Smarketing, Sales 2.0, & Golden Sales Strategies

This blog post is about three things:

In my last blog post I talked about sharing a list of the top seven sales and marketing alignment (Smarketing) strategies and using a modified version of the Situation, Target, Plan (STP) process as a framework to help you and your team sell more by aligning it’s sales and marketing efforts.

This is my first of those blogs posts and it’s about understanding your current Situation – who are your best customers?

For me the first step in any sales and marketing alignment effort is to define who you want as customers.

I would argue that you want as customers those who purchases from you in the past where:

• The sales was relatively easy to make
• The customer is willing to be a reference
• You had a shorter than average sales cycle
• You encountered little or no price objection

These are the customers you want to replicate.

The easiest way to replicate them is to identify who they are and the way you do that is using this Window of Dissatisfaction™ worksheet to make a list of the new customers you’ve acquired in the last 12 months

Start with your newest customers (the ones you recently won) and work backward. If you have too many put on the worksheet, then pick the ones you think matter the most.

Once you’ve made that list, identify the ones where you had a shorter sales cycle by going down the list and putting a checkmark next to each of those customer names where you had a shorter than average sales cycle.

Next go down the list putting a checkmark next to each of those customers you feel were easy to sell to.

Next, put a check mark beside the ones where you encountered little or no price objection.

Finally, put a checkmark next to those you feel are more than willing to be a reference for you.

Now look at all the customers who have three or more check marks next to their name. In all likelihood they were in the Window of Dissatisfaction™ when you first connected with them.

A blank version of the Window of Dissatisfaction™ worksheet shown at the top of this page can be downloaded by completing the form found at the bottom of this page http://www.shiftselling.com/window-of-dissatisfaction/

In my next blog post I will show you how to analyze the list of customers with three or more check marks so sales and marketing can work together to replicate these highly desirable customers.

A brand new sales 2.0 tool that I recently started using is called IKO-System – the brainchild of Nicolas Woirhaye.

I’m a huge fan of harnessing the Trigger Event of job changes (promotions within a company and moves to a new company) as opportunities to engage a decision maker in a conversation.

When a new decision maker is put in place there are several factors that make this one of the best times to reach out.

• They have been brought in to make change happen
• They want to make change happen fast
• They have little or no attachment to current solutions or vendors

There are two dynamics that make these the single best events to be notified of:

1. A decision maker has money (aka budget), the authority to spend it, and influence. As a result they seldom need to experience all three trigger events (want, afford, justify) before making a purchase
2. What I call the Domino Effect – A change in one decision maker leads to three opportunities:

• The person who left – where did they go?
• The person who left – who took their place?
• The person who took their place – where did they come from?

I’m a big fan of LinkedIn because I can use it to learn when any of my 1^st degree connection change jobs. I’m also a big fan of using Gist because it allows me to learn more about my LinkedIn connections so I can establish rapport and have a conversation that is more relevant to them.

The only challenge with using LinkedIn is that I can only see these job changes for my 1^st degree connections – today about 10,700 connections. What IKO-System allows me to do is see all the job changes in my 2^nd degree connections – today that’s over 4 million people.

With about 3% of people changing jobs every month I now have access to over 120,000 job change notifications every month and with each job change creating 3 opporutnities I just found myself 360,000 different people I can call to see if what I sell is now more important, more relevant, or more affordable.

Now all I have to do is put in place my secret 3 step process to engage these individuals in a conversation. If you want to know what this secret 3 step process is you’ll have to phone me (+1.403.874.2998) because right now I don’t have time to write about it and I only want to share it with those who will take the initiative to call and learn how it works.

P.S. If you want to learn more about Gist see the recording of the webinar I did with THE networking guru -Keith Ferrazzi – and the founder and CEO of GIST – T.A. McCann.

The recording and handout from my webinar with Art Sobczak are now available for downloading.

This is one of my all time favorite webinars. Art Sobczak and I share a specialized form of cold calling (what Art calls Smartcalling) strategies that get the attention of decision makers.

We share unique and compelling cold calling strategies and then, using Onesource’s iSell, product we look at real-time Trigger Events that happened during the webinar and show how you could use these real time Trigger Events to reach decision makers.

Have an eventful week!

Craig