Almost a year to the date, I posted a blog called Dumbing it Down: 5 Secrets for Getting Smart People to Buy. It was one of our most popular posts breaking the 100 tweet barrier. That post, along with the one you’re reading now, is aimed at complex sales. The characteristics of a complex sale are typically wider and deeper business challenges that require longer sales-cycles and result in larger average deal sizes.

Complex sales are to be contrasted with transactional sales where decisions are made in minutes or days rather than in months or longer. Buyers often need help understanding available options for solving their business challenges as well as what they should consider when talking with potential solution providers. They don’t wake up one day and say, “I know the exact extent of my challenges, who I should talk with, and what I need to know in order to solve them.”

Because they lack this insight, it’s natural to want to start slowly. They will likely start by searching the web for informative content and by attending conferences. They may form a committee or ask colleagues and business associates for input and advice. At some point, however, they will make a decision to contact a solution provider and have an actual conversation with a salesperson. Whatever it was that led them to engage with you you can be sure of one thing: they will turn on their heels and run the other way with the slightest provocation.

Are you unwittingly provoking buyers to look elsewhere (or to give up altogether)? You are indeed, if you haven’t considered these four reasons why dumbing it down is the smartest way to sell to buyers.

1. Complexity = Risk
   B2B buyers are smart people, especially within the framework of their roles and responsibilities. That framework is the lens from which they will view all information. They know and care about their business not yours. They don’t care to know everything you know about your solutions.  They want to know how you can help them with their business problems. Taking them outside their interest (or comfort) zone will be a disservice to both you and the buyer. Too much information often adds deal-killing complexity. Complexity adds uncertainty and uncertainty equals risk in the minds of – oh, just about anyone.  You don’t need to dumb it down because of a buyer’s lack of intelligence. You need to dumb it down because buyers are risk-averse. Gauge the buyer’s ability and patience for assimilating information being careful not to introduce too much information or too quickly.
2. Change = Fear
   In order to make a decision to buy something, people need to be willing and prepared to embrace change. Change is certainly required for a buyer to solve existing problems and to implement new technology or processes. No one likes to be pushed into making a change, however. The best way for you to reach them effectively is to help the prospect self-discover. You can participate in that self-discovery step by carefully-crafted step, by asking a series of ‘phase-specific’ questions. People learn by answering questions that get them to think for themselves—much more than when they’re told something. If buyers themselves create the mental transformation from problem to solution (with strategic ‘cues’ offered by you at the right moment) the change process will unfold naturally and therefore with less trepidation. Don’t tell buyers what they need to know. Help them discover it.
3. Analysis = Paralysis
   Rational analysis requires time and energy. When people consider how to dove-tail solutions with complex problems, their rational side takes over to process the data. Rationality requires focused analysis which requires an abundance of both time and energy. The key is to simplify the buying process so that your prospect’s “buying stamina” never starts running on fumes or worse yet, flames out altogether. When that happens, your buyer has fallen into a black-hole of inertia. It is very difficult to ignite interest momentum once a buyer’s stamina is spent. When it’s gone, it’s typically gone. Recognize that buyers have a limited supply of energy and do what you can to help them reach a decision before it dies.
4. One Big Step = lots of little steps
   Big changes come from a succession of smaller, more easily enacted changes. Asking buyers to focus on the end-goal may be too overwhelming. It’s important to focus on ‘next-goals’ because it’s the totality of an endeavor that often short-circuits a buyer’s ability to envision reaching their end-objective. You risk a deal when you make buyers focus on making a decision at the expense of taking a next step. Be warned however, that the buyer putting one foot forward won’t automatically result in them picking up and placing the alternate foot forward. Each step needs to be earned. It helps if you have diagrammed a road-map of the steps to take and in what order. No one likes to walk with a blindfold on. Make sure your buyers know what the typical path is and instill confidence that you’ve made the trek successfully with others in their shoes.

