision, rather than fighting fires or spending time on daily, “unimportant but urgent” tasks.

See how this works? You get what you give. Create more freedom and upside for your people, and you’ll get it in turn.

When my sales team grew to 15 direct reports, well past my ability to give each person the amount of attention they deserved, I divided the team into three sub-teams of 5 people. Each sub-team then selected their own “team lead,” like a squad leader, who could best support them in their personal sales success. These team leads were not managers but salespeople with extra responsibilities, there to ensure their sub-team functioned smoothly. They were my mini-CEOs, who took over my daily and (to me) lower-value tasks, like compensation reports (which were high-value to them, because they were learning and developing).While

To align their goals with the goals of their sub-team, 20% of a team lead’s goals and compensation depended on the whole sub-team’s results. This 20% was extra compensation for taking on the responsibility of being a team lead. The other 80% of a team lead’s compensation depended on their individual sales performance. Some of the other functions that the sub-teams and team leads owned included: Quality control of the work produced (we had an audit process to verify sales results and deals before approving them as commissionable). Small incentive/marketing budgets for their sub-team. Fun activities for their sub-team. Interviewing and training of new hires in their sub-team. Peer reviews of each other. Monthly achievement of sub-team sales goals.

If you have to throw your VP Sales (or yourself) at every big deal, you don’t have a scalable sales process, and that one person will always be a bottleneck.

With transparency compensation, the whole team could see who earned the most and why – how their higher results translated directly into more money.

The secrecy model: Run the reports: What were each person’s results? Prepare the report and calculate commissions. Cut the report into private reports for each person. Email or sit with each person to share results and ensure correctness. Fix the report as necessary. Combine all the results into one spreadsheet. Send to Finance.

Make compensation dependent on reports in your SFA system. Don’t pay people if the sales opportunity or customer isn’t in your SFA system, or if it’s not filled out to pre-defined standards. You’ll be amazed how quickly opportunities move into your SFA system!