Sales 2.0 and Document Assembly

If you’re involved in sales, you’ve most likely heard the phrase “Sales 2.0” and are aware how related strategies and technologies are changing the ways companies sell their products and find and nurture their prospects.
According to Anneke Seley and Brent Holloway in their new book Sales 2.0: Improve Business Results Using Innovative Sales Practices and Technology, “Sales 2.0 is the use of innovative sales practices focused on creating value for both the buyer and seller, enabled by Web 2.0 and next generation technology. Sales 2.0 practices combine the science of process-driven operations with the art of collaborative relationships, using the most profitable and expedient sales resources required to meet customer’s needs.”
Seley and Holloway say there seven key factors driving the adoption of these Sales 2.0 practices:

1) Customer’s evolving communications preferences
2) Shifting the power of information from the rep to the customer
3) Rising cost of sales
4) Customer demand for corporate social responsibility
5) Different markets, different economics
6) Decreasing sales effectiveness
7) Increased customer demand for trust, responsiveness, and authenticity

We would add number eight: increased pressure to find revenue in a changing economy.
Automated document assembly plays a big part in this movement towards Sales 2.0 and fits the model espoused by Seley and Holloway, who go on to say “innovations associated with Sales 2.0 practices fit into four inter-related, interdependent categories: strategy, people, process, and technology.”
- Strategy - What is your sales strategy? How does your sales force accomplish their jobs in this new environment? A fundamental shift that document assembly makes possible is enabling the field sales person to easily create documents they need to close a sale with little or no help from management or legal. Standard corporate documents are automated so sales people can answer questions in a browser and create compliant documents. Empowering sales people to create their own documents removes the impediments and risks of manual contract creation-- cut and paste, approval bottlenecks and a general lack of standards—which can have a major impact on your sales cycle and cost of sales.
- People - People generally migrate to the highest value challenge of their jobs. Very few people enjoy the repetitive, low-value parts of their jobs. By automating the creation of high volume, somewhat negotiable, but mostly predictable agreements, document assembly frees knowledge workers to focus on higher value matters
- Process - In this age of increasing risks and regulation, process is not only important but in many cases is mandated and audited. Automating key documents and contracts is a way to ensure that your company is minimizing the risk of using incorrect documents, templates or clauses as well as enforcing the use of required language.
- Technology - Technologies such as XML, have made it possible to automate even the most complex documents. This along with integration with CRM, ERP and other internal systems has created a whole new world of opportunities for companies to streamline and automate the creation of the sales contracts. It enables management to mine the data in those contracts which can be the crown jewels of a company.
Sales 2.0, goes on to state, “In addition to facilitating the approval process, online contracting systems store and manage all of your signed agreements as well as those still in the approval process. Many companies still rely on file cabinets with hundreds or even thousands of folders administered by a team of people who act as unnecessary gatekeepers. Meanwhile, users of online contracting can quickly search for specific contracts. For security and control purposes, rules can be set to limit access by individual users. And, in addition to reducing the length of your sales cycle, online contracting can automate and improve internal processes that require documented approvals.”
If your company isn’t evaluating how document assembly can empower your sales people, accelerate your sales, reduce your costs, reduce your risks and increase your compliance, you are missing out on a potential game changing opportunity. Please check my company's Sales 2.0 contract automation solution the Exari SalesAcclerator™.
Special thanks to Robin Fray Carey at The Customer Collective for sending us a copy of Sales 2.0.

Video Helps Build Relationships in Virtual World

Video is a great way, among other things, to help build relationships in a virtual business world. Since your companies are typically cutting back on business travel due to the economy, the greening of the environment or just for plain efficiencies sake, you need to get creative to drive the same type of connections that you would have made in person. There is a great post on using video on Chad Levitt's blog The New Sales Economy called "Next Generation Sales Reps Use Video To Win". I saw it on The Customer Collective page.

I have found video to be a very effective tool to show people what you look like and to draw them into the typically little screen they are watching as opposed to being distracted by what is going on around the screen. You can video yourself as part of the presentation or better yet include video of your customers talking about your product or service.

Beyond video, however, another very important way to keep your virtual customers engaged is to prepare for the presentation so that you can customize it for each audience. Customization and specifically targeting content at your customers' needs will keep them interested and engaged.

Finally, use social media to surround your customers with relevant content that they can go find or subscribe to so that they can keep up with what is going on around your market segment. Tools like blogs, Twitter, LinkedIn and etc work great for building a stronger community than you could ever build over the phone. My company Exari just launched a "Community" page on our website to aggregate the things we are doing to build relationships with our customers.

How to give a killer online demo

I found some great tips (below) about doing online demos in the GoToMeeting newsletter called "How to Give a Killer Online Demo". Since you don't have the ability to be in the room and see your audience's responses, you have to go out of your way to make things engaging and exiting.

"Here are some tips we learned from a recent Webinar with Peter Cohan, author of the book, Great Demo! – an online demo pro if we ever saw one: 

• Encourage participation from the start. Ask participants for information, like their names, their job functions, what they are hoping to learn. If it’s a small group, have them respond verbally; for large groups, use the Chat or Q & A box.
• Make sure their equipment syncs with yours.   Ask participants if they can see your mouse in different places on the screen, if they can hear you clearly and if they are seeing the same slide you are.
  
  
• Move your mouse slowly and deliberately. "Zippy Mouse Syndrome" is a surefire way to make participants want to look away from the screen, the opposite of what you want them to do. If you can’t resist, change your mouse setting to force yourself to slow down.
  
  
• Use the highlighter and drawing tools. Adding a new moving element to the screen draws attention and helps you emphasize important features or ideas. You can invite participants to draw and highlight, too.
  
