You may have been reading my earlier posts and thinking, "I already know that toxic leaders are terribly destructive because I currently work for one. So what can I do about it?" Like most tough dilemmas, your choices really depend on the context surrounding the situation. While I’m a strong advocate of honest feedback, I have found this strategy often fails when subordinates try it with toxic leaders. My research [1,2] showed that toxic leaders are narcissistic and only want to see themselves in...

Business meetings are the bane of our professional lives. According to The Muse, managers spent between 35 - 50% of their time in meetings. That’s a pretty significant number. You might be saying, the answer to this is get rid of meetings. But here’s the thing. I doubt that meetings are going away. The definition of meeting is "a coming together of two or more people, by chance or arrangement." People will still get together to accomplish stuff. That’s a meeting. Some...

Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts (Part 1) Protecting and growing strategic accounts requires that you constantly look for ways to create value for your customer. However, creating value won’t mean much if it goes unrecognized. Yes, you need to help your customer achieve their desired outcomes, and you must do so in a way that creates a positive customer experience. But, you also need to invest the time and effort to ensure that the right people in your account understand your contribution. Don’t take this for granted, and don’t assume. Value not communicated is value not perceived. So, how do you communicate value and to whom? There are three basic steps: Quantify your impact. Identify key players who need to appreciate your impact. Develop a strategy to communicate your impact to those key players. 1. Quantifying your impact. This is much easier if you establish objective metrics at the outset of your work with the customer. This requires you to establish the right key performance indicators (KPI’s) and goals and to track progress toward those goals through verifiable outcomes. All of this is easier said than done. Many customers will resist if it feels hard, if the data isn’t readily available, or if it will open political issues. In the absence of objective measures, you can fall back on subjective measures. These will help you, at least anecdotally, determine if progress is being made, even if it’s difficult to measure at present. These success stories are valuable for communicating early achievements and building momentum or commitment for further work. Subjective measures include net promoter scores, attribution surveys, and "look back" surveys, such as customer satisfaction surveys. Although they are lagging indicators versus leading indicators, they can still help you substantiate the impact you are making in a strategic account. Also, consider investing in activities such as presentations, case studies, articles, and awards that motivate your customer to tell their story and potentially get recognized for their success by a reputable third party. These provide a satisfying win for your customer contact, and the third-party validation helps to legitimize your impact in your strategic account. Co-presenting a case study with your client at an industry or trade conference can be a wonderful relationship building experience. You and your customer will most likely spend time developing the presentation, spend time together at the event, and spend time afterward basking in the glory of a job well done. It also gives you and your client valuable exposure in front of prospective clients and peers. Also, the honor should create some buzz in your client organization because your client will probably need permission from other key players to participate. That in and of itself will help raise awareness. Afterward, your client will have great material to use for internal co-worker education meetings, thereby adding more value. Articles serve a purpose similar to presentations, and co-authoring a case study for an industry journal or analyst publication can have a similar impact. The experience may not be as intimate because you won’t actually be on stage together, but it can be more enduring because a published article lives on in the form of reprints and blogs and usually becomes part of your client’s professional resume. An article is not only a source of pride for the individual but also for the organization in which they work. If the organization has a PR or communications department, the article will provide superb content for newsletters, intranets, and websites. Awards are also very nice gestures and forms of acknowledgment. Nominating a client for an industry award is a wonderful gesture, and it will be a tremendous achievement for them if they win. Most legitimate awards programs require a comprehensive application process that includes the impact that you made. The beauty of awards is that you can give them to an entire team, not just your immediate contact. You can also send one to the CEO or other influential people in the organization that you want to get to know. All of these tactics will help you to quantify the impact of your work in a strategic account.  However, as we mentioned earlier, value not communicated is value not perceived. Now you need to identify other key players in the account and create a PR strategy to spread the news inside your client organization. We’ll discuss this in the second part of this article. **************************************************************** New Richardson eBook. 