These are reasons why you should dumb it down. For ideas on how to dumb it down, you’ll want to refer to the original post. In the end, it really all boils down to this. Don’t scare buyers away with too much information that they can’t yet process or will never need to process. Recognize that change induces discomfort and vow not to feed into that. Time kills deals and considered thought based on rational analysis of a complex problem is nothing if it isn’t time-consuming. And finally, don’t expect your buyer to enthusiastically accompany you on your long trek to a sale without understanding what to expect along the way.

I recommend considering each of these four areas, how they relate to your sales cycle, and specific ways to dumb it down so your buyers don’t go running for the hills.  I’m not professing it will be easy to do. But it is the smart thing to do.

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Tool Talk blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.

In February, I posted the first of a 2-part Sales Leaders’ pledge. I’m creating this pledge as much for my benefit as I am for yours. You see like you, I’m not immune to the centrifugal force caused by the dizzying array of ailments that plague our profession.

Determined as we all may be, it is rare to NOT fall short of the lofty goals we set for ourselves and our organizations. It’s not sales goals or quotas I’m referring to (although a CSO study revealed that 37% of reps did not hit their plan last year — so we are falling short on those as well.) I’m referring to our convictions and intentions for improving upon the status-quo in order to radically increase revenue. I’m talking about making what seems like the impossible, possible.

In part-one, I outlined the first five challenges of which our profession has long suffered. I wrote them in the form of a pledge to take and commit to wholeheartedly. In this issue, I’ve outlined the last half of the top ten pledges. Will you join me?

Repeat after me…

1. CRM is not a productivity tool
   I recognize that we may be one of the 50% of organizations with a failing CRM system. I pledge to learn why it’s not working and fix it. CRM should help salespeople sell more — either by helping them to get more done in less time, or by helping them to spend their time more wisely and effectively. If it isn’t doing either, I will find something that does.
   I will honor salespeoples’ complaints about CRM and learn what’s needed to actually help them sell more. ______ (initial)
2. Forecasting has got to change
   Multiplying opportunity amounts by a deal-stage percentage in order to calculate total forecasts makes no sense and I will no longer pretend that it does. Opportunities shouldn’t make it onto the forecast unless we can answer positively to three questions: will the deal close at all, will it happen this month (or quarter), and will we be the\r?
   I will be brave and take a stand on outdated forecast methodology. ______ (initial)
3. Time-Use Matters
   In order to accelerate revenue growth, I will shine a bright light on how salespeople spend their time. I’ll analyze what they’re doing when they aren’t talking with a prospect and then determine which of those tasks can be delegated, which can be made easier and thus faster, and which can be eliminated altogether.
   I will figure out how salespeople can spend more time talking with quality prospects. ______ (initial)
4. Mobility changes the game
   The times, they are a changing. Mobile technologies like smart phones and tablets should be deployed so salespeople can; be more responsive to clients, present information in a more interactive manner, engage with prospects in a personable and collaborative way, have any needed information at their fingertips, and enter and log call reports and customer interactions faster.
   I will no longer ask salespeople to deal with log-in connections and laborious laptop boot-ups when what they need is fast, always-on access to content and the ability to quickly collaborate with clients and colleagues. ______ (initial)
5. Social is Personal
   I know that salespeople have an opportunity to engage on a much more personable and relevant level. I recognize that buyers expect our salespeople to know something about why we’re calling and to provide relevant ideas on how we can help.
   I will make sure salespeople have knowledge of the right verbal and written content to build trusted relationships. ______ (initial)

None of the challenges I’ve mentioned in this two-part pledge are easy to address. As is the case with other long-lived challenges, the key to solving them is to focus with a fierce resolve. It will be easy to get distracted. It will be tempting to give up. It will take guts. During the process, however, you will learn a great deal about yourself and your ability to pioneer deep changes that make a difference for your company and for you professionally. What will you do? Will you take the oath?

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Tool Talk blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.

There’s something watching our every move. It casts a dark, deceptive and often destructive shadow upon each and every salesperson as they go about their day. It threatens to wreak havoc in the most insidious and unexpected ways. It is the perfect ally to have on your side, but it often stands as a formidable and unforgiving adversary. It cannot be bought or owned, yet it is yours to use as you like.

