The New Rules of Sales and Service

Smart companies understand this new world and build a buying process around the realities of independent research. Instead of generic information dreamed up by an advertising agency, they tell authentic stories that interest their customers. Instead of selling, they educate through online content. Instead of ignoring those who have already made a purchase, they deliver information at precisely the moment customers need it. (Location 442)

Paul didn't need to sell me, because the online content had already done that! And here's the important point: Paul knew this. Unlike the sales process a decade ago, Paul's job was 95 percent done by the time he answered my call. The actual transaction was simple and was completed quickly. Once we had booked our expedition, the online storytelling didn't stop. At this point, Paul became a content curator, digging into Quark's information library to send me what we needed to make our trip more enjoyable. (Location 464)

We live in the era of a buying process controlled by consumers, not a sales situation stacked against us. The good news is this means that people who understand the new realities can make their business fantastically successful. (Location 503)

With the expense of publishing essentially free, customers have a (loud) voice through social networks and review sites. Therefore it is time for the New Rules of Sales and Service: Authentic storytelling sets the tone with content as the link between companies and customers. Big data enables a more scientific approach to sales and service. Agile selling brings new business to your company, and real-time engagement keeps customers happy. (Location 510)

Now success belongs to organizations that tell their buyers the best stories, companies with the best content, and those whose information aligns perfectly with buyer needs. (Location 517)

The best companies recognize that real-time engagement on social networks like Facebook and Twitter not only makes customers happy because their problems are instantly addressed, but also provides guidance to future customers with the same concerns via the public discussions. Such attention to customers' needs serves to brand those companies as ones that others will want to do business with. (Location 560)

But now, because of the wealth of information on the web, the salesperson no longer controls the relationship. Now, the buyers can check you out themselves. (Location 571)

Today it's up to customers when they want to engage a salesperson. If I'm interested in buying something, I go to the web, I go to Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, and I ask my friends and colleagues and family members for advice. I go to a half-dozen websites and do research. When I'm finally good and ready and I've built up my body of knowledge, I reach out, typically electronically through email, and say, “Hey, I'm interested to go to the next step,” and almost always the salesperson who calls me assumes I know nothing. (Location 626)

Just as online content is the primary driver for successful marketing and public relations, online content is quickly becoming a dominant driver for sales and service as well. (Location 632)

The best businesses have an organizational story that underlies everything they do. For these outfits, that story and the resulting culture it builds mean that everybody—from the CEO and the executives to the salespeople and support staff, even the person who answers the telephone—are all delivering the same information. (Location 650)

Content Drives Sales and Service As buyers move through the sales cycle, they self-select information that will help them. Perhaps they will encounter a blog post here, a webinar there, or maybe an e-book to read on the train ride home, just as Quark Expeditions reached me when I was investigating a visit to Antarctica. Salespeople can't hoard information like they used to, because it's all available on the web. So the smart ones have transformed themselves into a sort of information broker, serving up the perfect content to each buyer at the right time. On the service side, once someone is signed up as a customer, information delivered at the right moment makes for a happy customer who renews existing services and buys more over time. And happy customers talk up companies on social networks. (Location 676)

Today people use the Internet to search for answers to their insurance questions. If I can provide those answers, then people will see me as an expert, and it may lead them to contact me for both advice and service.” (Location 721)

McGlynn says he tries to write a new blog post each Wednesday, although he does take some weeks off when he is traveling. “Most of my posts come from listening to people's questions,” he says. “Whether it is in our office or in their office, my clients give me the best ideas.” (Location 737)

Remarkably, nearly all companies are still operating in a world as if the salesperson is the king of the information kingdom. Companies insist on driving all online interactions to a salesperson. One manifestation of this behavior is the insistence by most companies that buyers supply personal details—particularly an email address—before they can get information such as a white paper. When I question marketers about this practice, they tell me that they need sales leads and that salespeople follow up on the information requests. The idea that you shouldn't give information for free predates the web. Requiring an email registration is simply applying what we did in the past to the new realities. (Location 865)

Your salespeople should assume that they are the last place a buyer goes, not the first. They must assume that very little of their knowledge is proprietary. They need to facilitate the sale, not control the information. (Location 875)

