The topic of discussion this morning was “The Seven Winning Behaviors of Top Sales Performers.” With a room full of top-performing sales people one would think enumerating these behaviors would be a no-brainer.  Confidence? Relationship-building? Empathy? Nope. Turns out that while multiple qualities have value, they’re not the differentiators for top performance. Maybe it’s easier to be consciously competent than “unconsciously incompetent.” Or maybe it’s difficult to separate the good luck from the good behavior. Are we certain of the sales we make are because of what we do, or are in spite of what we do? The actual survey results were:

1. Assertive
2. Discovers Prospect Pain
3. Cold Calls Consistently
4. Plans the Sales Process
5. Views Professional Sales as a Career
6. Training Investor and Practitioner
7. Role Plays Consistently

Participants’ reactions varied. Some were silent, some were compliant. But present in the eyes of several guests was just a hint of what generates much educated banter: disagreement.

A couple earnest voices rang out, “Cold calling doesn’t work!” and “Sales isn’t a respected career!” Other guests answered with their contradictory experience, “95% of my sales will come from cold calling this year!”  And there was that energy. The meeting of the minds where ideas are born and where people grab the opportunity to learn from each other. We hoped it would peek out this morning.

The point of Business Wise Insiders is to bring together sales professionals and executives from Best in Class companies to network and learn together in a forum where experience and education are prized. Build new relationships, develop referral opportunities, and maybe just do a little business at the end of the day.

P.S. Congratulations to Ms. Lucy Finger of Imprimis Group for winning our attendee drawing of a $20 Starbucks Gift Card. Hopefully she’ll use it to invite a new contact she met at Insiders to coffee!

If you weren’t able to join us this morning, plan to join us at future meetings. Our next Business Wise Insiders Meeting with be October 25^th, from 7:30A-9:00A at 15851 Dallas Parkway, Suite 190, First Floor Conference Room, Addison, Texas 75001. Clients and invited guests only. This invitation is non-transferrable. If you have questions about our group, call 214-306-0605.

Insiders is a peer group of B2B sales professionals, committed to continuous professional improvement and success, who share an interest in new business development, exchanging leads and learning.

Even with the best of intentions, however, accountability to prospect remains a problem:  it’s a problem for sales people to make sure they do enough of it and for sales managers to follow up on their sales people’s commitment to do it.

Here’s how BWise can help sales managers follow up on commitments made by sales people to prospect. (Yes guys, that means picking up the phone and making calls to your best prospects, over time, until they either buy or tell you to ‘go away’! )

Step 1: Ask your sales team to use the BWise Activity Manager to record calls to their top prospects.

Why record prospecting calls in the BWise Activity Manager and not your CRM? To keep your CRM clean and filled only with real opportunities.  Ask your team to only enter the prospect into your CRM once an appointment is set.  The BWise Research team will continuously update the prospect data in BWise, letting your sales people focus on making calls, vs. wasting time updating prospect data.

(For the sake of brevity, for we’ll assume your team has been trained on how to use the BWise Activity Manager to record their prospecting activity and is actively doing so!  To view a 10 minute video tutorial on how to record Prospecting Activities in the BWise Activity Manager, click here.

Step 2: View the # of appointments your salespeople set (which they record as ‘Completed Calls’ in BWise)

Here’s a step-by-step guide:

1. Login to your BWise account. (here’s a handy link for you to do this right now!)
2. Click Activities Manager.
3. Click the Completed tab. (you would click the Follow Up tab to create a report of follow up prospecting calls vs. ‘Completed’ activities that resulted in an appointment)
4. Click Find.  The Find Activities window will pop-up.
5. Select User to a single, named user or leave it set to All Users if desired.
6. Enter Completed Date range. (leave this blank to display ALL appointments recorded)
7. In the Results section, check Set Appointment (Note: these Result values may be customized to match your preferred terminology under Admin tab; to display ALL types of results, leave all Result values unchecked.
8. Click Accept.  A list of Completed prospecting activities will display in the Completed tab grid.
9. If desired, click Exportto send this data to Excel.  That way, you can produce Pivot Tables, etc. to summarize this data. This is especially useful if you have a large amount of Activities data and wish to summarize data by user, Activity Result type, etc.(Note: When you attempt to open the file in Excel, a ‘security’ message may display, as Excel may not recognize it as a ‘true’ .XLS file file.  Go ahead and allow Excel to open the file. Then, be sure to do a ‘Save As’ in Excel, set File Type to Excel and Save the file to the desired folder.)

