Boom Demand
Grow Your Revenue ON DEMAND
Sales Team With a Forward-Thinking Attitude
How to Establish a Forward-Thinking Sales Team
Do you want to build a sales team that can face the future? You ought to; the future keeps approaching with exciting and terrifying new changes every day. Building up a team of forward-looking individuals is essential to facing this reality. Constant change is, ironically, here to stay. Strangely, the best way to deal with constant change is to change ourselves to be more constant. Here’s what we’ve discovered about how to do it.1: Unify Around a Shared Strategic Vision
“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” Abraham Lincoln said that just two years before being elected President of the United States. During his time in power, he saw the nation torn apart by a fundamental national disagreement as to the morality of slavery. He then used the full force of that power to ensure that one side would emerge victorious. His personal views on the moral issue informed his choices, but it was also because of the strategic danger the divide represented for the country. If the country were to remain divided, it would never be safe from the invasions of other powerful nations around the world. The question was not just one of unity or disunity. It was of unity… or annihilation. A country divided is a country more easily conquered from the outside. Likewise, your business organization can best succeed in the marketplace if your team is united around your visions and goals. Together they can carry out the plans that will make them a reality. It’s essential to inspire and require that your team share a unifying ideal, and a company culture that makes it natural. Make sure that the whole team understands the reasons they need unity, and the consequences of discord.2: Develop Courage, Commitment, and Emotional Intelligence
These powerful personality traits and skills are not inherent in every person. That’s the bad news. The good news is that they can be learned. It may take a great deal effort, but by providing your sales team with training on these matters, it can makes them into far better salespeople. The reason these skills make teams more forward-looking is because they help individuals look outside of themselves, and become more focused on doing good work. Courage means doing something good and worthwhile regardless of momentary personal discomfort. It’s selfless. The benefits of commitment are clear and related. Sticking to a task when it gets hard pulls the team through to the finish line.“[People] with high emotional intelligence have the ability to accurately identify their emotions and, most importantly, the ability to control and evaluate these emotions. They are also very empathetic of the emotions of others, making them better listeners, communicators and negotiators.” – thepitcher.orgThere are other traits that make for great forward thinkers. These are the ones most necessary for the last piece of the puzzle, though.
3: Consider Wide-Ranging Possibilities, But Focus on Execution
Lisa Bodell, CEO of Futurethink, lays out a detailed guide for “Formalizing forward thinking” in any organization, in an article at strategy-business.com. Among the suggestions she makes, she put special emphasis on the importance of scenario planning:“To analyze long-term trends and market forces, the following scenario-planning exercises can be useful:She also suggests keeping close tabs on new developments coming out of the tech scene and the academic world. Many of the world’s biggest game-changers have come out of those two sectors. With all of that, though, nothing beats action. There’s no value in doing all that thinking and research if nothing ever happens as a result of it. That’s why we at Boom Demand focus on execution. We maintain a strong culture of forward-thinking, especially in our sales team, which is at your disposal. We train our sales development representatives to be excellent listeners who also know how and when to push the conversation forward. Contact us today to make forward thinking an integral part of your sales strategy!
- “Set a time horizon (2025, 2055, etc.) and scope (a specific area of your business, all areas of your business, or the entire industry) for the analysis.
- “Map the key trends and driving forces that could impact your business, including economic, political, technological, legal, societal, and industry-specific trends. Describe each trend, as well as how and why it will affect your organization.
- “Look for uncertainties: wild-card factors that could upend current plans —such as an environmental disaster, vendor bankruptcy, or tighter industry regulation — and threaten your organization.
- “Define two to four scenarios based on the trends and uncertainties you’ve identified. Include a mix of best- and worst-case scenarios.
- “Assess the scenarios. What are your opportunities? What are the threats? How can your business prepare now for these scenarios?”
Sales Team Management: 5 Best Tips for Success
5 Best Tips for Managing Your Sales Team
Whether you’re a veteran manager with a sales team in a slump, or you’re new to the field, it’s useful to take a look at what’s working for others. Great sales team management requires that the person in charge understands what it’s like to be on both ends of the cold call. That’s beside all the usual business administration tasks, too. Here we present the five most valuable tips we can offer for any sales manager who needs some fresh air.5: 1-on-1 training is indispensable.