Nearly all B2B technology company trade show demos are conducted out of laziness. Here's how the dysfunctional process works and why B2B technology demos are so overused. Marketers don't understand their buyers, the problems their buyers face, or how their product could help solve these problems. (Location 891)

Any new initiative should start with buyers and your buyer personas. What problems do your buyers have? How can your company solve those problems with technology? How do your buyers describe the solutions? (Location 900)

Content is the link between companies and customers. You are what you publish. Companies must drive people into the purchasing process with great content. Blogs, online video, e-books, infographics, and the like let organizations communicate directly with buyers in a form they appreciate. (Location 1170)

Agile selling brings new business to your company. Buyers actively use search engines and social networks to find companies to do business with. The buyer is now in charge of the sales process, and wants to buy on his or her own personal timetable. When a buyer is ready to buy, the company must respond with lightning speed. (Location 1183)

Real-time engagement keeps customers happy. In our always-on world, buyers expect instant, 24/7 service. Because of independent product reviews, there is now a huge incentive to fix problems and make customers happy so they don't complain publicly. Customers expect employees of the companies they do business with to support them via social networks. (Location 1189)

By story, I don't mean something made up in a conference room one afternoon, nor something that an advertising agency creates on your behalf. Instead, the best stories lay the foundation for what makes an organization connect effectively with its customers. (Location 1566)

When the story that you tell customers matches the story that customers tell themselves, your business is in alignment. However, all too often, companies are completely out of alignment with their customers, which makes for difficult work. (Location 1582)

One way to research buyer personas in real time is to monitor the blogs, forums, chat rooms, and social networking sites that buyers frequent. (Location 2118)

“By monitoring Twitter, blogs, and forums to listen in on conversations, and by following trends, we were able to gain insight into what was important to cruise passengers, like our location's proximity to the port, and the kinds of cars that they actually wanted to rent,” (Location 2126)

What you should be asking yourself is this: What problems do we solve for our buyers? When a problem you solve is fundamentally different from one group of customers to another, then you have more than one buyer persona. (Location 2143)

Taking the time to segment buyers and then listen to them discuss their problems can transform the effectiveness of your efforts. The other thing that happens is that your marketing materials will use the words and phrases of your buyers, not your own. Buyer persona research ensures that you market using the voice of your buyer, not of your founder, CEO, product manager, or PR agency staffer. This drives people into the buying process, making salespeople's work easier and quicker. (Location 2156)

The Buyer Persona Interview The best way to learn about buyers and develop buyer persona profiles is to interview people one-on-one and in their own environment. The goal of the interview is to define the problems people are facing and to learn precisely how they describe those problems—the actual words and phrases that they use. For example, if your company creates products that are used by people who play golf, then get yourself out to a public golf course or country club and speak to people there! You'll need to segment the buyers you speak to, in order to develop individual profiles for each. Perhaps you might segment golfers into buyer personas like this: (Location 2167)

Start with open-ended questions of a general nature. A question like “Why do you play golf?” will often yield surprising answers. Ask about how golf fits into their life and work. You can then begin to ask more specific questions, but don't drive the discussion toward the products and services that you currently sell— (Location 2176)

Another line of questioning should center on problems your company's services are designed to address. You should inquire about how your buyers gather information when they need to solve such a problem. Again, using the golf example, you might ask, “Do you read golf magazines? How about visiting golf websites, blogs, and social networking sites? Do you ask the club professional for advice?” You should also ask, “If you were to go to Google or another search engine to research equipment to improve your golf game, what words might you enter as search terms?” (Location 2180)

Meet members of your buyer personas on their own turf (their office, home, school, or where they go to relax) and listen carefully to how they describe their problems. Then develop products and services especially valuable to them, and create marketing using their language, not yours. (Location 2190)

Taking the time to learn what their issues are, what their problems are, and what challenges they face will reveal nuggets of information that will lead to real-time sales and marketing success. (Location 2229)

buyer persona research (Location 2234)

“Our solutions could never evolve from a boardroom discussion; our ideas come to us when we are out playing. We go straight to the source. We don't ask our grandmother what she thinks about our motorsport mounts apparatus; we ask race car drivers.” (Location 2265)