 As you may have guessed, I’m talking about the most scarce resource of all – ‘time’.

Obviously, if you had more time you could talk with more prospects or better prepare for your calls or presentations. More time would make it possible to set more goals and put more check-marks in the ‘done’ column. Time is the enemy however, when it comes to creating opportunities and closing deals in the pipeline. That’s because time is a deal killer. This is the one factor you can’t afford to ignore.  In general, the longer it takes for a party to sign-off on your paperwork or proposal, the more chance there is of the deal ‘going south.’ Time flying by gives rise to many potential deal-killing events:

• Prospects’ priorities change
• Budgets get down-sized or eliminated
• Decision-makers change roles, or jobs
• Doubts or reservations set in, the competition seizes the opportunity
• Prospects lose focus (on your products or solutions and the value they bring)

The imperative is to generate more time for some things (creating more opportunities) while reducing or eliminating the time spent on others (chasing paperwork to close deals).

Boost the Time Available for Creating Opportunities

The ability to create net-new time defies all laws of the natural world. It just isn’t possible. On the other hand, it is possible to free-up time by becoming far more efficient, thereby accomplishing or producing more in the same amount of time. Here are 3 tricks and tips for improving efficiency when it comes to creating opportunities:

1. Use tools: Tools like Social Selling and Marketing Automation (to name just two) can increase the likelihood of contacting the right people at the right time—when they have the highest propensity to buy.
2. Evaluate your processes: Identify which tasks in your workflow consistently slow you down and which can be eliminated. For instance, eSignatures can eliminate up to 10 steps in the signing process reducing the time it takes to obtain a signed contract from weeks to hours.
3. Eliminate and delegate: Don’t contact prospects that will never buy. If your solution isn’t applicable to companies under a certain size, don’t call them! If you don’t know the company size of each prospect on your list (in this example), delegate the task of finding out.

Time vs momentum

“Went radio-silent.”
“Fell off the radar.”
“Disappeared into thin air.”

If you say similar things to describe a prospect, it’s a pretty good sign that the deal is either losing momentum, or has vaporized altogether (and you didn’t get the memo). The more time that passes—especially given every prospect’s ultra-busy agenda—the more the deal-momentum is at risk of slowing to the point that your prospect forgets why they were interested to begin with. To protect against that happening, here are 3 pointers for slashing the time it takes to close deals:

1. Implement intelligent persistence: Know where your contracts are in the signing process and stay on top of each step with confidence.
2. Eliminate barriers: Every deal will have bumps in the road-to-closing. Make sure you’ve foreseen and eliminated any and every bump that can be reasonably anticipated.
3. Provide Ammunition: Anticipate uncertainties and doubts your prospect may face from colleagues and decision influencers. Give them the ammunition they’ll need to address each one.

No matter how intensely interested your prospect professes to be and no matter how far down the sales process they have endeavored to go, every opportunity is at risk of falling victim to time. Manage every deal in your pipeline as if an invisible force was plotting to turn it into stone. Remember, time isn’t a friend or a  foe. It’s both all at once.

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Tool Talk blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.

At Smart Selling Tools, our goal is to make it easy to find tools that will improve sales productivity. Plain and simple – except we know that for most sales leaders and business owners it’s in fact, very complex. That’s because you’re either running the business or the revenue engine, and you have little time (or patience) to catch up on the latest technology.

Even if you are interested (which, come on, you know you are), there are so many sales tools – including more than a hundred CRM systems – that it’s enough to drive a smart person crazy. That’s why I’m excited to announce the launch of our new sister site, The Sales Productivity University.

This new eLearning site is a place where you can take short-courses to learn about different types of sales tools. Our goal is to keep it simple, and to stay away from industry jargon that over-complicates things.

Ease any inferiority complex you may be feeling about sales tools and cut through the hype. At Sales Productivity University, you’ll complete your course in 20 minutes or less.