Sales training is what makes everything else possible. It doesn’t matter whether one of your team members is a rookie or a 30-year sales veteran. Technology has made many old tactics obsolete, but many core principles remain constant. Everyone on your team needs knowledge of both. What’s more, they need to know that you care about the efforts of each one of them. Not the aggregate, but the individual’s performance. No matter how well the team is doing, each salesperson wants to know, “are my efforts appreciated and effective?” You need to give them that feedback personally. You also need to be humble enough to learn from them. Listen to their experiences, and factor them into the training.4: Quality beats quantity, but you need high volume to find enough good clients.
Aim high, but do it with a laser, not a shotgun. Train your reps to focus on qualifying questions to gauge genuine interest, rather than pitching everything that moves. If a lead is really not interested, move on to the next one. Help them make as many calls and send as many emails as they possibly can each day to reach that point. The reason for this is that a few high-interest prospects will end up doing far more for your organization than the dozens of mildly intrigued ones ever will. At the end of the day, the purpose of sales is revenue, not just brand recognition.3: Boost motivation by rewarding both effort and results
A lot of sales team management advice focuses heavily on results, and with good reason. As we just noted, revenue matters. But how do you get revenue? Through work. What is work? It’s an important question. In sales, work is not just pitching and closing. It’s also the hundreds of hangups, voicemails, and “no’s” you have to slog through to get to a yes. And as every successful salesperson can attest, the best closed deals always follow the worst rejections. So, consider rewarding the objections! “What?” you ask. No, really. Give your sales team an incentive to get rejected as much as possible, so they can find the “yesses” faster:“Every time someone got a no, we tracked it in our system, and the person with the most no’s received a $100 gift card every week… The more no’s you get, the closer you are to getting a yes. The prize of getting a yes is way larger than $100, so you still wanted to get there. This nearly doubled our outbound calls and motivated the whole team.” — Dan McGraw, CEO of FuelzeeHave a look at the other suggestions in that link from Dan Sincavage’s SalesHacker article. Decide what strategy will work best for your organization, but one way or another, make it easier for your team to work harder.
2: Transparency x Competition = Progress
Your team will want to work harder when they can see who’s doing the best at any given moment. Humans naturally love to compete with each other, and we love to win. Making sure that the metrics, goals, and results are visible to everyone encourages it, and actually helps everybody do better. Don’t keep secrets when it comes to reaching company goals. Let the team know how things are really going. Evaluate progress together and 1-on-1. Make sure that top performers share with others the tactics that make them successful. Give and receive feedback. Iterate and innovate!1: Remember that every member of your team is unique
Possibly the biggest key to excellent sales team management is this. Get to know the individual combinations of strengths ans weaknesses of every member of your team. There’s no such thing as a perfect salesperson, certainly not for every possible situation. You must recognize that some salespeople are better at building from the ground up, whereas others will be awesome only if they are joining an established campaign. Some will be better suited to high-value activities like closing deals; make these your account executives. Some will be rockstars at high-volume activities, like cold calls and sending warmed-up prospects along the funnel. Let them specialize as SDRs, and make it worth their while! There are many other ways someone can specialize in a sales role. Get familiar with them, and put them in the right place to make your whole operation as successful as possible.Bonus Sales Team Management Tip:
Boom Demand does all of this for you! We build our Sales Development teams with talented individuals who have proven their ability to make your sales process faster and more effective. Contact us today to start enjoying a more successful sales funnel!
Target Market Discovery Depends on Problem Solving
How Do You Find The Right Target Market for Your Software Product?
No business gets very far without knowing who they’re selling their products to. Some software companies have managed to appeal to an enormous target market. Social media and search companies are well-known for this, but they didn’t start out that way. Facebook started out with a very small and specific market: Harvard University students. Only later was the product’s greater potential apparent. Most successful software companies start out with a similar tight focus.What Problem are You Solving?
