Tag Archives: league table

4 Tips for Effective Pre-Call Sales Planning

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Stymied about what to say when you contact a prospect?

It’s especially tough if you feel like you don’t know enough about their organization to craft a relevant message. Recently, Katrina wrote to me about her frustration with pre-call sales planning:

“In your books, you talk about the importance of doing research prior to contacting a prospect. I’m having a hard time with that. I sell to marketing departments. But since companies don’t share that information publicly, it’s really tough to find out what issues they have. What should I do?”

She’s right. It’s virtually impossible to find that kind of information online. Companies don’t want to have their problems exposed to the public unless absolutely necessary.

4 Tips for Pre-Call Sales Planning

If you consistently sell to the same decision makers, make assumptions. Assume that they have similar objectives and face similar challenges as your existing clients. For example, most marketers today are under intense pressure to bring in more high quality leads or to justify their marketing spend. My Buyer’s Matrix is an excellent tool to help you outline the challenges your prospect is facing. (Click here to download it for free.)

If you typically sell to certain industries, immerse yourself in them. Join their associations, attend their meetings, get their newsletters and dig into their websites. Another great resource for learning more is via LinkedIn groups. You’ll find groups focused on certain industries as well as job positions. Personally, I belong to groups for VP’s of Sales just so I can keep up-to-date.

Prep some questions ahead of time to ensure you learn what’s top-of-mind for your prospect. Use your assumptions and what you’ve learned in your immersion as a starting point. When you actually meet with prospects you’ll want to find out their perspectives on these important topics.

Don’t be afraid of not knowing everything. No one expects it. They just want you to be knowledgeable and show you’ve done your homework.

 

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If Winning Isn’t Everything, Then What Is?

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Topping the leaderboard. Being first to complete a mission. Earning the most points. Much of the current talk around enterprise gamification understandably focuses on competition and status as the primary human drivers of an effective gamified experience inside corporations.

But new data suggests it may be time to start challenging that notion.

Yes, it’s true that a desire for mastery and tangible rewards are key human motivators. These drivers grab the brain’s attention, focus its energies and inspire repeat performance. And this effect absolutely can be amplified when employees are able to compare their performance to others and compete within the same experience.

The question is: are these the most important behavioral drivers? Not so much, according to new research by The Maritz Institute:

In a recent U.S.-based employee study, we found that the most engaged employees work for companies they perceive to value “self-expression” in the form of self-direction, stimulation, and universalism. Yet, this constituted only 21% of the organizations. The least engaged employees work for companies they perceive to value “self-enhancement” in the form of achievement, power, and conformity. This constituted 60% of the organizations.

These insights are reinforced by the findings of the World Values Survey. It shows that as more workers are lifted out of poverty and the world becomes an increasingly connected place, values globally are shifting away from material gain and toward self-expression. Business that want to succeed in the new normal should be paying close attention to this trend.

So, what does this mean for your employee engagement strategy? One guide might be The Maritz Institute’s re-imagining of Maslow’s well accepted, but (IMHO) slightly tired, Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. In their revised model, the desire for self-expression sits on high, trumping the desires for material success and basic security. This says to me that while generalized competition and rewards can be part of effective engagement design, an exceptional gamified experience will focus even more on the top of the pyramid, where personal meaning, collaboration and trust-building within the organization are the most critical drivers.

This can show up in your engagement design in three key ways:

Personalized Missions – One-size-fits all really means challenges that fit no one. Recognize that you have noobs and experts, thinkers and doers, and that your sales people and your IT team have different needs and values. Creating missions that are personally meaningful to them and their work will have a far greater impact than asking everyone to do the same thing.

Group Challenges – Collective action is a significant part of the global shift toward self-expression. Be sure you can create challenges that require the effort of every member of a team to complete, or which encourage different parts of the company to form spontaneous teams working together in order to level up. And if you still want competition in the mix, encourage competition between teams while your encouraging collaboration within them.

Choice – The human brain uses iterative processing cycles and feedback loops to explore options and make choices that match personal values. This means we attach more strongly to that which we choose, vs. that which is dictated to us. You’ll see more engagement when you offer employees a variety of challenges, mission types and rewards to select from, letting them be masters of their own destiny inside of a structured gamified experience.

Gamification is a proven tool for driving higher levels of engagement, but it’s a tool that will be most effective when applied with an understanding of the differing and shifting values of your employees. Simply put, figure out what winning really means to them and engagement will follow. Just don’t assume it always means topping the leaderboard

 

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5 Reasons to Apply Gamification to Your Sales Team

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don’t even like to call it a buzzword, because the idea of sales gamification is really grabbing hold. Where? See some examples of making it work are out there, like this, and this, and oh yeah that.   So how do you know if you could benefit from using gamification within your own sales team? Will it really make an impact, or just drive a short-term spike? Below are 5 reasons your sales organization may benefit from gamification:

1. Your Salespeople Are Competitive Beasts

Gamification helps you tap into the competitive nature of your salespeople by creating competition around the behaviors you need to motivate. Salespeople are often checking out the company sales reports to see where they stand relative to quota, and relative to their peers. That’s one of the main reasons you created sales dashboards in the first place – to provide visibility and keep people motivated. By applying gamification concepts within Salesforce.com, you can build competitions around just about any behavior you want. Just pick the activity you want to drive, and create a competition around it. The data is in your CRM, now you can reward people for it.

2. There’s Always Some Key Initiative

There are always times throughout the year that you need to drive specific activity from the sales team. Your base compensation plan should keep people motivated to sell and hit their goals. However, there is always some other specific behavior you are trying to get your team focused on. Maybe it’s taking a new product to market, making a few extra phone calls this week, following up on trade show leads more quickly, or booking more meetings. Your comp plan is focused on closing, but you can use gamification to point people toward some specific activity you need to motivate.

3. Your Sales Pipeline Has Inaccurate Data

Do your salespeople keep their opportunities updated? This is one of the biggest struggles for sales managers – having a solid view of the sales pipeline. Salespeople tend to do one of two things: Put opportunities into the system and then never update them until the deal is won or lost, or put opportunities in at late stages only before the deal is about to close. Both scenarios result in an inaccurate view of your business that you can’t take action on. So apply a little gamification to it – every time someone updates the close date or sales stage, give them a point. Every point is an entry to win, or whoever has the most points at the end of the month wins.

4. You Want to Drive Collaboration

Today’s sales organizations are more separated than ever before with folks working from home offices, or huddled behind their desks living in social media. By creating competitions around a key initiative, you rally everyone together around some specific objective. Everyone on the team can see a real time leaderboard on where they stand and how others are doing. This motivates people to want to learn from their peers to see what they are doing differently, and gives you a reason to talk about it in team meetings and one-on-one sessions.

5. To Make Your CRM More Interesting

All CRM systems could use a little creative boost. Applying gamification ideas keeps people inside of Salesforce.com. Since the competition is all tracked based on data in Salesforce, the sales team becomes motivated to keep their data updated and can be regularly reviewing the leaderboards and status updates on the competition.

The benefits of gamification will be unique to the environment and goals of each company. Have you applied gamification ideas to your own sales organization? What have you seen work?

 

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