Bertrand Duperrin's Library tagged salespeople → View Popular, Search in Google

Mar

2012

Current Customers are Mad as Hell

"Yesterday I was part of an excellent discussion on why customers are mad as hell. This Focus.com Round Table was moderated by Josiane Feigon featuring Koka Sexton, Matt Heinz and Rebecca Morgan.

Current customers are angry because the environment has changed. People expect timely help and especially when they are in a buying cycle or already customers.

Rebecca Morgan pointed out that people are already irritated with the economy, their jobs and any number of other external forces that add stress to their lives. Having a bad experience with a company or a sales person just gives them an outlet."

www.socialsellingu.com/...customer-20-mad-hell

- Preview

customer socialcustomer customerexperience salespeople sales inteliigence salesintelligence buyingprocess salesprocess

Customer 2.0 has had it with outdated sales tactics, and they’re just not going to take it anymore. This independent, busy, distracted, and opinionated buyer has something to say and it’s time for salespeople to listen, understand, and know how and why they make decisions.
70% of the buying process happens online. What this tells us is that customers are doing their own research, starting and engaging with conversations online that can help them with their issues.
6 more annotation(s)...
- The fine line is that a sales person needs to be more intelligent about the context and relevance of the communication. This sales intelligence means that you shouldn't initiate a conversation by talking about their wedding pictures on Flickr. Instead find some relevant information or mutual connections from social networks to get into the door.
- When the sales is more complex and needs some direction and support, sales people will always be needed. The difference I see happening is that te direction and pre-sales support will usually happen through social networks and be supplemented with phone calls and more engaging platforms like web-conferences.
- Sales-support staff will increase over the next decade. New job titles such as chief listening officer, sales transformation manager, sales operations manager, and sales analyst will expand
- The bottom line: If we don’t find and fill a need faster than a computer, we won’t be needed. computer, we won’t be needed. - Gerhard
- A company should put some focus on turning their sales people into the thought leaders
- The exponential mind share your company would get goes well beyond whatever marketing campaigns you are currently running.

Aug

2011

Finding the right person within your organization

"Understanding who knows what inside today’s modern organizations can be an exercise in frustration, especially when you’re trying to get things accomplished in tight timelines. Social software that delivers insight into the community can help by making it easier to find the right person. SAP’s Scott Lawley explores how, by leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured, computed, and put to good use to improve collaboration."

www.zdnet.com/...1669

- Preview

expertise experts expertslocation salespeople communities connections information

Sales, however, has a different story. The sales organization is rewarded for selling. Period. Sales reps are generally held accountable for deals closed and revenue targets on a quarterly and annual basis. In this case, online communities do not provide a solution.
But at the end of the day, the sales rep still will not use the online communities. Why? Because online communities as they are today do not help sales reps close more deals.
7 more annotation(s)...
- This summarizes nice and neatly into two use cases and one constraint: deliver a set of mobile applications that enables sales reps to find experts and get answers to questions
- To answer this we must first understand what is an expert.
- The first thing that became apparent was the realizations that there is no absolute expert, and that there are numerous dimensions that qualify the level of expertise. From our research we identified the following variables used to identify experts within our organization:
- These seven dimensions are each calculated by topic relative to the total community population, and a final expert score can is computed based on a weighting of these variables. This in turn becomes a topic expert matrix and is updated continuously.
- Data sources feeding all of this include numerous internal and external systems, such as CRM, HR, address book, project DB, community platforms, blogs, forums, wikis, sales management DBs, Twitter, LinkedIn, and etc. See
- The end-user application is a mobile application tailored to finding people. All expert dimensions are filterable by the sales rep.
- Finding the right person within the organization is a tough challenge. Leveraging community connections and interactions, a series of expertise dimensions can be measured and computed. Providing access to this information via a mobile device helps enable sales reps to find the right person within the organization to help close deals.

Jul

2009

Leaders: Listen to Your Salespeople!

Your best salespeople possess vast knowledge about how to connect with and motivate people - and perhaps take the company to the next level. But they rarely get to share their knowledge with senior managers. As a practitioner and student of business-to-business selling for more than half a century, Clif Reichard has learned to translate sales knowledge into leadership knowledge. This post is one in an occasional series.

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...isten-to-your-salespeople.html

- Preview

management leadership salespeople sales connect motivation