It’s free to register and it’s free to take the courses.  You’ll have all the knowledge you need so you can decide with confidence, which tools will be useful to you or your organization.

Look, every week I hear from dozens of people that feel overwhelmed and under-prepared when it comes to sales tools. They feel they’re behind in the game when it comes to understanding what’s ‘out there’ and what they should consider. It shouldn’t be so complicated. That’s what Sales Productivity U is all about. Our first course is on eSignatures. It’s a great place to start. Try it out and let me know what you think. Follow us on Twitter @SalesProUniv for the latest on course curriculum and daily updates.

I just returned from attending DemandCon in San Francisco. DemandCon’s purpose is to offer education and insight into the art of aligning and accelerating the sales and marketing funnel.

Unfortunately, I was only able to attend the first of the two-day event. I say ‘unfortunately’ because it turned out to be a great networking opportunity. But most importantly, it proved to have a number of really great speakers along with relevant and interesting topics.

In case you missed the event, I’ve jotted down my key take-aways from three of the most compelling sessions.

Umberto Milletti, CEO of InsideView spoke of better lead conversion through ‘enrichment.’ He was referring to the importance of relevant knowledge about your prospects and buyers.

Most interesting stat: 92% of prospects NEVER respond to a cold call or email. Why don’t they? Engaging a prospect in a quality conversation requires that you have something of interest to offer and most salespeople don’t. I’m not saying they don’t have an interesting product or service. I’m saying they don’t have interesting knowledge, insight, or relevancy to offer. Those are the 3 kings that will influence your prospect to engage. On a relevant side-note, be sure to attend the upcoming webinar I’m moderating on April 24th “Be More Interesting: Get More Sales.”

Most interesting quote:  (the 92% stat) means most salespeople are competing for business among the 8% of prospects that will reply. This comment is what I found most interesting because it drives home a point that would otherwise go unnoticed. Do you really want to slug it out with competitors for the attention of 8% of your prospects? Are the 8% of prospects that do respond even the right people to talk with? I think he made his point that there has to be a better, more effective way to get prospects attention so the 8% figure becomes much higher. What if you could get 20 or 30% of prospects to talk with you? This could make an obvious difference in sales productivity. This is exactly what they aim to help their clients do with their Sales Intelligence and Customer intelligence products.

Meagen Eisenberg, VP of Demand Generation at DocuSign described how she accelerates the pipeline with a content marketing and lead nurturing system. She was generous enough to share how she maps content to each stage in the buying cycle and what the leadflow looks like.

Most interesting stat: Every day, 50,000 new, unique users sign up for Docusign’s esignature solution (27million users to-date).

Most interesting quote: It’s not just about email analytics (number of opens, click-throughs, etc.) It’s about whether or not the end goal of the content/nurturing program was achieved (did you shorten the cycle and did you influence opportunities that lead to deals). You do have an end-goal defined, right?

Atri Chatterjee, CMO of Act-On Software took us through the 7 Habits of Highly Effective Marketers.  The Information derived was from a Forester Research Study of 208 small and mid-sized companies done on their behalf .

Most interesting stat: When asked how they performed against revenue plans over the last 12 months, 44% were below plan while 56% were above plan.

Most interesting quote: Companies are spread thin as evidenced by the fact that over 50% said they used more than 13 different marketing techniques. Perhaps most surprising is that the top 5 marketing tactics were traditional (trade-show events, print ads, etc). Even so, the study found that nearly 3 out of 4 marketing automation users enjoyed ‘top performer’ status . That’s telling.

Conferences like DemandCon are where you go to learn what the best of the best are doing. It’s a place to get ideas and to feed your own thought process. When you return back to your daily routines, be warned that it will be easier to sweep  the new ideas to the side or to file them away in your mind then it will be to figure out how you can apply them to your organization (that’s the hard part). Pledge instead, to explore one or more ideas immediately. Assign someone in your staff to conduct further research. If you don’t have the staff, then pencil the more compelling ideas into your demand generation strategy. Where do they fit? Which are the more obvious fits? Which would be easiest to test? It’s not enough to have the new insight. Figure out what you can DO today with the insight you’ve gained and what steps you can take immediately to put the insight into play.