Buyer personas also make it much easier to market your products. Rather than web content that is simply an egotistical reiteration of gobbledygook-laden corporate drivel, you create content that people actually want to consume and are eager to share. (Location 2275)

Here's an example of an open-ended first question that Buyer Persona Institute uses to get the conversation going because it focuses the buyer on the first step in the decision process: (Location 2333)

A great example of a buyer persona profile is the one describing “Internet Ian,” (Location 2374)

“You need to share content and move that buyer through the buying process. You need to teach salespeople that the buying process has changed completely and they need new mind-sets, new skill sets, and new toolkits.” Rowley encourages salespeople to understand social tools like LinkedIn and Twitter and to use them to share content. “Social isn't a shortcut,” she says. “They are just new channels—new ways to find your buyers, listen and relay, engage and amplify. You are still building relationships, and relationships take time. If you show up at the front door for your first date naked, you're not going to get very far. (Location 2664)

Referencing blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, and other web-based tools, buyers often bypass the traditional selling model altogether—learning for themselves about your products and services, your competitors, and what customers say about you (whether true or not!). (Location 2673)

The best salespeople have become information brokers—communicating by delivering the precise information that buyers need at just the right time and in just the right way. (Location 2677)

Educate and inform instead of interrupt and sell. (Location 2680)

Instead you need to deliver the right information to buyers, right at the point when they are most receptive. Although it sounds counterintuitive, you sell more when you stop selling. Organizations gain credibility and loyalty with buyers through sharing content, and smart marketers think and act like publishers in order to create and deliver content targeted directly at their audience. (Location 2689)

The marketing team creates information of value—blog posts, e-books, white papers, videos, infographics, and the like—for each stage of the buying process. Now we shift to how salespeople reach one buyer at a time. (Location 2698)

For many business-to-business (B2B) sales, the buying cycle may involve many steps and engage multiple buyer personas. (Location 2703)

Effective organizations take website visitors' buying cycles into account when delivering content and organizing it on the site. People in the early stages of the sales cycle need basic information about their problems and the ways that your organization solves them. (Location 2705)

Driving People into the Buying Process People in the early stages of the buying process need basic information addressing their problems and offering basic information about the marketplace and the product category. Don't distract them with stuff about your company and your products at these early stages. When doing initial research, people don't want to hear about you and your company. They want the essential information about the product and how it relates to solving the problem that brought them to your site. Make web content totally free with no registration in the early part of the buying process. (Location 2711)

Don't push product. Teach people something. Share your expertise. (Location 2720)

It is essential that your salespeople understand that buyers go through the buying process independently of the salespeople's involvement. The salespeople need to understand the strategy behind the marketing staff offering effective content directly to an entire buyer persona. This way salespeople know what to send and when to engage individuals one-to-one as they move them through the final stages of the buying process. (Location 2722)

Now Raise Your Hand (Please) After your marketers have delivered compelling information to demonstrate expertise in the market category and provided knowledge about solving buyers' problems, you want buyers to express interest. The goal of the middle stage of the buying process is to have people “raise their hand” somehow. (Location 2748)

They haven't yet purchased anything, but they have given their personal information. At this point, you've found a potential customer from a huge sea of buyers you didn't yet know. But this is not the time to sell. You've still got to move them through the buying process a bit more. (Location 2751)

When creating content about your offerings, remain focused on the buyers and their problems. (Location 2754)

As people interact with your content at this middle stage in the buying process, think of ways that you can offer something of value that will motivate people to enter a subscription so that you can learn who they are. Possible enticements range from an email newsletter, a webinar (web-based seminar), an e-book, or a research report to something like GrabCAD's membership in a community. (Location 2755)

The Merging of Sales and Content to Facilitate the Close As each individual buyer approaches the end of the buying process, you must provide content and tools that facilitate the sale. This is where salespeople earn their commissions. (Location 2792)

“Salespeople get invited into conversations much later these days because of online content,” (Location 2805)

“As a salesman, you need to bring something new to the party,” he says. “Now the buyer is very well educated when you get to his doorstep. So you can't just regurgitate what he's already seen on the Internet. You have to be much more switched on. And you need the understanding of his business. I think that's always been the case, but it's more critical these days.” (Location 2812)

