Monthly Archives: November 2011

Top-of-Funnel Strategy

HubSpot Tip

Another tip from VP sales at Hubspot Mark Roberge at the Sales 2.0 convention re top-of-funnel strategy.

Mark recommends on keeping the top-of-funnel as wide as possible and worry about the filtering and the quality further down at the funnel.

Most companies don’t know what type of a customer will convert and this will allow tracking a whole bunch of data that can be analyzed later.

However, the danger in that strategy is when passing all those customers to your sales team, it could lead to ineffectiveness and waste of their time so it is recommended to use filtering at this stage so that the most quality stuff is being transferred.

As mentioned in my previous post: “Top 3 Metrics to Measure Customer Engagement“, there are ways to set your filters by. Choosing the right metrics and measuring them correctly will assist in screening out the non potential buyers and keep the high potential ones is essential to any successful SaaS business.

Once the data is gathered and there are more and more leads you can continue optimizing this process.

Tomorrow I will publish another tip by Mark Roberge regarding how to pick your sales model – zero touch vs. low touch vs. high touch.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

SaaS Key Metrics Survey Results

 

Want to know which metrics are usually used in top and bottom of funnel?
Download SaaS Business Survey Results

 
 

Video Transcription:

Mark Roberge. VP of sales at Hubspot.

I highly recommend at the top of the funnel keeping it as wide as possible and worry about the the filtering and the quality further down to the funnel, and the reason being is especially when you are stunning out and most people are starting out with inbound. You actually have no idea who’s going to work out, what type of marketing tactics are going to work, what types of buyers are going to actually work well in your funnel, so keeping it why it is, possible allows you to capture a whole bunch of data to see what actually progresses through.

The danger in that strategy comes when you pass everything to the sales team, because that can lead to a lot of ineffectiveness in recent time by that sales team so with that process you want to have a lot of filtering to make sure that the most quality staff is actually getting down to the sales team.

And as you gather data and gather more and more leads, you will continue to optimize that process.

Do you Distinguish Your Sales to Hunters and Farmers?

HubSpot Tip

At the Sales 2.0, I’ve also met Mark Roberge, VP sales at Hubspot, who gave me some sales tips.
On today’s video post, Mark explains the difference between Hunters and Farmers sales skill sets and recommends to protect the hunters from doing the farmers’ job as finding good hunters is hard and we don’t want to waste their time on doing things they’re not skill to do.

I agree with Mark that a business should know to distinguish between those roles and have each of them focus on their own specialties. As discussed in my post: “Does your SaaS Business have a VP Customer Success?“, Some B2B sales leaders have the farmers focused on customer success. Others now call themselves “Chief Revenue Officer”. Either way, we can see more and more of these roles in the SaaS industry lately and therefore can conclude this distinguish exists and becoming more and more acceptable.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

SaaS Executive Dashboard

Hey Hunter – Let us do the measuring for you!
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About Totango:
Totango analyzes in real time customer engagement and intention within SaaS applications to help you grow your business

 
 

Video Transcription:
Mark Roberge, VP sales at Hubspot.

You’ve got hunters and you’ve got farmers. The hunters are typically out there, generating new business, finding companies that don’t know who you are and turning them into new customers. You got farmers, who are really good at building those relationships, helping them see the hour line of your product and getting them to spend more money with you overtime.

Usually those skills are extremely different, and it’s really hard actually, I think, to find good hunters. The last thing I want them to do is spend more time on farming, more time making their number, not with my new lease and new companies. So, I wanna really protect that asset and also, I think, it’s such a different skill set that I want it separate.

Tip on How to Reduce Churn (Even in Low-Touch Models)

HootSuite Tip

Another tip taken during Sales 2.0 from Darren Suomi, VP Sales at HootSuite – this time regarding self service model and how to adjust it to reduce churn.

You know how it is that you get many leads and you just don’t know who to refer first? This situation is common in many SaaS companies.

With the right metrics and cohort analysis, it’s easy to decide who are the more engaged customers that are ready for sale and it’s usually more likely that if you’ll approach those customers, they’ll signup for your product.

Darren is also claiming that even in a self service model (low-touch model) like HootSuite, once they find out who are their active users in their service, they proactively reaching them and by that they reduce churn.

Tomorrow I will publish a tip by Mark Roberge, VP Sales at HubSpot who will explain the difference between the hunters and the farmers skill sets.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

 
 

Video Transcription:

I’m talking to Darren Suomi, VP of Sales from HootSuite.

