using LinkedIn as a sales tool

With LinkedIn, you can research accounts in general and/or individuals in particular.  If and when you are cold-calling a company, it often helps to ask for a specific individual when you reach the operator.  Otherwise, they may not transfer you to the (unknown) VP of Operations, for example.

LinkedIn provides you the ability with Advanced Search to find specific individuals within a specific business.  You can use Keywords to narrow the search to specific domain areas such as Operations Management or MES.

The possibilities are quite endless.

Follow on Twitter

Next generation social CRM is provocative, but not commercially-validated (as of yet.)  However, using Twitter to follow prospects, clients, your competitors, prospects’ and clients’ competitors, industry leaders, and others can definitely provide insightful information tidbits.

Tweets are short and sweet, but most importantly they are current.  When communicating with business leaders, sharing a little competitive intelligence (for example) will go to establishing equal business stature.  It may just pique interest and be a catalyst for sponsorship and subsequent partnership.

Closing will always be manual

Do SFA tools automatically close business?  Of course, not!

However, the tools on the market today (which have come a long ways from the days when Scopus, Clarify, and Vantive were the big players) are quite flexible and productive.  While SFA tools are powerful, they won’t create a compelling “call to action” for your customers.  Closing will always be a manual process.

With microscopic-focus, identify what it will take to make a buying decision.  It may be internal based upon negative activity ratios or it may be external, such as feared competition.

Sales team functionality

Many CRM tools provide “sales team” functionality which essentially enables more than just the “opportunity owner” with read and write privileges.  This feature is very handy for organizations with team-selling environments.  While you may have to overcome potential “control” issues by the default “owner” the benefits are straight-forward, including:

• automated tracking and updating virtual sales team
• expanding sales and marketing reach across team
• easy transition/assignment of ownership
• strategic “divide and conquer” territory management

Camaraderie is nice to have, but expanded and improved territory coverage is a must.

Territory break-even analysis

Are your sales territories partitioned properly?  Does your current territory map beget maximum revenues?

Hopefully, management and sales agree on the answers but that is often not the case.

There is a break-even point (BEP) where adding an FTE (another sales person) is advised to optimize overall sales performance.  In this economy, companies carefully measure costs and expenses versus revenue.  However, companies often rely on ancient territory definitions which are not optimized.  An audit provides actionable insights; which can be derived by analyzing sales history (perhaps 4 trailing quarters) at a granular level (e.g. by products, services, new vs. recurring, direct vs. indirect, etc.)

I’m not trying to solve the unemployment problem, but if your company boasts a notion of “growth strategy” restructuring sales territories can accelerate revenues overall and result in new hires.

Day in the life of sales (funny video)

The following video accurately depicts life in sales, while being painfully funny.

However, the language may be offensive to you.  Consider yourself disclaimed.

Here is the video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cVLAvix-dX0&feature=player_embedded

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