12 Social Media Tips To Support New Business & Account Growth Click here The post Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts, Part 1 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts In the first part of this article, we introduced the notion that value not communicated is value not perceived and three basic steps to ensure that the right people in your account understand your contribution: Quantify your impact. Identify key players who need to appreciate your impact. Develop a strategy to communicate your impact to those key players. We also discussed how to quantify your impact in a strategic account. This article continues the discussion with the next two steps to help you protect and grow your position in the account. 2. Identifying Key Players. Protecting and growing accounts is based on meeting the right people, building relationships with them, and understanding their challenges and opportunities. These people can either buy, influence buying decisions, or derail buying decisions. It is crucial for you to identify these players, understand their role in the buying process, uncover their perception of you, and, if necessary, shape their perception of you in a favorable manner. All of this sounds simple, right? Well, according to a report from CSO Insights, 40% of salespeople do not adequately identify key stakeholders. A relationship map is a tool — a visual representation of both the reporting relationships between stakeholders in an account and the political landscape surrounding an account — to help identify key stakeholders in a systematic manner. It is helpful to go through a relationship mapping process by starting with your day-to-day contacts, then moving up and down the org chart to identify and fill gaps, and then moving across divisions with high potential to benefit from the solutions you sell. LinkedIn is a powerful tool that can help you with this task. Start by linking to your day-to-day contacts. This will enable you to see their connections and filter the connections in their company. Most people connect to their bosses and their immediate co-workers, and many will connect with co-workers in other groups that share similar responsibilities. With a bit of inference, LinkedIn can help you to understand the organization quickly and begin building the relationship map. If you have a good relationship with your day-to-day contact, they can help you add to and validate your map. 3. Developing a Strategy to Communicate Your Impact. Once you start building your relationship map, it will become clear who you need to get to know to communicate the impact of your work in the organization. If you have many relationships in a strategic account, then you have more opportunities to learn about their needs and spread the word of your success. There are a few natural opportunities in your strategic accounts to meet key people. Personal introductions through your day-to-day contact are the easiest way to spread the word about your impact in a strategic account. These can be simple introductions to co-workers or orchestrated events in a social setting. Strategy and planning sessions give you the chance to facilitate decisions and directions in multi-phase projects, and they can help you set priorities for new projects. In many cases, you can add real value for a client by offering to facilitate such sessions or by contributing additional resources that will help the client make the best decisions. Kickoff meetings are especially valuable. They draw large numbers of people, making them aware of what will happen and how it will impact them. These meetings also give you the opportunity to ensure that key players are comfortable with the plan. Involving key people in kick-off meetings, or parts of kick-off meetings, also sets the expectation that you will check in with them occasionally over the course of a project. Updates, reviews, and progress meetings offer opportunities to report on progress and resolve issues. Executive briefings are similar to updates and reviews but at a higher level. Think of an executive meeting as a meeting before the meeting to surface concerns, seek direction, and build support from key executives. Scheduling an executive meeting is a wise political move, giving you access to key executives and making them more comfortable with you. Training sessions give you license to meet people impacted by the change. Lower-level people will often attend the training, but they typically need permission to do so, giving you the opportunity to explain to managers or department heads why it’s beneficial for their employees to attend. Training is also a perfect time to make a good impression on a client. If he has a good experience, he might become your avid supporter. Customer education sessions enable you to provide valuable insight to your customers and position yourself as a trusted, expert resource on topics important to them. Often, you can build a good audience in the client organization by offering to help them understand new trends and issues or by sharing new research and best practices. This is an excellent opportunity to bring in a renowned expert or a top-level executive from your firm. Again, it’s about identifying who you want to meet and creating an intriguing event that they feel compelled to attend. If they can’t attend, they’ll be interested in a follow-up activity. Every event mentioned here is an opportunity to meet key players and prospective buyers. You can ensure that they understand and appreciate the impact that you’ve had on their organization by kicking off any of these events with a quick overview of where they are today and the ways you’ve helped their organization progress. Strategic accounts are many companies’ most valuable assets, and care must be taken to protect and grow these assets. Invest the time and effort to ensure that the right people in your account understand your contribution. Don’t take this for granted and don’t assume. Value not communicated is value not perceived. *************************************************** New Richardson eBook. 