Selling Made Simple, Salesman Podcast, This Week In Sales, And More...

On this week in sales we’ll be looking at: 

* Sales automation* Post COVID lead generation trends* Amazon’s Hire to Fire strategy

News:

What’s Your Sales Automation Strategy?

A recent McKinsey study shows that more than 30% of sales activities can be automated to improve efficiency and effectiveness.

However, lack of awareness of automation’s potential, inadequate tracking, return on investment (ROI) concerns, and delayed delivery challenges are hindrances to adoption.

https://hbr.org/2021/06/whats-your-sales-automation-strategy

Automated sales commission platform Spiff secures $46M

Companies connect Spiff to their customer relationship management (CRM) platform, business intelligence (BI) tools, or accounting and payment systems to automatically glean real-time sales data. 

While its prebuilt integrations include the likes of Salesforce, Looker, Snowflake, Quickbooks, and Stripe, the company also follows an API-first philosophy that opens things to just about any data conduit.

Through the no-code Spiff commission designer dashboard, companies can combine rules, variables, and conditions around commission payments so that when an employee meets certain preset criteria, they automatically receive their dues. 

This can support any number of commission structures, including deal splits, ramps, and team roll-ups.

https://venturebeat.com/2021/06/01/automated-sales-commission-platform-spiff-secures-46m/

Lead Generation Trends Sales Leaders Should Know

sales emails have now effectively doubled from the pre-pandemic baseline — 106% in March and 94% more email volume in April 2021.

Sales calls, too, trended up. Call events were up 72% and 65% in March and April 2021, respectively (compared to pre-pandemic baselines).

 In 2021, we find spending up a staggering 38% in both March and April 2021. The year-over-year uptick is 52%.

However, despite buyers’ preferences for digital sales interactions — 70%-80% of respondents to McKinsey’s research survey prefer over face-to-face — all this activity has not led to increased sales.

The HubSpot data indicates closed-won deals cratered early with the uncertainty surrounding the onset of the pandemic (-9% April 2020) and were underwater (up only 1% to negative) seven of the next 11 months. Things seem to have finally reversed in March 2021, popping 13% above the pandemic baseline.

The big takeaways here are that more activity is generating fewer results and that this hard work, especially in prospecting or awareness-generating activities, is not currently showing signs of reversing course.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2021/06/02/lead-generation-trends-sales-leaders-should-know/

Five Ps of Sales Success

Five Ps of sales—purpose, precision, personalization, productivity, and profitability.

Phil Harrell, a vice president and group director at Forrester,

Social Selling Show Hosts:

* Daniel Disney is the King of Social Selling, a best selling author and keynote speaker. Daniel is also the founder of The Daily Sales.* Will Barron is the founder of Salesman.org where he helps B2B sales professionals master modern sales in just 42 days.

On this week in sales we’ll be looking at: 

* Buyers buying faster* If the AI in sales hype real?* Selling to the new millennial buyer

And much more!

News:

63% of B2B Buyers Now Make Procurement Decisions Quicker Than Pre-Pandemic, New ARPR Research Concludes

When we polled CIOs and CTOs, 63% of respondents said their IT budgets have increased slightly or significantly due to COVID-19.

Added Anna Ruth Willams, ARPR’s  CEO: “Our survey points to a moment of reimagination for software sales departments. Tech buyers are now empowered to drive innovation with more budget and faster approval processes. To do so, they are turning to increasingly digital sales processes to find information exactly when they need it.”

https://www.prweb.com/releases/63_of_b2b_buyers_now_make_procurement_decisions_quicker_than_pre_pandemic_new_arpr_research_concludes/prweb17965880.htm

AI & Machine Learning: Substance Behind the Hype?

It’s become inevitable in IT. Something new appears on the horizon and the hype machine ramps up to warp speed. In some cases, companies relabel their existing wares to align with the new term without making any actual change to the product.

Sometimes the hype is justified, often it is not. How about artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML)? Gartner believes they are over-hyped according to its recent Gartner Magic Quadrant for Data Science and Machine-Learning Platforms.

https://www.cioinsight.com/innovation/ai-machine-learning-substance-behind-the-hype/

Getting B2B marketplaces ready for going prime time in 2021

Gartner believes so. It has predicted that, by 2023, at least 70% of enterprise marketplaces launched will support B2B transactions.

