One of the hardest things for sales people to do when prospecting is to communicate the benefits of their solution to the right stakeholder—especially knowing they’ll likely be communicating first through a gatekeeper.

According to research conducted by The Bridge Group, Inc., on average it takes 9.3 touches to get the first meeting.   And, you need that first meeting to start the sales conversation, right?

Not necessarily.  TimeTrade didn’t.

They were able to send a single email with content so compelling it was digested and shared with 10 others before the first meeting—which, by the way, TimeTrade successfully secured within 10 days of sending the email.

Situation
TimeTrade President and CEO Gary Ambrosino craved a new way to open doors.  He was excited about the idea of including video in email to personally connect with prospects’ pain points and highlight bottom-line impacts of using TimeTrade’s online scheduling system.  In the short time it takes to view a video, Gary was confident he could present TimeTrade’s value proposition and actually use its scheduling product in the associated call to action to motivate prospects to book a first meeting at the very moment they were jazzed about the offering.

Solution
TimeTrade used VisibleGains applications and best practices to create a single communication including:

• A personal video introduction with an animated overview; and
• A set of actions the prospect could choose to do such as:
• watching a product demonstration,
• learning more from information presented on the TimeTrade website and
• booking a meeting.

Results

• One email sent to one person who shared it with 10 different people generated 14 views

• 10 Days later, TimeTrade had a booked meeting

• 90 Days later, TimeTrade had a signed deal

“With a single link, our sales rep in the prospecting process was able to reach and touch 10 people, leading to closed business.”
- Gary Ambrosino, President and CEO, TimeTrade 

Conclusion
Getting a first meeting is a key milestone in the selling process, often requiring Herculean effort and tons of guesswork by salespeople about the right time to follow-up.  The initial back and forth exchange between a sales person and prospect kicks off a salesperson’s direct involvement in the prospect’s buying process.

Salespeople open doors and earn the right to subsequent interactions when they demonstrate a persistent understanding of their prospect’s pain points.  Sending compelling content and following up when a prospect is engaged with it (thanks to the alerts sent by VisibleGains in this example when email is opened and content is read) helps salespeople get the first meeting, advance the sale and close the deal.

Are you taking full advantage of the opportunity to start sales conversations in email?

TimeTrade is the world leader in online appointment scheduling systems used by businesses to create new customers, accelerate the sales and service process and make it easy and fast to respond to customers—24/7. TimeTrade’s scheduling software solutions are built on the flexible TimeTrade Appointment Cloud SaaS platform that has the power to scale up to meet the real-time scheduling demands of the largest deployments.

Life is full of should-do’s.

Without thinking about it, I floss my teeth every night as part of my bedtime routine. I exercise regularly because I love how swimming energizes me. But there are plenty of other should-do’s I keep putting off. One of them is to use social media to build my professional reputation and relationships.

Social media has radically changed the way we communicate and connect with others. What I still think of as a should-do, younger workers—in addition to my early adopter peers—just do.

Don’t get me wrong—I use social media, but mostly to research and listen. If there was the equivalent of a Klout influence score for lurking, mine would be right up there! I am an introvert online. I join LinkedIn groups, but observe from the sidelines. I feel awkward—like I’m back in middle school and not sure where to sit at the lunch table.

It’s high-time for me—and maybe you too—to get over it. I realized I’m not the only one who feels this way when within hours of promoting our webinar, Using LinkedIn to Sell, we got 300 signups. Lots of extroverted salespeople are eager to move their selling skills online to engage with prospects. Like me, they know it’s something they should do and are looking for guidance getting started. They also want to be convinced they’ll realize a return from their investment of time and effort. I bet they’re struggling a bit to find their voices, too.

If becoming more ‘social’ is on your should-do list as a salesperson, I encourage you to check out this webinar. We invited David Kalstrom from Outbound Excellence to speak alongside our very own Cliff Pollan. David shares practical how-to tips from his social sales system. David’s system has been proven successful and reinforces what we at VisibleGains already know to be true: salespeople who engage more personally with prospects by sharing relevant information (via a tweet, participation in a LinkedIn group, direct email or whatever) build reputations and relationships that generate more sales and referrals over time. 

CLICK HERE to watch the webinar recording, Using LinkedIn to Sell.

Remember, it takes practice, practice, practice to transform should-do’s to behaviors we do do.
Are you committed to making ‘posting daily’ as habitual as flossing?

188 billion email messages sent each day?! That’s a boatload of email!