12 Social Media Tips To Support New Business & Account Growth Click here The post Communicating Value to Protect and Grow Strategic Accounts - Part 2 appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Which e-mail Campaigns Deliver More: Broad-based or Account-based? Every day, it gets more difficult to capture the attention of busy professionals using a broad-based e-mail marketing campaign. More and more companies are adopting automation tools for content-based e-mail marketing campaigns that typically focus on the top few generic topics faced by everyone in their database. For most marketers who use this approach, the key performance indicators (KPIs) involve tracking and capturing opens, click-throughs, and responders. The next step is an automated drip follow-up campaign to nurture these leads and take them to the next level. The entire process is a numbers game for the marketing team. The more responders they get, the more potential leads there are that can be nurtured and turned over to the sales team — and the more likely they are to hit their KPIs. But what if, instead of playing a numbers game, you targeted ten key accounts that your sales team wanted to acquire? And what if you identified two or three contacts at each accounts? Then, you could create an e-mail campaign directly relevant to the targeted individual. It would include a few insightful data points or messages that the recipient could relate to — and they would appreciate the value you provide in helping them solve their issues and improve performance. I get literally hundreds of e-mails every day, and I actually study the good, the bad, and the ugly to constantly improve what we do at Richardson. First, let’s look at a broad-based e-mail and then compare it with a more specific account-based one. Both cover the same topic: improving search engine results based on keywords. Here is one of the "ugly" and impersonal broad-based e-mails: Dear James, I hope all is well. Did you know that 63% of all buyers will use search engines during the ever changing buying process to find out information about your company? In today’s ever changing world of internet marketing, it’s crucial to fully optimize your web site and show up when someone searches for you … Download our free report on 5 Ways SEO is changing marketing. My first reaction: Really? Who sends a senior vice president of marketing an e-mail about the importance of SEO? If I didn’t already know this basic information, I and my company would be in serious trouble. My second reaction: How cold and impersonal was that? The e-mail was addressed to James. Everybody knows me as Jim, so there’s some bad data mining going on there. But this ugly e-mail only gets better. Three minutes after I received the first one, I received an exact duplicate addressed to Jim and then another one for Jimmy. Finally, I received a fourth one addressed to Dear Info. I’ll give them points for persistence, but the impersonal and generic approach made them zero for four in terms of response. My second example — a "good" account-based approach, follows: Hey Jim, As a courtesy, I just completed a brief analysis of your web site and how it is ranking on the major search engines. First, let me tell you how impressed I am with your ability to rank #1 and #2 for so many major keywords related to sales training and sales coaching. I know how difficult it must be to achieve these rankings. Second, I would like to take the opportunity to briefly talk with you about how you may be able to improve your exposure even more with a secondary focus on building long tail keywords, by doing XYZ and ABC to your landing pages… I have included a PDF file of one of your landing pages with some suggestions. I would welcome the opportunity to discuss this strategy with you and how XYZ may be able to help. This is more like it. The e-mail is personal and immediately got my attention. It not only addressed an important issue for me, it identified specific opportunities to improve long tail keywords. Overall, it was an insightful e-mail and provided me with some value-based suggestions. The salesperson really earned the follow-up call and a subsequent meeting. Don’t get me wrong. Broad-based e-mail campaigns still have a place in the marketing and sales communication mix. They can provide timely higher-level information and help build a brand for your company. Just be sure to scrub your database from time to time to keep it current. Specific account-based e-mails are much more focused and can provide a deeper level of value to the recipient. Yes, these campaigns are much more difficult to create — and time consuming. To get it right, you have to research target companies and craft a very specific message, delivering relevant insights into a perceived need. You will typically spend more time in development and produce a smaller demand generation waterfall. You may have to explain your rationale when your KPIs drop. The payoff, though, can be well worth it. If done right, an account-based campaign that provides relevant insights will provide much more value to the targeted individual and drive more qualified opportunities and hopefully closed pieces of business. ************************************************************* Download our Complimentary Social Selling Report To learn more about Richardson’s 2013 Social Media in Sales Survey, please click here to download the report. The post Which e-mail Campaigns Deliver More: Broad-based or Account-based? appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