Bring me a model which where we play, it is a self-service model. So, we’re really trying to look at it from turning down the churn. I guess I’m looking at what people are trying to play instead of going from just a self-service. We’re actually just playing with the model in terms of a little bit of more of a high touch point. So, we are really taking a look at our customer who are quite active on social media. We are actually proactively reaching out of them and seeing where we might be able to help them versus just letting them fend for themselves.

Lessons learned of reading Steve Jobs bio

1 Reply

I couldn’t get my hands off the Steve Jobs biography for the past couple of days. Great book, I highly recommend reading it to everyone!

One of the key lessons I’ve learned by going through Jobs’ amazing life story, was his passion for products. For the past decade I’ve been thinking and researching about the relationship between science, technology, engineering, art and craftsmanship. The disciplines which are blended in when creating new amazing products.

In order to build great products the focus should be on the *creation process*. People from various disciplines are blended in the creative process. Isn’t this great?

It may sound weird (to some) that as Founder and CEO the best parts of my day are the combination of Customer Feedback, User Interface and User Experience design and creation. Now I know for certain; we are building TOTANGO to enable such a mixture of creative processes. It will ensure great products customers will love and also our own enjoyment, so we can keep on doing that for long.

Do You Allow Social Media Channels in Your Business?

HootSuite Interview

At the Sales 2.0, I’ve met Darren Suomi, VP Sales at HootSuite who gave me a tip regarding social media – If you’ve ever considered not to give a salesperson your phone or email address, consider giving them a social media address.

As you probably know, nowadays, where customer engagement is the focus of successful SaaS business, social media is a central player in communicating with your customers and for customers to communicate with each other. As I presented in my previous video post, the world have moved on from “system of records” to the system of engagement and social media become a big influence in the system of engagement.

According to Darren, a lot of companies are afraid from allowing their workers interacting on this medium, however, Darren encourages they allow it as it worth while in the long run. Of course it should be accompanied with guiding you team about what’s acceptable and what’s not.

In my next post I will publish another tip from Darren regarding self service model and how to adjust it to reduce churn.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

 
 

Video Transcription:

“Darren Suomi, VP Sales from HootSuite.
Well, what I was talking about earlier was in terms of well, in the past if you’ve ever considered not giving a salesperson a phone or an email address. I think it began by giving them a social media address. A lot of companies are afraid to let people go and interact on that medium, I will say, really, “Open up, stick your foot in the water.
Get the waters warm.”
So come on in, play around, let people go but give them a little bit of guidelines in you know, what’s acceptable and what’s not, what kind of branding you want to give them.”

Evolving from Document System to Engagement System

aiim Interview

Here is the additional interview promised from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference.
This time Jessie Wilkins, Director System Engagement for aiim speaks about how will the future of the enterprise information management will look like.

As mentioned a lot in this blog, nowadays the customers are kings, customer engagement is taking a royal place in web applications and the interaction between the business and the customers and between the customers themselves is highly important for any successful SaaS business.

Jessie mentions that for decades the world have been focused on “system of records” which is actually focusing on documents.
These days the focus is on conversation, interaction, Facebook “likes” and it’s called “System of Engagement” where individuals engage with each other, organizations engage with customers and partners try to develop more collaborate ways of working together.

To learn more about the System of Engagement, read the white paper by Geoffrey Moore: System of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT

Tomorrow I will upload an interview from the Sales 2.0 Conference. This time Darren Suomi, VP Sales at HootSuite will give a tip regarding social media channels in businesses.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

 
 

Video Transcription:

“My name is Jessie Wilkins. I’m Director Systems of Engagement for Aiim. Aiim is a non profit trade association. We do market research, networking events, industry analysis, standards development and training. We did some research earlier this year, and to try and determine what the future of enterprising information management looked like.

And what we determined was that for decades we’ve been focused on systems of record, all of those databases, repositories, share points, et cetera – that every organization has. They’re focused on documents and now we are starting to focus more on conversations, interactions, Facebook likes – and so we call those systems of engagement.

Ways in which individuals engage with each other, organizations engage with their customers and their partners and try and develop more collaborative ways of working together. Our research and research from others including Mackenzie, Forrester and Gardner, all suggest that organizations that use these tools effectively are more profitable, their market leaders are gaining market share, they can streamline their processes, but too many organizations don’t know how to do that.

And so, we’re here to hopefully provide our strategies, processes and plans for how to do it more effectively.”

Converting from Visitors to Signups and from Freemium to Paid in a Fun Way

BadgeVille Interview

In the next couple of weeks I would like to share some short video interviews on relevant subjects taken at several events I’ve been to.