We concur with the Infographic’s conclusion—email is here to stay. However, email is not always the most effective way to transmit your message. New(er) technologies—like Facebook and Twitter—introduce additional ways for humans to communicate. Think about what you’re trying to accomplish and select the best media available to you.

Email gets a deserved bad rap from marketing campaigns and spammers pushing unwanted messages that ignore communication fundamentals—such as this basic truth: the receiver must want to receive the message sent!

When your emails are written to be personal, with timely, relevant information the receiver really wants, they can help you build relationships one-to-one. Make your emails better and create relationships using VisibleGains.

Click to download .PDF version

Embed this image on your site:
<a href=”http://www.visiblegains.com/is-email-dead” target=”_blank”><img src=”http://www.visiblegains.com/Portals/54582/Infographics/visiblegains-emaildead.png” alt=”Is Email Dead? [Infographic]” width=”550″ border=”0″></a><BR><div> courtesy of <a href=”http://www.visiblegains.com/”>Visible Gains</a></div>

I recently realized we’ve taken for granted a powerful shortcut for creating Outlook message templates that’s been in our company toolkit for a while. I was talking to a prospect recently about email workflows and described our process for sending multiple personalized emails containing a similar core message. He was amazed at this shortcut, even though it seems pretty obvious to me. I’m documenting it here to share more widely. Hopefully you already take advantage of using Outlook’s standard signature setup; this just kicks it up a notch for creating multiple personalized emails containing similar message text.

5 Steps to use Outlook’s signature function for creating email message templates

Step One: Click New E-mail

Step Two: Click Insert, then click Signature

Step Three: From drop-down menu, click “Signatures…”

Step Four: Click “New”. Enter a name, as well as text, for a complete email message. (Remember to also include an email signature in this “Signature” template entry!)

Step Five: Select the appropriate standardized message by “Signature” name each time you want to send similar text in a new email. Don’t forget to add a subject line and the first name of the person to whom you’re sending the message in the message body. Also, modify the templated text appropriately to ensure it’s relevant to the individual receiving it.

This shortcut saves me time when I want to repetitively send only slightly different emails over and over again–such as a follow-up to a hands-on product demo I’ve just given. Let me know how this shortcut works for you.

Got any Outlook tips to share with us?

If we’ve learned anything from Steve Jobs, we’ve learned technology is constantly evolving around the use case.

We’ve referenced before Gutenberg’s printing press and the sea change its introduction created. The ability to print in quantity created a new channel for communicating information to the general public. And, as the printing press became commoditized, it wasn’t just the rich producing content. Streamlined processes and lower production costs increased the diversity of subject matter communicated. For the first time, regular folks could share their ideas to persuade the masses. Leveraging the new technology, “crazy” ideas could easily spread and plant seeds for other “crazy” ideas–aka innovations. The same thing happened with the introduction of TV and subsequently the Internet.

Sometimes everything just comes (or is coming) together…

It’s not like the tablet just got invented yesterday. Steve Jobs was superb at making it work very simply for the user in the form of the iPad. I’m pretty sure Amazon’s Kindle Fire (suspiciously familiar to the Blackberry Playbook) wouldn’t exist today if Mr. Jobs hadn’t been as successful at widespread adoption as he was. That’s not the interesting part. What’s next is the INTERESTING PART.

Click below to hear David Meerman Scott talk about why he wrote his newly launched eBook Newsjacking, specifically for the Kindle Fire.

Text no longer exists statically in black and white on paper–it’s colorful, blinks and moves–opening us up to a whole new way of thinking about how we consume and interact with information. The iPad truly started us down the tablet path and Amazon’s Kindle Fire takes us a step further.  The Kindle Fire will be more accessible at its significantly cheaper price point and it will allow me to self-publish my thoughts beyond the blogoshpere. Amazon provides you the opportunity to elevate your credibility and bring interactive content to the masses; the iPad doesn’t seem to be going this way.

Can you imagine if all 48 pages of Common Sense written by Thomas Paine had an interactive community around it citing sources? Could King George have jumped in and had a counter argument disputing each point from its original anonymous “Written by an Englishman” author? Would support for the American Revolution been secured faster? What similar e-documents were used to aid Egypt in their efforts for independence? Did mobile texting networks, the blogosphere or Twitterverse speed up the democratization process? I’d argue it did.

Compelling content exists today in unfathomable quantities and we hungrily consume and produce more of it every day. Whether paid or not, people take the time to post 900,000 blogs per day. There are roughly 70 million videos on YouTube and 2 Billion searches conducted via Google.