A Simple Guide for Defining Your Ideal Prospects and Leveraging LinkedIn to Find More Growing your pool of potential customers begins with defining the profile of your ideal prospect. This activity should be done collaboratively between sales and marketing. Start by looking back at opportunities that you won over the past two or three years and recreate the path or circumstances that led a prospect from contact to lead to opportunity. Drill down to determine the types of individuals and organizations, as well as the situations or issues they faced that motivated them to talk to you. A word of caution: be careful about accepting the lead source in your CRM system at face value. Marketing automation and CRM systems are notorious for missing offline handoffs and will tell you that all leads came from the web. In my experience as a CMO, there are many other activities and touch points that engage multiple buying influences within a prospect organization. This activity drives brand awareness, word of mouth, and offline delegation of tasks within the buying process. So when an organization is finally ready to buy, they either will go directly to your website and call the 1-800 number or they will Google your company or product name, hit your website, and call the 1-800 number. Buyer Characteristics If you’re going to find like-minded prospects, then you need to know what specific activities led to this point. While you’re at it, find out what issues they were trying to solve and why they chose to engage your organization. This is a great opportunity for sales to educate marketing about what customers are really buying and for what reasons. Defining your ideal prospect requires you to look at the characteristics common to your buyers and the organizations in which they work. This typically includes: Company Characteristics — company size (employees and revenue), industry, location, growth rate, age/maturity Buyer Characteristics — job title, level, tenure, attitude, ownership (or lack of) of the problem, scope of responsibility (buying on behalf of department, function, or company) Situational Characteristics — initiatives, triggers, opportunities, threats, regulations, internal change Leverage LinkedIn to Find Ideal Prospects Once you have determined your ideal prospect profile, you need to find prospects that fit the profile — some of whom might be sitting right under your nose within your existing accounts. Get into the habit of linking to your customers on LinkedIn, which will give you the ability to see who they are linked to (unless they make their contacts "private," but this is seldom the case). Here are suggestions for leveraging your connections’ networks: Their colleagues: People usually link to others in their organization who share similar interests and responsibilities. If you are linked to your buyer, who is perhaps an IT Director in Division A, LinkedIn can help you find IT Directors in other divisions or locations of that organization that you should get to know. People also link to their bosses and their boss’s boss. So if you need to sell up and across in an organization, LinkedIn can give you insight into whom you need to target and possibly facilitate a referral. Connections outside their company: Your connections are also connected to people outside of their organization who could be viable prospects for you. These could be former colleagues with whom they used to work but who have changed companies or classmates who had the same major and are doing a similar job in another company. Suggested similar connections: LinkedIn is also a great resource to help you find people similar to your buyers. In fact, they make it simple by including a feature on every profile page that identifies people with profiles "Similar To" the profile that you’re viewing. Organizational and industry groups: LinkedIn Groups are a great hunting ground to find people who fit your ideal prospect profile. Start by looking at the LinkedIn profile of a contact who matches your ideal prospect. Scroll down to see the groups that they belong to, and click on a few that seem likely to have similar ideal prospects. You’ll be able to see members of the group and the discussions taking place. If appropriate, request to join the group. Most groups are "open," and you will be accepted almost immediately. Once you are a member, you will be able to see the names of other group members, even if you are not yet linked to them. And, if you know the right technique, you can either invite them to link to you, get introduced through a contact, or send them a message. Even offline, you will find that "birds of a feather flock together." For example, HR directors know other HR directors, and many belong to the same HR industry associations and subscribe to the same publications. CFOs have their own industry-specific associations, as well as regional associations. All of these associations have meetings that provide speaking or sponsorship opportunities