The key is to do things in the right order. A common mistake is to try focusing on an enormous target market with a wide range of interests, needs, and problems. There are millions and millions of software products out there now whose creators are just throwing stuff at the wall to see if it sticks. The better strategy is to make sure that your software is solving a known problem. That is, a problem that has been clearly identified as a pain point for someone. It should be a problem that is likely to occur for many organizations, and your market research should prove that indeed it does. Ideally, you’ll be the first to solve that problem. If you aren’t, then your software should do it significantly better than whoever’s already leading the market. Otherwise, no one will have any reason to switch.Who Has That Problem?
That brings us to the next point. To help your sales efforts, it’s a good idea to make sure that your target market operates in an industry that interests you and that you can relate to. Carl Mattiola points out why:Which industries do you believe in? Which ones would you love to help? Which ones would you be happy to talk to every. single. day. ??? You are gonna be in business with these people so you really have to love it. If you don’t you may get bored and self-sabotage any success you have.For a more practical take on this point, Phil Morettini has this to say:
Of course, it’s better to choose a market segment where you know the lay of the land and have some existing contacts–than not. Sometimes this can be a little-overblown, though. I’ve moved into many markets where I previously had no experience or contacts with great success. And in the software/tech business, things can change very quickly. If you aren’t open to recognizing change, that “existing market knowledge” might already be dated and that knowledge that gives you so much comfort can actually work against you. Imo, it’s usually far more important to have the ability to go into a market segment and size it up accurately and quickly, than it is to have actual experience there. But all things considered, assuming you don’t get over-confident in your market knowledge, having existing contacts and past experience in a market segment can be very helpful.
Accelerating Target Market Identification
Boom Demand considers this the first crucial step for all of our clients. If you don’t already know your market, we help you find it. Once it’sidentified, we help you reach out to potential clients fast with our sales development teams, SEO work on your online content, and other strategies that help you hit the ground running. Contact us today to start!
Software Sales Boosting Without Breaking the Bank
How to Grow Your Software Sales Without Breaking the Bank
Your B2B marketing efforts are key to making sure you find customers who need your software. Marketing has its costs, though, and like everything in business, there’s a risk of missing the target. How can you make sure that you reach your software sales goals without wasting your budget? The answer may be simpler than you’d expect.Nothing Sells Itself
There’s plenty of talk out there about the power of the freemium business model, where you offer just enough basic services for free to hook your prospect, while the most useful features wait behind a paywall. It’s been enormously successful for all kinds of SaaS companies, and it’s clear why. Some have gone so far as to say that these platforms sell themselves. It would be easy to get caught in a trap of thinking that business strategies like this could even eliminate the need for marketing, but that’s not so. It begs the question of how the users even found out about the free product in the first place.Information Distribution
The simple truth about all software sales is this: nobody knows about your product until you tell them about it. One way or another, you need marketing. Whether it’s by guest posting on a blog, traditional ad campaigns, social media outreach, or even old-fashioned cold calling with a modern twist, you have to sell your stuff. It’s important to figure out which of these methods will work best for your brand. Different products call for different approaches.Boom Demand Makes Software Sales Simple
All of those different approaches take time and money to implement, whatever way you slice it. You can’t get around that. What you can do, though, is avoid the high costs of doing it all in-house. Boom Demand’s nearshore and offshore resources make our clients’ software sales way easier than they expect. Our professional teams of trained Sales Development Representatives have the experience and the raw sales talent needed to get your name out where it counts: in your clients’ ears and in front of their eyes. By phone, email, and social media, we market your brand, your way. Contact us today to start saving money while growing sales faster than ever before!