Be Proactive. Contact the list of “Click-Thrus” ASAP.  Your prospect has a short attention span.  After a few hours he may forget you; after a few days the likelihood he’ll remember drops dramatically.  Improve your results significantly with immediate follow up!

At the same time, “Big Brother” remains as intimidating in 2009 as in 1984!  When following up with your Drip audience, make your opening statement something like:

“I’m calling to follow up on an email I/we recently sent you, do you have a moment?”

Do not share that you know the details of their activity on your web site…it’s unproductive, unnecessary and uncomfortable for your prospect.

The “BWise Drip Marketing Click-Thru Detail Report” contains a list of click-thru responses for each Drip Marketing message you send.  Access your most recent click-thru reports by clicking on the Completed Tab from the Drip Marketing Message Manager. From there, click the link under the Unique Clicks column, which shows the number of unique contacts that clicked on at least 1 link in your message.

The Drip Marketing Click-Thru Detail Report for that message will display, showing the Contact, Company, Title, Phone Number, Time of Click and Link clicked.

You may elect to call click thrus directly from this report; or, you may Export this data to Excel, and then Import it back into the BWise Web App, in order to manage your calls using the BWise Activity Manager.

Here’s how:

1. Click the Export link from the Drip Marketing Click Thru Detail report
2. You will be prompted to Open or Save the file.  Open it, and if necessary, specify that you wish to open it with Microsoft Excel.
3. Once the data is displayed in Excel, click Save As, making sure that the File Type is set to .XLS.  Be sure to note the folder you save the file to – you’ll need to know this when you do the Import step below!
4. Now, switch over to the BWise Web App.
5. From there, click Query, then click Design to open the Design Query window.
6. From the Data Match Query Criteria section, click Contact BWise ID Match.
7. A pop-up window will open. Click Import and browse to the location of the saved Excel file .
8. Click ‘Accept’, then, ‘View Results’.  The Query result will display the Contacts that clicked on your message links.
9. We recommend now creating a List from this Data Match query result. To do so, Click the +/- List button.  From the List pop-up window, click New, and create a new list such as “May 2010 Special Offer Click Thrus“.  We recommend also specifying that this is a ‘Shared’ list, so that everyone in your firm can easily access it.
10. The newly-created list name will appear in the drop-down. Click ‘Accept’ and the contacts from the Data Match Query result will be added to this new List.

To access this List any time, click the main List tab in BWise. Then, click the drop-down labeled ‘Select List to View’. Click Shared Lists and select the ‘May 2010 Special Offer Click Thrus’. The Contacts that clicked on links in this message will display.

• Lissa offered valuable tips on how to improve our cold calling  efforts including “elevator pitches.”  We learned to refocus our “what we do” to the pain we solve for our clients. We uncovered powerful words like frustrated, upset, distressed, worried, angry, concerned and agitated. The before and after comparisons were amazing!
  
• New BWise Mobile saved time and gave fingertip access to Decision Maker names. One contact who wouldn’t return a phone call came out for an in-person visit!
• Which titles were hot or not. (CFOs topped the list, CEOs, Sls VPs, even Admins…who know everything…were key to some staffing firms)
• Several folks who focussed on Buckhead businesses connected to share opportunities.
• “Ask and ye shall receive” proved true when one BWiser  sought a medical software firm and another gave her an immediate referral.

While trivial when compared to world peace,  it makes me crazy! In our world of data accuracy,  it is not in keeping with either our mission or reputation.

Solution?
Bob Bly suggests to proofread your copy backward.  Apparently, since the copy loses all meaning, you notice each word more.

My mistake was with ‘you’ and ‘your’ so I’m curious to see if it will work. What I do know is this: “spell-check” did not work.  According to Customer Service Advantage, “spell-check” only catches 3 out of 10 errors! That’s not good enough for me.

Let me know if you know of any other solutions to share and how this idea works for your. (oops you!)

Lots of marketers try to cram everything they can into their emails.  They assume that if the email is good, the reader will stop everything they are doing, read the entire email, go to the website and give their credit card infomation.  All the email is supposed to do is help set an appointment – but it’s being asked to close the sale.

Give the poor, tired, overworked email a break. 

Take a step back and look at your email.  Really look at it.  You’re probably overworking your email if…

• it looks and feels just like a web page
• it takes more than 30 seconds to read from start to finish
• it has more than one central call to action

Your email should be engaging.  It should include just enough information to get the reader to click.  Any more than that and you’re overworking your email.