The title of my post is a play on one of the most famous advertising headlines of all time. John Caples, was a fledgling copywriter in 1926 when he wrote a headline for Ruthrauff & Ryana on behalf of  the U.S. School of Music. Caples ad, “They Laughed When I Sat Down at the Piano” became known as the 20th century’s most successful,  mail-order copy because of it’s stunning results.

The goal of the ad was to capture interest and gain attention so that the entire sales copy would be read and then acted upon. Interest and Attention are pre-requisites of any sale of course. That’s easy to understand. The hard part to understand–especially back then–is that the only way to capture interest and attention is TO BE INTERESTING!

Tell a story

So why was Mr. Caples copy so interesting?  Instead of focusing on features and benefits, Caples introduced us to Jack, a budding pianist who was taunted by a fellow pianist then booed by the crowd before he eventually silenced everyone with his masterful music.

Caples told a story we could all relate to. When we read that Jack silenced his skeptical audience with his skillfully played “Moonlight Sonata,” we applauded. Stories are powerful. They help us to understand, relate, remember and believe.

The ad didn’t talk about the U.S. School of Music, neither did it proclaim the superiority of the music correspondence course it offered. It told the story of Jack who gleefully shouted, “Before I knew it, I was playing all the pieces I liked best. Nothing stopped me. I could play ballads or classical numbers or jazz, all with equal ease! And I never did have any special talent for music!” Even though Jack is a fictional character, we could see ourselves in him and believed we could accomplish the same thing.

Although a lot has changed in the world of sales and marketing since 1926, much has remained constant (if not all too often over-looked). Stories have the power to move people to action. Today, story telling is but one tried-and-true technique that sellers and marketers can use to be interesting and induce action.

Be More Interesting, Get More Sales!

Be more interesting and get more sales is the title of an upcoming webinar that I’m moderating on April 24th, and you’re invited!

I’ll be joined by three of the most interesting women in sales for an hour-long, highly interactive webinar; Trish Bertuzzi of The Bridge Group, Inc., Lori Richardson of Score More Sales, and Barb Giamanco of Social Centered Selling. We’ll tell stories about the technique that got one seller a meeting with Ken Chenault, the CEO of American Express. Perhaps you’ll also be interested in how one sales leader discovered that her prospect liked the same music she did and what she did to capture his attention.

The key to being interesting is to find interesting approaches. We’ll share an example of how a sales leader connected her prospect to a speaking opportunity and what happened as a result, and how one of us grew her business through the roof by messaging CEOs about what she learned about them on social channels.

You can break through the noise and engage with prospects previously unavailable to you. You just need to know a few secret techniques and come up with your own unique approaches.

Shock your boss, your colleagues, loved-ones, and the world! Get those impossible-to-get appointments and close deals you never thought possible.  Register now for the free webinar.

Sellers have only 8 hours a day, 215 (selling) days a year. Time is a finite commodity. We can’t get more of it. The ONLY thing we can do is make better use of our time. For salespeople, the best use of time is to spend it talking with a quality prospect. A novice might ask, “Why don’t salespeople spend all their time with prospects?” You, however, know that it’s not that simple.

Along with the disappointing reality that there aren’t enough known prospects to occupy 100% of our reps’ time, there are two simple contributing factors:

1. A long chain of to-dos is unfurled with each prospect conversation. Unless the prospect says, “Holy-smokes! This is awesome, how can I get started?” Salespeople have to actually ‘sell’. At its basic level, selling is nothing more than performing the right combination of tasks to convert the prospect’s interest into a bona fide opportunity and to win the business.
2. Salespeople do other things besides sell. They perform other tasks we impose on them as well, like expense reports, product training and internal meetings.