At the Enterprise 2.0 Conference, I’ve met Eric Montoya from BadgeVille and interviewed him about the ways to convert from visitors to signups and from freemium to paid users.

These topics are highly relevant to every SaaS business and I’ve been writing a few posts about it lately, including my previous post.

In this interview, Eric explains how the conversion process become a simple mechanism when you find unique and fun ways to get your users to know your product by gentle guides or creating a feedback system that is presented back to the end-user once they conducted a series of behaviors that we wanted them to.

Eric also gave some interesting examples in which he mentions a 500% lift for a unique application of Samsung – view the interview to learn more

Tomorrow I will upload another interview from the Enterprise 2.0 Conference. This time Jessie Wilkins, Director System of Engagement for aiim will talk about how the document system era evolved to the system of engagement era.

To read the full transcription of the video, click here

 
 

Video Transcription:

“My name is Eric Montoya, I am with sales and business development here at BadgeVille. You know, there is a couple of really, really unique things that happen within the context of any sort of online community or any sort of interaction with the product, the first is some sort of anonymous or local capture, right?

How do i get that person who has just come to my platforms, to my products and my brand and what can I do to try to capture them at that point? How do I convert them, maybe from fremium to paid and all of those mechanics that go along with could be something as simple as a mechanism like gentle guide or something where I am taking a series of behaviors or actions and presenting that back to the end user in some sort of unique, very step oriented, fun way with that getting feed back as they through all of the interactions learning the platform, taking a steps in necessary to become engaged within the product, but they are doing it in a way that’s very controlled and really wrapped around the behaviors and the actions that you want dozen users to perform.

Us, like our kind of broad, you know, 100 plus customers that we have now, we’ve seen, you know, strategic impact to the goals and objectives tied to a lot of those specific behaviors in the, like, 25 to 30% range, if you want to be very broad.

When you look at very, very unique applications or specific behavior such those users are performing. Samsung, for example, has just put out this last week that they are seeing a 500% lift on some of the drive and user engagement and actions that are very relevant to the success of their community.

Things like rating and reviewing and interacting with the product and the brand overall. So, you know,we have seen a lot of variance but the impact, you know, whether that’s 10%, 50% or 500%, absolutely the numbers are there.”

When Not to Waste Your Time on a SaaS Sales Prospect

Target the right prospects

Anthony Iannarino’s sales blog on “All Opportunities Aren’t Created Equal” got me thinking about prioritizing your time, given limited sales and marketing resources.

This is especially important for lean startups and high velocity sales businesses, where there are a relatively high number of prospects as compared to the number of sales and marketing resources.

However, prioritizing your time in a self service sales model is changing as compared to the traditional enterprise model where every prospect requires sales touch. Consider these reasons
why a prospect may not be ‘Mr. Right’ or ‘Mrs. Right’ in the traditional sales model (as mentioned in Anthony’s blog):

#1 – When a Prospect Has No Money. The art world’s ‘starving artist’ is the ‘struggling start-up’ of business. Both may produce beauty, but without a stable income neither is worth bringing
home to your parents.

#2 – When a Prospect Has Too Much Money. They have big ideas and big budgets to make them happen—they just need your software, customized almost beyond recognition; causing too much work and distraction.

#3 – When a Prospect Is Dissimilar. Trust, communication, shared values, and a united vision for achieving goals are all factors of a great relationship.

Interestingly, if you are offering an online, self service trial for your service and have a low touch or zero touch sales model, you may not need to be too concerned about these factors
upfront. You can let customers self qualify through your sales funnel. It is ok to have any of these three customers sign up for a trial. Then actions speak louder than words. When a prospect
is active during the trial and engages with your product as-is, he is probably worth your time.
If, on the other hand your prospect never logs into the free trial or is aggressively calling your support team, it may be worthwhile finding yourself another ‘date’.

How NOT to Sell in SaaS and Increase Paid Conversions

Offer Customer Value

So you have a product! you’ve worked so hard on making it the way you want (iteratively of course) and now you want to sell it – so how do you do that? The answer, as strange as it might sound, is that you don’t!

As I wrote in my previous post, two very common sales models which have recently evolved are the zero-touch and the low-touch models where there are no sales teams or a very small sales team respectively. Why have these models evolved? because they were needed! in the SaaS reality, where the Internet is flooded with information, customers prefer being the active searchers and find solutions for their specific problems. They tend to rely less on non-objective sales people to convince them why their product is good for them – they prefer to simply read or hear about a solution from someone else and if they feel a solution might help them, they can simply sign-up to it’s free trial period or free account (freemium) and try it themselves!