I engage (and expect to engage) with online content much differently than I do when I read a printed book. I choose to explore related resources when they are conveniently presented to me, only a click away. Dispute a fact. Research a related thought. Ague a point. Post a comment. Buy a product right now. Have a concern about a company– ask your friends about it right now. Granted, I have a bias towards action (in fact, my twitter handle is biasforaction), but I don’t think I’m unique.

Maybe I’m giving them more credit than they’re due, but I’d like to think that Amazon with its Kindle Fire is deliberately breaking new ground. Amazon could become a broker of communities formed around common interests and original content. I realize may be way off-base as I don’t even have a Kindle Fire yet. Still, I’m excited at the possibilities and the technology revolving around “me” right now.

What do you think? Is Amazon up to the task of advancing our level of engagement with new ideas (and each other) through interactive content? Is Kindle Fire the platform to change the way the masses communicate and consume information?

I took an hour this weekend to read David Meerman Scott’s new book entitled “Newsjacking: How to Inject your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage“.

The concept is simple—any company can find breaking news that will get broad coverage and fit themselves into the story. You can see David tell it in his own words in an interview I did with him yesterday.

Important for me was David’s concept of creating this book for digital distribution only, taking advantage of many of the new features offered—including interactivity—for the new Amazon Kindle Fire, as well as the Apple iPad and Barnes & Noble Nook. The interactive elements create a rich, personal experience. A viewer can quickly dig in and learn more. Designing for the medium makes for a true digital experience, as compared to reading a book written for hardcopy and published as an eBook. Also, David intentionally kept the book short so you can get through it in an hour.

Business ebooks will spark more conversations online and offline via shorter, more interactive and easier to share formats like this one. I see this as the future for creating community.

Thanks to David for cutting new ground here.

To learn more about Newsjacking and how to share other real-time data to advance sales, join the discussion on Tuesday November 22 @1PM EST with David and Craig Elias, creator of Trigger Event Selling™ and author of the Bronze Medal winner of the Top Sales Books of 2010 “SHiFT! Harness The Trigger Events That TURN PROSPECTS INTO CUSTOMERS” .

(Note: David is an advisor to VisibleGains).

For any business, customers are its single most important asset.   Customers represent the lifeblood of the company, a source of revenue, new growth and ideas for future opportunities.  But we often forget that it is also the best source to find new clients.

Here is a customer case example that I stumbled upon in the Q&A section of a webinar that CSO Insights held:

An example was a software firm we benchmarked. They showed us a report from their LMS system that showed quantity of leads per various lead sources. Top on their list was tradeshows, which accounted for 42% of their total lead flow. Last on the list was a source titled, DebbieC which was responsible for .05% of the leads for the previous twelve months.

…. DebbieC turned out to be the name of a customer who regularly sent referrals to the company. On an annual basis she sent 56 referrals. When they started tracking leads through their sales cycle in their CRM system, they found that 46 of those leads turned into opportunities that closed!

That insight prompted them to reallocate some of their lead generation funds to start a formal referral management program, which while generating small numbers of leads, is way out performing any other program for deals that close.

It is interesting that many B2B companies do not have programs to help them get referrals.  I think that is because marketing focuses on getting new names through other vehicles and account managers most often are responsible for current client relationships and see their role as having these clients succeed.

Account managers do not see or are not incented for the broader goal of getting referrals to help generate new revenue from new accounts.

John Jantsch has done a great job of evangelizing this opportunity.  His book “The Referral Engine” is worth reading, as it provides a blueprint for a holistic approach.

What are you doing to drive referrals?

Building Trust through Content

Before you can sell your services to a customer, you need to build a relationship. In business, the relationship between the salesperson and the customer is based on a foundation of trust.

One of the easiest ways to generate profitable publicity and to build a foundation of trust is to establish yourself as an expert in your niche. The point is to create a reputation as being the source for information about your product or service. – and the best way to provide information is via content.

Here’s six ways to use content to increase sales:

Be the Expert

First impressions are everything, and chances are your customer will first ‘meet’ you on your website. In a study by FOCUS two-thirds of a prospects mind is made up prior to engaging a sales rep. So be sure to fill your site with content that establishes you as a well-informed authority on your product or service. Your website should not be a supermarket of content with relevant  information buried under layers of lingo and buzz words.  Creating landing pages which are specific to the individuals you are trying to converse with is important.  This is the cornerstone of trust.

Don’t Sell, Teach

People love to buy stuff, but they hate to feel sold. Avoid this turnoff and focus your content as providing information. Fill your website with educational, tutorial-style content that will decrease sales resistance. Create content that allows the viewer to self direct their education. Consider using Video, PDF’s, Slides, Pictures, Lists and anything else that will speak to them about their concerns.