In particular, he emphasizes that an ability to deliver content as a way to help move potential customers toward closing a deal has always been an important sales technique. (Location 2818)

Tremendous success comes when great online content and an educated and interested buyer meet a skillful salesperson who understands the new realities of the buying process. (Location 2826)

A Customer for Life Once the deal is closed, there are two more steps. You must continue the online dialogue with your new customer. Add her to your customer email newsletter or customer-only community site where she can interact with experts in your organization and other like-minded customers. You should also provide ample opportunities for customers to give you feedback on how to make the products (and sales process) better. (Location 2829)

Think about the average corporate website. There are usually only two steps. A visitor goes to the site and there is a “contact us” form or some sort of offer (maybe for a white paper). At most companies, that lead is passed on to sales and all too often it is viewed as a “crappy lead” and ignored. Even worse, at most companies that site visitor receives no additional marketing. What a shame. (Location 2915)

Of course it's the salespeople's job to follow up on leads. But you might consider how you can integrate marketing with sales by, say, sending each of your trade show visitors an appropriate thank-you offer, such as a free trial of your service or a complimentary download. Or add the sales lead to your email newsletter list. (Location 2925)

Smart marketers need to educate the salespeople so they understand that we're in this together. We are no longer in a world where marketing passes the baton to sales, and sales leads are seen as the primary measurement of marketing's success. Marketing needs to create content for each step in the process. And salespeople, if they are active in social media, can drive prospects into the top of the funnel. (Location 2932)

“There are no barriers, no walls. There are no sign-up forms. People realize we don't have an ulterior motive, because we don't make them register to receive content. And we try to prove that by giving them plenty of information about what they need at every step of the process. (Location 2953)

The web content serves to provide the initial information, but most people want to connect with Kendall PRess to discuss their specific needs. This is where the “non-sales-lead” approach kicks in. Rather than forcing everyone to fill out a response form and let a salesperson take the next step and make a call, Kendall PRess allows buyers to contact them in whatever way they are most comfortable. (Location 2961)

The debate about putting a gate in front of valuable content on a site rages on. The question: Should you require buyers to provide an email address and other contact information before they are permitted to download information such as e-books, white papers, research reports, and the like? Or, like Kendall PRess, should you be completely open and require no registration? (Location 2977)

Advocates for open unrestricted content, including yours truly, contend that far greater value results from many, many more people consuming and spreading your content than would otherwise occur if a gate was in place. (Location 2984)

Can I Have Your Phone Number? A guy goes up to someone he finds attractive at a bar, and the first thing out of his mouth is: “Give me your phone number.” A girl sees someone she finds interesting at the local coffee emporium and starts the conversation off with: “So…how much money do you make?” (Location 2994)

Yet this is exactly how many companies behave when they require personal information, including an email address and a phone number, before sending you a white paper. Their inane “contact us” forms require you to reveal intimate details, such as how many employees work at your company, before you can even speak with a human. (Location 3000)

The next time you have to design a sales strategy, think about how you would approach it if you were trying to date the buyer instead of sell to them. (Location 3003)

Registration through squeeze pages is a holdover from the days of direct mail, when a business reply mail card was the way to fulfill a white paper request and collect names and addresses. When direct mail experts flocked to the web in the early days, they adapted the strategies they knew best. (Location 3020)

Requiring registration greatly reduces the number of people who download something. Think about your own behavior. How willing are you to provide an email address to register for an e-book or white paper from a company? I've had marketers tell me they've run tests that indicate that the number of content downloads can be 50 times greater when no registration is required. Stop and let that soak in! (Location 3023)

So if you do use registration forms, you need to assume very few people will share your content. (Location 3030)

When lots of people link to your stuff because your content is freely available, your numbers will rise in the search results. (Location 3031)

Here is the detailed calculus showing the two different approaches to delivering a typical white paper to buyers. (Location 3037)

But the strategy of comparing your business to your close competitor means that you are likely to become a me-too enterprise that's just a little better, faster, or cheaper. That's no position to be in. True leaders forget about the competition. The best salespeople don't focus on what the other guys are doing. (Location 3120)