Nobel Prize winner in economics Alvin Roth says successful marketplaces must be “thick, uncongested, and safe.”

* “Thick” here means there needs to be enough participants in the market to make it thrive. * Avoiding congestion is about balancing the offer and the demand side, so there are not too many merchants selling, that increasing demand is being fulfilled, that the customer is seeing a wide enough selection of products.* Safety is when all parties feel secure enough to make decisions based on their best interests.

https://www.digitalcommerce360.com/2021/05/24/getting-b2b-marketplaces-ready-for-going-prime-time-in-2021/

Is Buy Now, Pay Later Right for B2B?

 Klarna recently raised $1 billion and is now valued at over $30 billion. PayPal, AfterPay and a slew of other companies are also generating big buzz in the space.

The B2B eCommerce payment market — $4 trillion and growing — is ripe for transformation.

Financing has always been a challenge for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), and COVID has only exacerbated the problem. According to the Biz2Credit Small Business Lending Index, overall loan approval rates in December 2020 were down over 50% vs. December 2019.

Kim Walsh is the Global VP, Go-to-Market Partnership at HubSpot. On this episode of The Salesman Podcast, Kim reveals HubSpot’s strategy of following up after a networking event/webinar and nurturing the participants into a sales-qualified lead.

Resources:

GROW – A unique online event for leaders in Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service

Kim on LinkedIn

Chris Voss’ Book on Negotiation: Never Split The Difference

Qualifying sales leads and increasing close ratios

Transcript

Will Barron:

This episode of the show is brought to you from the salesman.org HubSpot studio. Kim, welcome to Salesman Podcast.

 

Kim Walsh:

Thanks, Will, thanks for having me.

 

Hubspot’s Process of Closing Webinar/Live Event Attendees · [00:10] 

 

Will Barron:

You are more than welcome. We’ll dive into a topic today that could be incredibly timely for a lot of the people listening to the show, how to take someone who attends a, whether it’s a live event, a live virtual event, or a live webinar, how to get them from just an email address and a name to perhaps marketing qualified lead, sales qualified lead, and hopefully customer. So let’s not beat around the bush here. Let’s just get super practical. Do you have a process for this at HubSpot? Is there a step-by-step process that you can share with us? Or I guess it might take longer than half an hour to get through, so we’ll dive into chunks of it, but is there a process that you guys have created and found reliable to get someone from just email address to sales qualified lead, or hopefully a deal at the end of the day?

 

Kim Walsh:

Yeah, well, great question Will, and I would say this context is probably pretty important for anyone who is in sales. I would just say, the way that I think about it, is I’m in a pretty fortunate position, because in being in sales and partnerships at HubSpot, we have a fantastic marketing team who runs a lot of our event strategy for us. So I know sometimes in sales, you’re not fortunate to have a marketing team that runs such a great event marketing playbook and event marketing process. So you can go between both. I’ve lived in both worlds, but I would say the world that I’ve lived in for the last 10 years has been with a remarkable marketing team, who helps us take those lead registrants through our process, and through our flywheel. So happy to talk about that, but just wanted to make sure I was giving the right context, that a marketing team does a lot of the work.

 

Will Barron:

Sure, because I, we touched on before the show in medical device sales, I did tonnes of in-person events. Massive urology conferences, gynaecology conferences, and there was no marketing team. I was the person chatting with surgeons, emailing them beforehand, getting them to come over to the booth, so I don’t look stupid in front of my sales manager. I’ve actually had a few conversations during the day, before we go out. So let’s assume for the audience, to make things more simple here, that they’ve got a marketing team, at least helping with a lot of this. If not, as you in your own words there, Kim, a remarkable marketing team doing the upfront production, I guess, of the events themselves. So let’s make that assumption.

 

Social Selling Show Hosts:

* Daniel Disney is the King of Social Selling, a best selling author and keynote speaker. Daniel is also the founder of The Daily Sales.* Will Barron is the founder of Salesman.org where he helps B2B sales professionals master modern sales in just 42 days.