for you. As a vendor, becoming "part of the group" might take a little longer and require you to be in "helping mode" versus "selling mode." There are many other sources of contacts (e.g., Hoovers, Data.com, Netprospex, and Lead411), as well as associations and groups, to join. Knowing your ideal prospect will help you find targets that, over time, have the best odds of becoming customers. The suggestions made here all favor casting your lines where the fish are, so to speak. That usually makes the most sense and nets you (yes, pun intended) the best results. ************************************************************* Click here to learn more about Richardson’s award winning sales training solutions. The post A Simple Guide for Defining Your Ideal Prospects and Leveraging LinkedIn to Find More appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Leveraging Trigger Events to Take the Pain out of Prospecting In a recent post, I talked about ways to find ideal prospects. Once you’ve identified the profile of your likely buyers, you could start cold calling them to gauge interest and get them on your mailing lists, but that takes time and promises little yield. A more effective approach is to know situations or circumstances that precipitate buying among your current clients and then target ideal prospects in similar straits. Trigger events are leading indicators from prospective companies that might signal a need for your products, services, or solutions. Knowing these trigger events and how to track them can give you a first-mover advantage and a much better shot at engaging a prospect who is ready to buy. What is a trigger event? When an organization issues a press release announcing that they have secured financing to fund the expansion of a new facility near you, this indicates that they have money and have set an expectation to make a significant investment. Growing companies need to buy lots of products and services — from construction services to IT hardware to janitorial services. Follow the money! Another factor to know (especially for professional services providers) is where and how you fit into the ecosystem of solution providers and if there are other solutions that are leading indicators of an eventual need for your services. For example, in our business, a company that launches a new product will eventually need sales training. So, we network with marketing and brand strategy agencies that are usually involved at earlier stages with clients doing market research, go-to-market strategies, product marketing and communications, and graphic design. You can try to formalize these relationships into partnerships or alliances in which you share leads and earn a cut of a sale. These alliances can work, but they often fail because the relationship is often actually between individuals within the partnering organizations. When they are focused, times are good. But when one party gets too busy, distracted, or leaves their company, the partnership suffers and often fades away. If you want such an alliance to work, ensure that it gets embedded into your organization beyond a single point of contact. Google enables you to set up "alerts" that will send automated e-mail notifications for keyword-based trigger events that you specify. For example, if you sell marketing solutions, a good trigger event to track might be new marketing VPs. When companies hire or promote new marketing VPs, they will often issue an announcement or a press release, which will get picked up by Google. If your alert is set properly, you will receive an e-mail notification, which you can then use as an opportunity to get in touch to congratulate the VP and offer your services. It is also helpful to follow your prospective companies on LinkedIn, which also serves as a news aggregator for the company. Following companies and prospects is also a great feature of Twitter. As a sales leader, the final step is to train your sales managers and sales reps on how to spot and follow up on trigger events among your ideal prospects. Once you set your mind to the task, it probably won’t be difficult to identify the trigger events in prospective companies that can help your sales. The more challenging aspect is the ability to know about them when they occur and to follow up before your competition or before the opportunity slips away. ************************************************************* Click the following to  learn more about Richardson’s award winning sales training solutions. The post Leveraging Trigger Events to Take the Pain out of Prospecting appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Selling with Insights:  The Why and How of Approaching Informed Buyers with Insight In our previous blog post, we discussed four changes in buyer behavior driving four challenges for sellers. These were: Online Perception Bias Reputation Bias Solution Bias Procurement Process Bias In this article, we’ll share some ideas for overcoming those challenges with insight. How to Approach Informed Buyers Buyers are doing their research, and traditional sellers are getting left behind. It is tempting to throw your hands up in defeat and simply respond reactively to the opportunities your customers give you. This approach puts too much of your fate in the hands of your marketing team and can drive intense price competition. Sellers need to engage informed buyers differently. To avoid commoditization, rather than simply respond, sellers must create and shape opportunities. Shaping opportunities requires the seller to change