The Atlassian sales process largely depends upon the distribution of free content that is accessible on its site. The content is designed to arm buyers with everything they might need to make an independent purchasing decision. There is no registration form on the site except during the final step in the process when the buyer is ready to download the product. (Location 3205)

“We don't care about qualifying people,” says Simons. “Rather, we want the software to qualify the buyer.” Many buyers learn about Atlassian via word of mouth and social media. Additionally, company representatives create awareness by participating at events, speaking at conferences, and making sure their content is found in the search engines. (Location 3208)

“If you try our products, we will send you an email,” says Simons. “It says, ‘We are thrilled that you are giving our Atlassian product a try. If you need any help, we are at the other end of this phone number or can be contacted at this email address. Write or call us anytime, and we will be delighted to help you.’ The only difference is that we are empowering you to make a bunch of decisions on your own. We don't need to persuade you to make that decision. If we arm you with all the answers to questions others have asked in the past, we will make it easy for you to discover that you are smart enough to decide whether or not the product does what you need it to do, and if it's right for you, you'll buy it.” In an average month, this strategy converts around 800 new customers, representing about 3,500 licenses. (Location 3216)

Simons says there are many doubts that still arise about doing business using this model. Often someone at Atlassian begins to suspect that the company may need to add salespeople. But maintaining faith in this model as the right one for the company has so far proven the wisdom of that decision. (Location 3228)

When you establish a new start-up, you can build the entire infrastructure around a business model that does not have a sales team. That's very different from taking an existing company with an army of salespeople and making the change. (Location 3234)

The Ideal: Agile Sales Today buyers are in charge. The idea of mystery in the sales process is over. We research someone online before agreeing to a first date—is he a creep? (Location 3264)

We fire up LinkedIn an hour before an initial business meeting—does she have anyone I know in her network? We watch on-demand movie trailers before deciding which film to see that night at the theater. We check out restaurant reviews and browse menus before booking a reservation. (Location 3265)

Instead of forcing buyers into the company's sales process, an agile company responds to individual buyers based on what they are doing and how they are interacting. (Location 3282)

“Previously, a major aspect of the sales process required everyone in sales to memorize the price book and be intimately familiar with the competitive landscape. Salespeople had to be ready with quick responses about how their company was different from the competition,” Roberge says. “You had the power and control. And you could use that to your advantage to win over the prospect. Now, buyers conduct their research at any moment of the day or night—perhaps even midnight on a Saturday night.” As an example, the buyer locates the top six vendors. She researches what their products do. She looks at their price books. Sometimes she can try their product for free. And oftentimes, she can even buy it right on the website. However, in this case, the salespeople need to bring more value to the buying process than just basic information found on a website. And that value is being able to transform the website's generic messaging into specific information tailored to the needs of a particular buyer. “Today successful salespeople play a role much like a consultant,” Roberge suggests. (Location 3289)

“A consultant comes into your business to learn about everything that's going on, and learn about what you're trying to achieve,” Roberge says. “And then they can tell you if their product is a fit or not—because it's possible it might not be. And if it's not, they need to tell you so, honestly and up front. And if the fit is good, they need to explain it within your context, using your vocabulary, using your business strategy, using your business goals, just as a consultant would. That's where sales is going today. (Location 3301)

The Decisive Advantage: Speed With buyers having access to much more information, salespeople now enter the buying process later, at a moment of enormous opportunity. When a buyer raises her hand, it's very likely she has already educated herself based on the content on your site and elsewhere. She knows the basics and wants more. She's indicating that she wants to speak with you about something specific. (Location 3323)

Not only do buyers need a salesperson with more knowledge than what appears on your company's site and blog, but they also expect a much quicker interaction. When buyers express interest, they expect contact right away. Now. Not tomorrow. Not this afternoon. Now! (Location 3326)

If your marketing team does an excellent job creating content for your buyer personas, it's also likely that the number of inquiries will grow quickly. Over time, you can start to use technology to do a first pass on lead qualification in real time; however, it's important to monitor the filters carefully when they are first instituted to make sure the parameters are properly defined. It is best to use an algorithm when dealing with high-volume responses because the clock is ticking, but implement this only with constant human monitoring, and quickly adjust and make changes as required. (Location 3343)