Indeed, reps have to be masters at balancing their activities in a way that maximizes their revenue. As managers, the only way to know whether reps are on target with time and task management is to check whether they’re on target with percentage of quota. We rely on quota attainment to indicate whether reps are spending enough time with prospects and whether they’re doing enough of the right activities when they aren’t talking with prospects, to move deals through their pipeline.

Measuring Quota attainment percentage and other key performance indicators (KPIs) is important. But here’s the problem with KPIs: they don’t tell you whether reps could be selling more and what’s preventing that from happening. The only way to know whether reps could be selling more is to fully understand how their time is being used.

Think about how much time is spent on each of the following activities and what the implications are to productivity. Remember, it’s not just the minutes lost to each task that harms productivity—and ultimately—revenue. It’s also the frequent task-jumping distractions that sap focus and momentum.

Consider how much time your reps spend on the following activities and ask yourself whether they could be selling more, not by getting better, but by getting faster.

You can increase your sales by 28.5% simply by trimming 3.5 hours of time each week from the above tasks, if you devote that time instead to prospect conversations. The tasks outlined above, are essential to selling. They can’t be eliminated. However, they can be done more efficiently. The first step is to understand how time is used across the various sales tasks. Only then can you discover where there are opportunities for shortening the process for each task.

Technology Footnote: Tools that are particularly appropriate and relevant to this post are: iQuoteXpress, Front-Row Solutions, SalesDataPro, DiscoverOrg, Gorilla Expense, and VanillaSoft.

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Sales Productivity blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.

 I’ve been a long-time fan of Chip and Dan Heath, authors of the books “Made to Stick” and “Switch.” The subjects of both books are decidedly applicable to the field of Sales and Marketing. Made to Stick explores why some ideas thrive while others die. Switch explores the reasons why it’s so hard to make lasting changes in our companies and private lives. As I read both books, I asked myself what they tell us about how and what our prospects go through when they make decisions (either to believe in an idea, or to make a change). Interestingly enough, the topic of decision-making is one the Heath brothers chose to tackle in their new book.

Decisive (available March 26), asks and answers the questions: How do people make choices and how can we make better choices. Research confirms that decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities. No one understands this better than a Sales Professional. After-all, why wouldn’t everyone buy your products and services once you explained the rational for purchasing?

While Decisive is designed to help readers understand and improve on their own decision-making, I challenge you to make the translation into what you as a seller can do to help your prospects be decisive. Often buyers will get stuck in their heads when it comes to making decisions (any one ever have a deal stall?).

In Decisive, the Heaths analyze the four biggest decision biases and introduce a four-step process designed to counteract them;

1. Widen your options beyond ‘This OR That’
2. Reality-test against confirmation bias
3. Attain distance to overcome short-term emotion
4. Prepare to be wrong to avoid overconfidence

When asked to make a decision, buyers will often get trapped by their own decision biases and we’re partly to blame. Consider asking a prospect to buy your product, in this example, an expense reporting tool. You are pitching an either-or-proposition. Either buy an expense reporting tool, or keep doing things the way you are today, manually. We are narrowing their options to just two; do things a new way or keep doing things the current way.

The two options represent a big chasm for our prospect to jump across. What if instead, we helped prospects widen their options? Think how you can expand the decision options so prospects don’t feel pressured to pick from two extremes. What if, for instance, you suggested to prospects that they simply change one small aspect of their expense reporting as an experiment? Prospects can test how receptive their people are, the degree of difficulty of asking (and getting) people to change their habits, and the outcomes of making such a change.

In Decisive, the Heaths would consider this approach “ooching.”

To “ooch” is to construct small experiments to test one’s hypothesis. As the authors explained, the expression was new to them, but apparently it’s not new or uncommon in parts of the South. As the vendor of an expense reporting system, an obvious ooch would be to offer prospects a free product that lets their people take photos of receipts with their smart phones. You’re not asking the buyer for a decision on your expense reporting solution. You’re expanding their options with something in the middle. This middle option (between status quo and a purchase) is to eliminate the hassles of stuffing receipts into wallets and brief-cases only to have to sort through and make sense of them later. That small experiment will allow the prospect to test the receptiveness to changing the way expenses are reported.