Sales Development Reps Can Save Managers’ Careers
Top 5 Difficulties Sales Managers Face Every Day
Sales managers often find themselves in a tough situation. Executives expect a lot of them. They often don’t have the breathing room they need to specialize in their main role leading a sales team. We’ve learned how using a specialized team of sales development reps eases some of those burdens. Here are the top 5 problems sales managers face, and how SDRs can help them.5: Management Ability
Many new managers get thrown into the role because they were previously among the top performers in their sales team. Some sales directors and executives believe that this translates naturally into management ability, but that isn’t necessarily the case. Management is a different game from sales, requiring different skills. Developing those skills requires training at a minimum, and it’s helpful if the manager indeed has a natural aptitude for the job. This is one challenge that depends largely on the person who promotes the new manager into that position. They should use predictive and analytical tools to be sure that the person they’re considering for a management role is up to the task. Either way, once in that role, management training should be on the menu.4: Recruiting New Reps
Similarly to the question of raw ability, not all managers always make the best hiring decisions. A bad hire can torpedo the effectiveness of a sales team. An excellent way to minimize the risk of disastrous hiring decisions is to work with another company that comes with focused experience hiring sales development reps. If they’ve got the process down to a science, then you can focus more on getting the new reps up to speed on the product itself.3: Training Reps
Good sales managers should have a sales background so they know what the reps on their team face each day. They won’t necessarily be the best at sales themselves, though. Their role is to inspire, motivate, and lead; to help their team reach their goals. They may need help doing that. By working together with a team of outsourced sales development reps, a sales manager can let even more experienced sales professionals teach their team the best techniques. The manager can then focus on helping them learn the product and creating incentives for hitting targets.2: Consistency With Reps
Every sales representative is different, with different needs and expectations, and different styles. Part of the role of a sales manager is to work around those differences while enforcing uniform standards of quality and achievement among the whole team. Inconsistent or unequal requirements between reps breed resentment and all kinds of other problems. Working with an outsourced sales development firm gives managers the freedom to let their sales team specialize in deal closing. The in-house team worries far less about initial performance indicators. Meanwhile, SDRs do the cold calling and emailing, and refer interested prospects up the chain to account executives who used to do all of that work. The SDRs are managed differently than the in-house team, which works just fine for everyone.1: Building a Culture of Trust
The good sales manager’s paramount challenge is making sure that everyone on their team can trust them. That comes from providing useful coaching in the context of a clear vision.One of the challenges missed by many first time sales managers is to build a culture of high performance. They are focused on fixing many of the problems they inherited. While this is important, a focus on the desired culture is critical to building long term success. Personal leadership, vision and building trust are important. A sales manager can’t coach a salesperson who doesn’t trust him or her. The first time sales manager must fully understand the difference between being a leader and a manager and the various styles of leadership and management. — Ken Thoreson
Use Sales Development Reps to Turn Vision Into Reality
Boom Demand provides a powerful way for sales managers to scale their sales operations and reach their goals faster than ever before. We provide remote teams of Sales Development Reps, who we train and manage for you. Each rep has all the skills and tools they need to generate demand for your products and services immediately. Modern communications technology makes it easy for sales managers to integrate remote reps into their team and its culture. Contact us today to scale your sales team and leap right over the biggest pitfalls everyone else is dealing with.
Acquisition Cost for New Leads: What’s the Ideal?
What Does it Take to Get a Good Lead?
What’s funny about this question is that as we were researching it, we came across two different types of answers. Almost everyone who answered made a plug for their particular email marketing service, naturally. On Quora, Some individuals gave simple, direct answers with a range of prices to expect for your acquisition cost. Others tiptoed around it, offering long, drawn-out explanations of the process and the variables, and never seemed to get to the point. There’s actually a good reason for that, though.Every Industry is Different
The acquisition cost of a lead varies somewhat depending on the industry. In some contexts you can justify spending hundreds of dollars per lead. Of course, that only makes sense if the sales that happen at the end of the funnel are high enough. In other situations, spending more than one dollar per lead would be outrageous. What makes the difference, partially, is how you define the process. You can talk about just the cost of obtaining the lead information itself, or you can factor in all the costs associated with nurturing that lead as far as it wants to go through your sales funnel. Either way, you have to work with your sales and finance teams to determine what’s the right strategy for your company. There’s one factor that stands above all others, though.Quality is Waaaaaay More Important Than Cost
How you get your leads makes an enormous difference. Simply buying a list of email addresses and other contact info may be fast and cheap, but it can also put your brand at risk. Reaching out to leads that were not organically generated can often be perceived as spamming. The better way to get your leads is by generating genuine interest. This is done by creating valuable and engaging content, including some which is available exclusively to email list subscribers. When you get a lead who voluntarily provides their email address, you already have their attention. That dramatically increases the possibility of a future conversion and sale. Obtaining leads by building an email list organically may have a higher initial acquisition cost. That’s because of the content you need to generate. This process pays dividends further down the sales funnel though, with much better conversion rates than any purchased email list will ever get you, and a better brand reputation. At Boom Demand, we help our clients build organic email lists, create interesting and useful content, and scale their operations as fast as they need to. Contact us today to start building a powerful lead generation campaign!