“When you get called from HubSpot, it's contextual,” he says. “It's a dialogue. It's ‘Mary, this is Mark from HubSpot. I noticed you downloaded our e-book on generating leads through Facebook. I reviewed your Facebook company page and have a few quick tips. I'll email them to you now. Give me a call if you'd like to discuss.’ And two days later, I'll contact again and say, ‘Hi, Mary, as it turns out I found a case study of a customer of ours who's been quite successful in your business. I'm going send you their story and what they actually did to trigger some ideas.’ Each message we send relates to the context of their situation, and the impact it makes is very powerful.” (Location 3363)

Whenever a HubSpot salesperson makes a call or sends an email or contacts a buyer through a social network, it is to be helpful and provide something in context to that particular buyer's educational journey. (Location 3369)

The idea of newsjacking is quite simple: It is the art and science of injecting your ideas into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate social attention and media coverage for yourself or your business. (Location 3375)

The good news is that smaller organizations can rely on free services like Google News and TweetDeck. (Location 3723)

ways. Imagine a B2B salesperson inserting an ad into someone's Facebook stream shortly after the person downloaded a specific white paper. (Location 3741)

Those same predictive analytics engines are now being deployed at much smaller organizations as well, providing salespeople with critical information that will help them sell more. In a simple incarnation, real-time website data can help a salesperson with what to say to individual buyers based on what they are doing on the site. For example, as a buyer visits your website and registers for a webinar, an alert is triggered on the salesperson's real-time dashboard, providing details about the buyer based on the page that person is visiting. The alert notes that the person downloaded a white paper a few days ago. In fact, the alert is flagged as high priority because that combination of actions—white paper download plus webinar registration—is highly indicative of a propensity to buy. The alert, a trigger event, instantly pulls up information on the buyer's company. Is it already a client? Have others from this company visited the site before? (Location 3759)

This is just a simple example of a trigger event that might happen in real time based on somebody visiting a website. Predictive analytics can be so much more when combined with external data. In the nonprofit world, trigger events are being used to gather information about active and potential donors. Intelligence gleaned from publicly available resources such as recent real estate transactions, reported executive compensation, and political contributions can be harvested by a nonprofit organization to estimate the level of an individual's ability to donate. (Location 3770)

To learn more about trigger events and predictive analytics, I spoke with Brian Kardon, chief marketing officer at Lattice Engines, a technology company providing data-driven predictive applications that help companies market and sell more intelligently. (Location 3797)

Kardon says the companies doing the best work with predictive sales analysis understand it requires both technology and human interaction. “Sales reps alone can't get all the information they need,” he says. “It's just too hard to find. (Location 3806)

Interestingly, this kind of analysis also allows sales teams to operate in a leaner fashion because there is no longer a need to contact every single lead that comes in. “If a company used to have 20 job postings and now they have none, and their credit score just went from A to C and they just shut down two offices, that's valuable to know,” Kardon says. “If you knew that, would you call them even if they came via an inbound lead? No, don't call them. (Location 3828)

Social Selling and Your Customer Relationship Management (Location 3838)

Today, the buyers decide when they want to engage a salesperson. When the salesperson was in charge, the old CRM work flow model—charting a path from initial lead, to the first call, to a face-to-face meeting, to the negotiation phase, and ending with the close—made sense. No longer. Today, if I'm interested in buying something, I go to a dozen websites and do the research. And then at some point when I've built up my body of knowledge, I reach out, typically electronically, and tell the company that I'm ready to take the next step. (Location 3851)

CRM systems should do a better job of helping sales representatives understand buyer context, but CRM wasn't built to do that. Instead the systems were created to help sales reps organize how they're going to take a prospect through the sales process, and bubble it up to the sales VP. (Location 3871)

CRM should be much more focused on helping salespeople to deliver a better buying process. CRM (Location 3877)

Buyers control the buying process, not you. The problem here is huge. Modern social selling just doesn't work on the CRM platforms that were built during an obsolete era (Location 3888)