the way the customer thinks about their needs or a solution to the seller’s advantage. It is most applicable when the customer is far along in their buying cycle and has already formed a concept for what they want or need. Shaping the opportunity requires the sales rep to disrupt the customer’s thinking so that they take a few steps back and reconsider the need or solution. Through building trust and credibility, and through sharing relevant insight based on credible research or experience, the seller challenges the buyer to think through what’s wrong or what’s missing in their prescribed approach. Shaping opportunities creates a win-win because it helps mitigate competition and price sensitivity for the seller while resulting in a better solution for your customer. Creating opportunities requires the seller to make the customer aware of a new issue or opportunity or raise the sense of urgency of an issue to act sooner. This is most applicable when the customer is very early in — or not even in — their buying process. The sales rep that engages the customer at this level is trying to provoke a need rather than responding to a request. As in the shape mode, sales reps must build trust and credibility and share relevant insight based on credible research or experience. By doing this, the seller challenges the buyer to think through the risks of not prioritizing and accelerating an initiative. Creating opportunities creates a win-win because it helps mitigate competition and price sensitivity for the seller while helping the customer move forward on an initiative to help them make money, save money, or manage risk. Effective Utilization of Insights As mentioned above, creating and shaping opportunities requires the sales rep to leverage insight to challenge the customer’s mindset. Insight is information or ideas that are based on credible research, authoritative content, or relevant experiences and are tailored to a buyer’s challenges and opportunities. When shared, it encourages the buyer to think about his needs in a new way, showing him a path to solve a challenge or capitalize on an opportunity by leveraging the capabilities and differentiators offered by the seller. Selling with insight is not about inundating buyers with data and facts. If sellers do not understand how to deliver insights effectively — collaborating with customers rather than dictating to them — the approach can backfire. It requires more advanced preparation skills and communication skills. From our experience, these skills are learnable if the organization has the will and commitment to reinforce a new way of thinking about sales. Selling with Insights:  Techniques to Modernize Your Sales Force Twenty years ago, a sales rep met with customers to tell them about his products, and all he needed was polished marketing materials and an enthusiastic sales pitch. In most cases, buyers didn’t have access to other information unless it came from other sales reps with a similar approach. If they were impressed or persuaded, there was a good chance that they could buy from you with little additional input or process. Times have now changed. Remember, buyers may be as far as 60% through their buying process before they contact a sales rep. To overcome the four challenges driven by changing buyer behavior, you must approach informed buyers with insight that adds value to the conversation. Sales reps need to transform their approach by anticipating buyer problems, offering compelling insights, and tailoring solutions to specific customer needs. Training sales reps to respond to changes in buyer behaviors is the best way to guarantee that you don’t end up in a race to the bottom. ************************************************************* Click the following  learn more about Richardson’s Selling with Insights(TM)  Sales Training Solution.   The post Selling with Insights: The Why and How of Approaching Informed Buyers with Insight appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

Although attendance at trade shows has decreased, trade shows continue to attract key providers and serious buyers.  What’s happening with trade shows parallels what has happened in selling.  With a click, buyers can learn about your company and your competitors’ products.  So why do they continue to come to trade shows?  What is it they are looking for in one of the last bastions of face-to-face marketing?  The answer is clear: ideas, insights, collaboration, and the connection that comes with a handshake. The buyers who come to trade shows are highly prepared and strategic in their objectives.  Their expectations are higher.  They frequently participate in teams, which reflects the trend for decisions by consensus, and the number of team members a company sends can show how serious the buyers are.  So, look for teams. According to The Center for Exhibition and Research, 43% of participants say trade shows have improved in the past two years, which means fewer than half of exhibitors are stepping up to meet the higher expectations of participants and address their level of sophistication.  It shows that there is room for improvement and opportunity to differentiate. What hasn’t changed is the key metric for success for exhibitors to develop quality leads that produce results.  Most exhibitors continue to send their A teams, but getting through all the noise has made developing quality leads even more challenging.  In the past, more than half of the leads generated at a trade show were not followed up on, but with fewer leads, that is becoming less of a problem.  