When you ask a prospect to ooch, you help them bring real-world experience into their decision-making. You don’t ask them to predict whether a particular option will be right for them (This OR That). You give them a simple way to test it out. Ooching is different from trial-ing. Asking a prospect to trial your software is much like asking for a decision to buy. Either way, you’re asking them to invest their time, effort, and money. Even though no money is exchanged in a trial, the ‘money’ element is still present in the mind of the buyer. After-all, they know that if they trial something, they need to be willing to buy it. A prospect may not know yet, whether they’d be willing to buy it. That’s where ooching helps.

I’m sure that there are many ways that ooching can come into play in our marketing and sales strategies. And the application of ooching in my example may not be what the Heaths had in mind. You’ll want to buy the book and think through it for yourself. The point is that there are plenty of opportunities for applying the many approaches you’ll learn about in “Decisive” to our field of B2B Sales and Marketing.

Selling in today’s world involves more than relaying value to your buyer. You must act as the catalyst to help the buyer make a decision. That means you need to know how people make decisions and the mistakes they (and we all) make in the process. You goal is not to sell some one something. Your goal is to help your prospect be “Decisive.”

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Tool Talk blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.

If all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail. Our decisions are colored by the history and experiences that shape our perspective. So it’s not surprising that each time I talk with my friends on the sales training front, they tell me that the path to increasing sales is to improve selling skills. Of course, my retort is that you won’t increase sales if you don’t have the right tools to compete more efficiently and effectively.

They would ask, “What good is a prospect research tool if reps don’t know how to get a decision maker to engage?” I would ask, “What good is it to know how to engage a decision maker if you don’t have the tools to quickly learn who the decision maker is?”

A sales rep may know how to use the proverbial hammer (the right skill) but they’ll never be truly effective or efficient if they’re using a rock instead of a hammer (the right tool) to pound the nail.

We shouldn’t be asking ourselves which is more important, skill-sets or tool-sets. Knowing and becoming adept at the right skills and making use of the most appropriate and effective tools are, I would say, on equal par.

Like pairing wine with food, skill-sets and tool-sets should be combined to deliver peak outcomes. How so? In the table that follows, I’ll take a look at the sales skills—both hard and soft—needed to overcome issues, and which tools they can be paired with to provide the best boost in sales outcomes. Hard skills include such things as effective cold-calling, presentation skills, overcoming objections, skillful questioning, getting past the gate-keeper, negotiation skills, how to sell value, qualifying prospects, and closing techniques. Soft skills involve emotional intelligence and include such things as empathy, interpersonal skills, assertiveness, impulse control, and problem solving.

These are just a few examples of how sales skill-sets and sales tool-sets line-up. Next time you’re considering the cause of a particular sales issue, don’t stop with skills improvement. If you want to hit the nail on the head, it’s not enough to know how to use a hammer. You have to have a hammer.

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Tool Talk blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.

Content was anointed King the minute buyers started using the Internet to search for products and services. Marketers prove their allegiance to the new ruler because of its power as a market-awareness and lead generation tool. No doubt, we use content to acquire, grow, and maintain the prospect’s attention for the purpose of populating and perpetuating the pipeline.

Content marketing, as the practice is called, is a semi-automated mechanism that gives organizations the ability to extend their sales-reach—to keep in touch (i.e. network, email, tweet, or just plain interact) with more prospects than ever before. The principle involves automating the ‘task’ of staying in touch (and relevant) with prospects that aren’t yet ‘sales-ready.’ Content-marketing helps to develop, maintain and move relationships forward until they are primed for a conversation with a sales rep. That’s what people mean when they talk about lead nurturing.