“For example, LinkedIn is getting into social selling with an app called LinkedIn Context (Location 3893)

“We need to connect and build relationships with our customers, and CRM doesn't do that. It's no longer a sales funnel, or even a circle. It's a pretzel in which you have no idea where the journey starts and stops. But buyers will view you as a trusted advisor if you join them during the journey and share with them a nugget of information or an article you discovered. You're building relationships, and that's how you build your brand and your network. (Location 3901)

Obsessing over Sales Forecasts Does Nothing for Your Buyers (Location 3907)

A micromanagement of salespeople via CRM and salesforce automation systems leads to failure because those systems were built and the algorithms developed in the old days of selling. As soon as you obsess over forecasts, you've lost. (Location 3919)

Instead, focus on the buyers and their problems, and let salespeople do their jobs without interfering and forcing them to enter ridiculous amounts of data into your systems. (Location 3921)

“I've spent millions of dollars on sales software and I've used a lot of it,” Halligan says, “and I've got two big issues with it. First, they haven't adjusted and transformed it to match the way people actually buy today. It forces sales reps to be stuck in the 1990s. Second, it was built to monitor progress and help the VP (Location 3948)

Buying Signals! (Location 3953)

“When a marketer sends an email to a list, the marketer gets incredibly valuable intelligence about who opened that email, what they clicked on, and other analytics,” he says. “But this is 500 times more valuable to the sales rep! So why not build these signals into the salesperson's Outlook and Gmail? Every email that a prospect opens will create a signal that will report to the rep, ‘Oh, they just opened their email.’ (Location 3956)

In mid-2013, Halligan created a start-up company within HubSpot to build and launch a new notification app called Signals (Location 3963)

In this new landscape, successful selling requires new thinking as well as new technology. Today's successful salesperson is active on social networks, focused on the signals that buyers are sending, and fully aware that the buyers are leading the process. (Location 3971)

at Epson America are fairly common, Ploof has been working with his team of bloggers to create content around products and services that can be used to answer questions on social networks. “I ask bloggers, ‘Rather than answering a question 86 different times, what if we actually wrote a great blog post about that particular feature that's in your product or service? How can you come up with useful content that people are searching for?’” That content serves as the information that people are directed to when they need help. (Location 4283)

You can't put your head in the sand. These conversations are happening with or without you. So you have to decide: Are you going to participate or not? I would rather participate and know what's going on than just ignore the whole thing.” (Location 4289)

The only time customers hear from many organizations is when the organizations send out ridiculous “Your opinion is valuable to us” feedback requests. (Location 4341)

Each time you email a customer, you should be providing content of value. You should always be giving more than you are taking in a relationship with a customer. (Location 4348)

When unhappy customers voice disaffection, the damaged relationships could be repaired by swiftly addressing the problems, thus reducing customer churn. And the possibility of identifying opportunities for growth in comments from delighted customers would mean new sales. (Location 4467)

If you decide surveys are right, send them after you've delivered something meaningful to a customer at a time when it would be appropriate for that customer to receive a survey. (Location 4504)

Real-Time Customer Engagement (Location 4575)

I've found that finding the time to participate in social media is much like exercise; you need to make it an important part of your life. If it is important to you, you don't even think about it anymore. It just is. (Location 5163)

You need a presence on social networks because we all prefer to do business with people we know. When somebody can instantly find out a little about you on a social network or perhaps read your thoughts in a blog post you wrote, then you're not a complete stranger. If you have great content, people will find you and interact with you. And this will drive familiarity. (Location 5186)

Do 85 Percent Sharing and Engaging (Location 5218)

using this four-part model: tools, communications, training, and measurement. (Location 5548)

If your salespeople are communicating only through traditional channels, you need to start by showing them that social channels can be far more successful. A LinkedIn network, for example, becomes their personal database. (Location 5686)

If I send an email, it's now email number 321 in somebody's inbox that day. But if I reach out to a connection on LinkedIn, mine might be one of a tiny handful of messages and it will be looked at. That's a whole new competency that can be taught— (Location 5690)

I think more and more sellers are going to have to be more P2P—person-to-person—not just B2B or B2C. They need to sell to people as people, not as a company.” (Location 5771)