The problem now is converting quality leads into results.  The time-tested basics for trade show success, such as capturing leads; staffing booths with energetic, proactive, skillful, driven, and smiling salespeople; and creating an appealing booth and location, still hold true. But there is something NEW, and that is what is drawing customers to trade shows.  They are not just driven to learn about products.  Of course, learning about products, and especially new products (launching a new product is a great way to attract activity at your booth), is certainly a factor (as is the hope of finding new providers, making new contacts, and checking in and on current providers), but none of that is enough to initiate the buying process.  So, let’s look at what you can do before, during, and after trade shows to make the time, effort, and expense pay off for you. Before the Trade Show Reach out to attendees and potential attendees in advance to get on their calendars before their dance cards fill up.  Most trade shows will provide a pre-show mailing list so that you can reach out to the attendees.  In addition, your Marketing team can create "events" and send invitations using social media.  Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn groups are great for getting the word out.  Richardson’s creative marking team uses a tool called Enthusem, which allows them to craft a customized message to the individual level through an online system that automatically sends out a traditional snail mail postcard containing relevant information specific to the recipient.  Salespeople can do their part by personally inviting their customers and prospects. Think about what you will do that is NEW and what your visitors will learn as a result of talking to you.  Think about how you can incorporate social media and personalized communication pieces.  As you look at the trade show plan, identify at least one WOW, and if you can’t find one, ask your marketing team to help out.  Dare to be different. I like the idea of an "Ask the Thought Leader" booth where buyers can get insights and advice on their business challenges.  It would be a lot like an old-fashion kissing booth and buyers would love you for it.  Some creative ideas companies have used include promoting a paperless booth, building an exclusive social networking community, using Pinterest so attendees could pin up what interested them, and advertising thought leadership through on-site consulting.  Give prospects a reason to want to stop and look and more. At the Trade Show Initiate conversations.  Change the conversation.  Rather than probe for product interest, ask about the business challenges and desired outcome, and share insights.  Back into your offerings, and set up specific follow-up. Your message must be one of insights and ideas, and your goal is to add to what your visitors already know.  Be prepared to share the highlights of key industry success stories.  Customers don’t want to hear a pitch, but they are very interested to hear what other companies are doing and to gain insights from your experience or research. If a prospect seems not to qualify, ask at least one more question to be sure.  Make every visitor feel welcome and valued, and thank everyone who engages with you. After the Trade Show Post trade show activities are essential to reaping the benefits of all the expense of a trade show.  Marketing can tweet, but sales leaders must clarify expectations for their sales teams and use technology to ensure timely follow-up and accountability.  Once you have a good lead, response time is the first, and possibly the most important, factor in conversion. Here are some best practices to help you and your organization maximize every lead: Distribute leads ASAP — within one day of the end of the trade show.  Hot leads can be acted on immediately and appointments set before the trade show ends.  Give an award to the salesperson that has the most appointments in place before the trade show ends. Call immediately.  Talk in terms of solving business challenges.  Be prepared to leave a concise, upbeat value message customized to the prospect. Invite your leads to connect with you or a company group on LinkedIn. Have contact courage.  If you call on a Monday, call back on Tuesday or Wednesday and continue to call.  Call at 7:30 a.m.  Be creative.  Be assertive.  Do what it takes to get through.  Use e-mail to support phone contact.  Send something relevant. If you can’t connect with the prospect within a week, don’t give up.  Don’t take it personally if the prospect is slow to respond.  Remember, after a trade show, participants are likely swamped with catch-up.  It’s your job to reach the prospect to start the buying process. Trade shows are a lot of work, a lot of standing, but can also be a lot of fun.  You are out there to greet, learn, and teach.  You connect personally and professionally.  Take advantage of the pre-purchase stage, which truly is an important bonding stage.  Gaining early entry into a customer’s buying journey is one of the big advantages of trade shows, so make visitors feel welcome and understood. Trade shows are not the same.  So, what will you do to be different?  What will you contribute to the WOW? ************************************************************* Click the following to  learn more about Richardson’s award winning sales training solutions.   The post Not Just Another Trade Show: Convert Leads into Results appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.