Come to think of it, it’s kind of a revolutionary state of mind where your customers want to be able to choose their products based on its true value! After choosing it, they’ll evaluate it and only then, if they find it really helpful for their needs, they’ll convert to paid users.

The key is not to sell the product but to give away value – if you honestly & utterly try to gain customer success and help other people with their existing needs, they will feel your pure intentions and stay for more. Once trying to sell, the whole focus will go in that direction and you risk loosing the audience loyalty.

This very much like Google organic search: if your website truly provides relevant and valuable content, it will be ranked high in Google and attract prospects. Similarly, if your product is truly relevant and provides value to customers, prospects will try it and convert into paying customers.  Your solution should of course solve a very common problem and preferably have a unique answer (and that is a subject to a whole different post).

Top 5 Trends in Sales 2.0

Sales2.0

It was a jam packed day at Sales 2.0 in Santa Monica today. It was a great opportunity to meet with and learn from some of the brightest in the Sales 2.0 community.  I have summarized my key takeaways for Sales 2.0 leaders below:

#1 – Attract many, then focus on filtering

If your prospects do research online, will they find your company, or your competitor? Mark Roberge, VP Sales from HubSpot argued that you should keep the top of your sales funnel as broad as possible. Attract as many people as possible to your website through good content. HubSpot itself is attracting 50,000 leads a month, of which 40% get passed to the inside sales team and about 400 (or less than 1%) convert into new customers.  The leads that don’t convert still help to reinforce the HubSpot brand and trust. With so many leads, strong filtering and lead scoring algorithms are keys to sales success.

#2 – Give all sales people a social media address

Scott Holden, Senior Director at Salesforce.com argued that not just companies need to be discoverable, but also individual sales representatives. Social pages are often the first ones to come up in search results.  Darren Suomi, VP Sales from HootSuite called it “giving all sales reps a social media address”. He said it is no different from issuing a rep a cell phone and e-mail. IBM indeed has done just that, said Douglas Hannan, BU Executive at IBM: all 1,000 IBM sales reps have a web page with built in 2-way video and chat. They are also asked to get on Twitter and LinkedIn. IBM marketing maintains a social messaging calendar to make it easy for reps to find content to post.

#3 – Deliver value first, sell later

Jim Cathcart, the well-known author of “Relationship Selling”, defined what customer relationships are all about: in a relationship people know each other and have an exchange of value. Ask yourself: who is truly glad to know me? In a sales relationship, provide value first, sell later. Don’t talk about up selling customers, but rather up serving them. If you do a good job others will vouch for you and recommend your services. Scott Holden summarized this as moving from self-promotion to social referrals: “trust me, he is a great lover” and not “I am a great lover”.  I expressed a similar sentiment in my blog earlier this week on Genuine Customer Engagement.

#4 – Use online demos to drive sales

Salesforce.com recently did a survey of 1 million influencers in the buying process and found that 50%-70% of sales processes start long before a sales person ever gets involved. The most important deciding factor in the sales process was “online demos”, not sales person interaction.   HubSpot data points in the same direction: the most reliable indicator that a lead will convert into a customer is a request for a demo (46%) as compared to download a white paper for example (22%). As we discussed in many blogs including Trial Conversion is Top Priority in SaaS, I would add that interaction with a free trial version of your product has an even higher correlation with conversion to customer.

#5 – Consider a territory model based on social proximity

A somewhat radical idea was presented by Michael Lodato from Network Hardware Resale. He argued that in a commodity business (he sells network hardware) buyers are deciding based on personal relationships and customer service. Therefore he moved to an open territory model, where leads are assigned based on the personal relationship of a rep to the lead, rather than geography. On paper this social proximity model sounds great, but in reality it is still difficult to implement. Michael admitted to have a team of marketers manually assigning leads based on social parameters.

#6 – Move towards a lower touch model

Gerhard Gschwandtner pushed speakers to learn from B2C selling models:  Amazon has $30 billion in sales with ZERO sales reps. B2B companies need to learn from this and move to lower touch selling models, wherever possible. One of the speakers, Rini Das from PAKRA, has achieved just that. She is closing 95% of her business based on social media leads. She has hardly met any of her clients in person, but is still doing $30,000 to $150,000 in revenues per customer each year.  

Gerhard and gang; thank you so much for a great conference!

Tomorrow: Enterprise 2.0!