Don’t Just Tell, Show

Video is an excellent way to provide engaging content to your potential clients in a unique format. Consider making a how-to video. If you make a demonstration video, the content should focus on the benefits of the product or service.  Video does not have to be overly produced consider – business casual video.  Clean and clear recordings with good audio conveys and honest and direct approach which will be appreciated.

Engage

Follow blogs and social media sites that deal with your product or service to see what customers are talking about. And then engage with them in a conversation by offering pointers, answers and advice.

Write for Others

Chances are there’s a trade publication, blog or site dealing with your sector. Why not write a guest article for it? Just make sure the article doesn’t preach but provides valuable information to the reader.

Don’t Forget SEO

When writing your content, don’t forget to make sure it’s search engine optimized. Customers will only find you if you show up on the search engine results!

In this post we thought we’d highlight a common scenario some refer as the “Dead Zone”.  A prospect has indicated interest in some way and now you’re trying to connect.

It’s never pleasant waiting for the phone to ring and most successful people don’t. Everyone does occasionally wonder why some folks just won’t call you back. Are you struggling to get your calls returned? Are you becoming frustrated with empty promises to ‘call you back’? Try these five simple tips to increase your call backs:

Capitalize on Trigger Events

According to Craig Elias, the key to getting a prospect to call you back is to capitalize on what he refers to as ‘trigger events’. “When you cold call someone in attempt to sell them something, you’re interrupting that person’s day,” says Elias. “The dominant instinct is always going to be for that person to find any reason to get off the phone and get back to what they were doing.” At the beginning of the call or prior to it, you want to find out if there has been a trigger event – or whether or not they are already talking to the competition. If so, that means there’s an opening and you need to capitalize on this immediately.

Reference Referrals Up Front

According to Jill Konrath, the single best way to keep prospects listening is to start the conversation by mentioning the name of a respected colleague. If you do this on a message machine, chances are they will call you back.

Do Your Homework

Konrath further suggests that doing your homework – and letting your prospect know you did your homework – also increases the chance of a callback. “Let them know you prepared for this call by researching their business,” she says.

Use Your Script as a Foundation

Any salesperson knows that the script is an essential sales tool – helping you stay focused.  It’s a game of permission, so every word counts.  Your first statement earns you the next 15 seconds.  That 15 seconds leads to 45 more seconds. The first 45 seconds leads to the next minute and so on.  Scripts are guides – not the end all be all and must be used as a reference not verbatim.

Create a Deadline

Finally, as Anneke Seley points out, after every conversation you should end with an agreement from the prospect outlining the next steps. And always include a date for when these steps will be accomplished. That way, when the time for the follow up call comes around the prospect will be expecting it.

In the end combining all materials (triggers, referrals, homework, scripts, deadlines)  and their sub-components can earn you enough trust with a prospect to continue the discussion.

Links to reference materials on Amazon.com:

• Shift: Harness The Trigger Events That Turn Prospects Into Customers
• SNAP Selling: Speed Up Sales & Win More Business with Today’s Frazzled Customers
• Sales 2.0: prove Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology 

David Meerman Scott just launched his revised & updated book The NEW RULES of MARKETING & PR (Click to buy).  If you haven’t read it you should.

In it David talks about the creation of a video category called business casual (page 252). He explains that video in all its forms need not be the high production difficulty and cost you’ve come to expect from “formal video”.  David goes on to make several points

1. You can produce simple low cost engaging content that works/converts.
2. Do not create poorly shot video, with bad lighting and editing – there is a baseline.
3. He is “convinced that the trend towards casual content means that consumers want to get closer to the organizations they do business with”.
4. Informal “telling it like it is – will make us more efficient”

One additional learning that David and our customers have stressed is -

Trust.

Business Casual video is honest. You’re standing out there on your own with no fancy backgrounds nor teleprompter.  People love the directness and the honesty that comes through the simple format.  We find that people appreciate it and are therefore willing to advance to conversation with such a forthright individual that’s focused on the content delivered.

Never forget that no matter how produced your video is – the content must be authentic and engaging. That is what converts visitors. The business casual content is easily produced on small high definition capable cameras (Cisco Flip, Kodak Zi8) that are simple to use and cost less than $80 to purchase. The quality is fantastic and as of this post Flip cameras are still online for sale.

Here is an example of business casual video content –

Today, when visitors see this business casual content they find it genuine and engaging. The results are excellent and the more you do it the easier it gets.