My Top 25 List of Tools for Sales People When you think of typical tools for sales people, CRM software and services, such as Salesforce.com, likely come to mind. While CRM is certainly an important aspect of a salesperson’s job, it’s by no means the end-all-be-all. In order to effectively prospect and sell, sales people and managers can and should take advantage of a host of tools and applications to guide their activities and help their efforts. Here’s my list of 25 Tools for Sales People with brief descriptions and grouped by activity: Find Prospects Very few sales reps have an evergreen book of business. In addition to networking, how else can you look for new prospects? LinkedIn — 200 million+ members. Manage your professional identity. Build and engage with your professional network. Access knowledge, insights, and opportunities by company, industry, geography and role. Leverage groups and discussions. Twitter — Follow your clients and prospects, their colleagues, and their corporate accounts to stay on top of what’s important to them and their business. What are they saying, and who do they follow? Lead411 — Lead411 provides business e-mail lists, company addresses, executive e-mails, and phone numbers. NetProspex — NetProspex, voted Best Lead Generation Solution, is the fastest-growing and most accurate B2B contact information solution, providing new, targeted prospects. Google Maps — Find local businesses, view maps, and get driving directions in Google Maps. Stay Informed There’s no shortage of information out there, but you need to be able to sift through what’s most relevant to you and prioritize your time in reviewing it. Evernote — The Evernote family of products help you remember and act upon ideas, projects, and experiences across all the computers, phones, and tablets you use. Scoop.it — Easily curate engaging magazines. Effectively feed your web presence. Pulse — Pulse takes your favorite websites and transforms them into a colorful and interactive mosaic. Sign up to personalize your experience. Recently purchased by LinkedIn. Flipboard — Flipboard is your personal magazine, filled with the things you care about. Catch up … Tap red ribbon, Accounts, select a network, and sign in. Google Alerts — Google Alerts are e-mail updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your queries. Follow client or prospect organizations, and receive an e-mail when they’re in the news. Depending on the amount of news, you may need to refine your queries. Live Conversations Few sales reps are shy and likely prefer to have a live conversation. "If I could just get him on the phone so that I can have conversation instead of hoping he’ll read my e-mails." ConnectAndSell — ConnectAndSell offers an order-of-magnitude improvement in sales productivity. Insidesales.com — Phone dialer software. InsideSales.com is the leading provider of inside sales software and solutions to respond immediately and persistently to leads. Make 350+ calls per day. ooVoo — ooVoo is a FREE video chat and instant messaging app for desktop, mobile, tablets, and Facebook. ooVoo lets you chat with up to 12 people for FREE anytime. Skype — Make internet calls for free with Skype. Sign up today and discover a whole new world of staying in touch. Not a tool for cold calling, but an effective one if you’re in that stage of not having met in person but want to enhance your relationship. More personal than a webinar. E-mail E-mail is still a prevalent mode of communication. These tools can help you leverage your e-mail efforts and know what’s getting through, opened, and clicked on. Don’t underestimate the power of a good subject line. Rapportive — Rapportive shows you everything about your contacts right inside your inbox. We combine what you know, what your organization knows, and what’s on the web. Cirrus Insight — Rated #1 by Salesforce users. Create new leads and contacts. Save e-mails and attachments to Salesforce. Sync calendars. Boomerang — Boomerang is a plugin for Firefox and Chrome that adds scheduled sending and integrated e-mail reminders to Gmail. Yesware — An e-mail tool for salespeople. Track e-mails, create templates, sync with CRM, and more. Yesware helps you close more deals faster. Bananatag — Track e-mails from all clients. Know when your e-mails are opened or clicked. Streak — Streak is great for sales, but you can also use it for hiring candidates, handling e-mail support, organizing deal flow, fundraising, and organizing. Video and Presentations According to Domo, there are 48 hours of video uploaded to YouTube every minute. Videos and savvy presentations might be just what you need to get the attention of your targets. Keep them professional and not too long. Leverage your charismatic sales leaders in a way that e-mail can’t do justice. YouTube — Share your videos with clients, prospects, and colleagues. Record brief tutorials, demos, or product descriptions to whet your prospects’ interest. Put your content experts on screen to help engage your targets. SlideShare — Offers users the ability to upload and share publicly or privately PowerPoint presentations, Word documents, and Adobe PDF Portfolios. Brainshark — Create online video presentations and mobile video presentations from PowerPoint or your other static content. You can also create voice-enriched video presentations. Screenr — Instant screencasts — just click record. Screenr’s web-based screen recorder makes it a breeze to create and share your screencasts around the web. Snagit — Snagit screen capture allows you to grab an image or video of what you see on your computer screen, add effects, and share with anyone. Hopefully, this list gives you some ideas to help your selling and prospecting. Do you use a tool or application I haven’t listed here? Please let us know by leaving a comment along with the primary benefit to you. The post My Top 25 List of Tools for Sales People appeared first on The Richardson Sales Excellence Review™.