Sales Leads: Finding and Identifying Potential Customers
Sales Leads: Finding and Identifying Potential Customers
Most business ideas involve selling a product or service that is helpful in some way. The question that turns an idea into a business is “for who?” Every company has to figure out who wants what they’re offering. That’s where sales leads come into play.What is a Sales Lead?
Any company that depends solely on people finding them physically and walking into their office is going to fold fast. Whether it’s a physical product or an intangible service you’re offering, you need to be proactive in one way or another. You do that first by identifying the kinds of people who are most likely to need (and therefore want) your product. Sales leads are the information that allows you to contact those potential customers and turn them into prospects. They are data that include names and contact information, which you can use for outreach via email, phone calls, personal visits, and traditional mail. They also help to target broad advertising campaigns in regions where many of them are concentrated. Every sales lead corresponds to an actual person or company who could possibly become a paying customer in the future.How do Companies Get Leads?
Sometimes, it’s possible to purchase a huge list of sales leads just ready to call. That strategy can be fast, but expensive, or you just have to be lucky. If you find yourself in the position of needing to generate your own leads, there are several powerful strategies you can reliably use and find success. Boomdemand uses all of these methods to help our own clients generate more and better leads:- Use social media platforms like LinkedIn to connect with other professionals in your market.
- Attend or organize events, both for networking and for experiential demand generation targeted towards potential customers.
- Create useful and educational online content such as blog posts, downloadable eBooks and white papers. Make sure potential customers can find your content through good SEO practices.
- Create an email sequence that keeps new prospects engaged, and build up email subscription lists.
Top 3 Growing Pains Companies Must Power Through
Every company that survives the transition from startup to major player goes through an awkward stage. Like any teenager, they experience growing pains as they adapt to the new conditions and needs associated with maturity. There are three such challenges that can be crucial to making it through this period intact.
1: Finding Enough Time
In the beginning, employees at a startup may find themselves working on a wider variety of projects. Everything needs to be done, and it doesn’t matter as much who’s doing it, as long as it gets done. As the company grows, and as sales increase, the responsibilities get heavier and heavier. At some point, employees may find themselves with way too much to handle. New coworkers have to be hired to take on some of the added burdens. Hiring is a project on its own, though, so it can also add to the burdens placed on current workers if not done carefully. New hires should always make someone else’s burdens lighter.2: Developing Organizational Clarity
Once a company does have the employees it needs, they need to know who they’re responsible to. In the beginning, the small startup team often works collaboratively and directly with the founders. The bigger the team gets, of course, the less practical this becomes. It always becomes necessary at some point to implement interdependent but defined teams headed by middle- and senior-level managers. These in turn report to the company directors and executives. When to do this is a strategic question for each individual company. Doing it too soon can lead to micromanagement and top-heaviness, and if too late, an organization that spins out of control. In other words, even sharper growing pains.3: Implementing a Precise Strategy
What is your company aiming for, and how is it going to get there? In the beginning, this question is less important. A startup may quickly find that its initial approach was flawed, or that there are more opportunities in a different target market. A small, young organization can pivot on-the-fly to respond to those changes. A bigger company can’t move so nimbly, as MailChimp once discovered. They should already have a very clear idea about who their customers are. In order for a bigger team to focus and achieve their individual and departmental goals, then, they should know what the company’s overall purpose, goals, and plans are. BoomDemand sees these growing pains all the time. What we do about them, though, is make it substantially easier for our clients to scale up. We help them build dedicated and focused teams while keeping costs down. Through memorable experiences, we give them the strategic boost that attracts new customers and helps employees know how to serve them. Contact us today to cut the pain out of your growth strategy!