Content-marketing is lead development. It is not selling however. You need salespeople to sell. And salespeople need their own content designed to support their selling process. They need content they can use to communicate with prospects through email. They need content appropriate for use on social networking platforms like LinkedIn. They need content for sales call follow-up and for leaving voice-mail messages. They need customized presentations in various formats. And, they need content that makes their proposals stand out from the competition’s.

In short, they need content to convert opportunities into deals. Let’s call this ‘Content-Selling.’ The need for content selling is particularly evident in complex B2B sales where sales cycles are longer and decisions are rarely made by one person. Long sales cycles consist of long stretches of follow-up and information-sharing, intermixed with relatively fewer occurrences of live conversations.   In other words, a large percentage of a rep’s communication is done through content.

So who’s in charge of the content piece of ‘content-selling?’ Most organizations leave it entirely up to sales reps to produce the sales content they need. It’s assumed the ‘raw ingredients’ for such content are available for easy extraction from the plethora of marketing content—which is true to a small degree.

Availability of raw materials isn’t the only factor to consider when deciding who should be in charge. Studies have shown that the typical percentage of time a sales rep spends with a prospect is 35% (or less). What are reps doing with the remaining 65% of their time? You can bet that a good chunk of that time is spent composing, developing, creating, and distributing content of their own making.

How much of that content is effective? Which content works the best? Is the content consistent with your brand and your messaging? There’s no way to know that answer when you’ve got reps independently crafting and distributing content. This points to the need for a more institutionalized approach to content-selling. I believe there are plenty of opportunities to apply content-selling that will leave more time for reps to hold quality conversations with quality prospects and at the same time ensure a higher level of effectiveness of sales content across the organization.

We can find these opportunities at many points through-out the sales cycle. Creating templated sales emails is a great example of where content-selling can be applied. Rather than leaving reps to fend for themselves, recreate the wheel and rewrite the same emails repeatedly, look for how you can offer reps best-practice emails that can be shared across the team to be used at a moment’s notice. Think about the opportunities to create targeted paragraphs, attachments, links, and call-to-actions for various situations, objections, or buyer profiles.

Think too, about what content reps need to keep the momentum going. With long sales cycles, reps need to ‘stay in touch’ to keep the ball moving. Staying in touch is what reps do when they don’t have anything to lead with. What you really want is for reps to continually and consistently offer value that builds momentum and interest. My mantra is that Time Kills Deals. If that is indeed true, then content is the defense.

Along with the content itself, think about creative ways to communicate and distribute the content. An attachment to an email is common-place and unlikely to generate excitement or the will to act. A video email, or a document sent with a personalized audio message is much more likely to stand above the crowd. So to, is a personalized web-page for the prospect to view. Here’s the take-away: each and every communication between your reps and their prospects gets factored into the prospect’s decision calculations—if not consciously, than certainly sub-consciously.

Content-selling deserves a well-thought-out content plan. Start by identifying who’s in charge of the process. If it will be crowd-sourced by your reps, that’s ok as long as someone is in charge of evaluating the content for effectiveness and for producing best-practice content based on those results. You’ll also need a method for sales team collaboration. Next, identify the types of content needed for various stages in the sales cycle. If appropriate, identify what variations are needed to make the content relevant to various buyer profiles. Also, take a look at the variety of delivery mechanisms. Are you giving reps a way to share information effectively with their prospects?

Content-marketing doesn’t go far enough into the sales process. There needs to be a well-orchestrated symphony of content for both Marketing and Sales organizations. That can’t and won’t happen if each member of the band is left to create their own music.

Technology Footnote: Tools that are particularly appropriate and relevant to this post are: ToutApp, PointAcross, Bloomfire, Postwire and BombBomb.

Author, Nancy Nardin is the foremost expert in sales productivity tools. As President of Smart Selling Tools, she consults with many of the top sales productivity software vendors as well as end-user organizations looking to select the right tools. Click to get Nancy’s What & When weekly digest with invitations to complimentary webinars and informative publications. Follow Nancy on Twitter @sellingtools or subscribe to her Tool Talk blog. Nancy can be reached at 916-596-3035. To schedule a free 30 minute consultation click here.