  
• Put audience members in the driver’s seat. Sure, passing keyboard and mouse control can be a little scary, but there’s no better way to hook people than to give them a hands-on experience. Ask them to perform specific tasks and talk them through the steps they need to do to help them feel confident."

More Companies Encouraging People to Work from Home

There is a great article in Business Week on working from home.  It talks about how major companies such as Capital One are not only encouraging people to work from home but in some cases they are incenting them to as well with home office expenses, laptops and blackberries.

This recesion along with longer term trends of the environment and technology are driving companies to reorganize how they are physically structured, how they manage their workforce and even how their employees do their jobs.

Additionally, tools from Web 2.0 and Social Media will be at the forefront of how companies adapt to these new realities.  Twitter for example is a great way to keep in touch with a mobile team.  And, LinkedIn can help you create a customer community.  There are also old standbys such as Instant Messaging and Team Rooms that have enabled people to manage virtual teams.  My company Exari is on the forefront of using technologies such as XML to facilitate the negotiation of complex documents and contracts in a virtual world as well.

Do schools kill our creativity?

I came home last night to find my 8th-grade son working on a Powerpoint presentation for school.  Much to my horror, it was filled with bad clip art and dense text.  Here was a very creative kid who spends his spare time making films attempting to conform to the "accepted" practices of presentations for his school.  Scary.  But this is where it all starts.

So, join me today in helping children and your young colleagues understand that communication does not have to forced into bad Powerpoint and that there are better ways to get your point across.

With my son I suggested video and images from Flickr or even better taking his own photos to supplement the communication. 

This reminds me of a presentation at TED (the thought provoking conference that now posts all of its presenations and discussion online) by Sir Ken Robinson called "Do Schools Kill Creativity?  He talks about how a group of small children were asked if they could draw,  everyone in the room raised their hands.  When asked if they could dance, everyone in the room raised their hands.  When asked if they could sing, everyone in the room raised their hands.  And, then later in life - I can't remember what grade but judging by my son it happens before 8th grade - children were asked the same questions and nearly everyone didn't raise their hands anymore.  Their confidence was gone.   Where did it go?

Furthermore, do schools force our children to begin thinking in Powerpoint and Word instead of thinking, creating and then choosing to express some part of their ideas in this tool called Powerpoint as well as in tools called writing, drawing, video, audio, painting and songs?  It seems to me that it does and it seems to me that we all have to do whatever we can to stop it or we will be doomed to bad presentations and bad communication for generations to come.  And, judging by the environment out there a little better communication couldn't hurt.

Accelerating the sales cycle and reducing cost

Here is a something I just posted on my company's blog about automating sales documents in order to accelerate sales and significantly reduce expense.  Documents like NDAs, pricing proposals, contracts and services agreements can be created by sales people themselves through a browser-based interview so that they can be created in real time with no waiting.

Sales is hard enough

Over the past 20 years or so CRM has exploded on the scene, fromGoldMine to ACT! to Siebel and now Salesforce.com and its SaaSbrethren.

CRM has done wonders for automating the sales process and helping sales people execute on a cadence of sales activities, follow a standard process and keep up with customers. Unfortunately, this is only half the battle in creating a truly efficient prospect-to-pay process.

Most sales cycles require a number of sometimes complex and burdensome documents to proceed to closure.  And, if our experience is any guide, it is the creation of these documents that causes immense pain for most salespeople and can delay and even lose sales in some cases.

NDAs, Proposals, Services Statements of Work, Business Cases, Sales Contracts, even customized collateral can be automated to accelerate the sales cycle, reduce the need for lawyers to create and review large volumes of contracts, and increase compliance with internal process and procedures.

Document Assembly can solve this problem by creating standardized templates, clauses and business rules that are owned and controlled by legal and/or sales operations so that every document that is created is done so in a compliant fashion. No more rogue Limitation of Liability clauses or unprofitable pricing.  No more out-of-date templates or old bottom drawer contracts re-used inappropriately.

While ensuring compliance, document assembly also empowers salespeople to create the necessary documents themselves in real time (with non-standard deals automatically escalated to legal on an exception basis). No more backlogs means more satisfied customers.

So, if the documents and contracts in your sales cycle are somewhat negotiable and fairly repetitive and predictable, and if the creation of these documents is slow and painful, you might want to consider automating them.

How to have better sales meetings

Sales meetings are usually bad and frequently a waste of time for a number of reasons.  In a virtual world, where you don't even see your sales people while you are meeting with them, things get even worse.  I used to have a manager who made me drive 3 hours both ways once a month so that I could attend his Monthly Sales Meetings that most people slept through or made excuses avoid.

1) Sales managers and their managers have to learn to trust the system.  If you use a system like Salesforce.com, make sure every sales person religiously updates it and then use it to generate reports and dashboards for management and yourself.  This way you can be very up to date on everything and know that even more data is available if you need it, without having to go through the details of every deal on every weekly call.  It is a huge relief to be able to trust the system and let go of the tedious inspections.   It reminds me of David Allen's book Getting Things Done.  Once you get everything in a system you trust, you can relax and focus on execution and not worry about what you are missing.

2) Sales managers are or used to be sales people and they like to talk.   In order for sales meetings to be succesful, I would argue that sales managers in general need to talk less. Collaboration is much more powerful than any one person so don't be afraid to let everyone else talk and pitch in.  It doesn't mean you aren't doing your job.  What you should do, is be a catalyst for good conversations.

3) Sales managers are also very susceptible to what I will call the Idea of the Month.  Since they spend a lot of time thinking about how to do things better and typically read and research a lot this as well, they sometimes will latch on to the latest idea and create a whole meeting around it. The problem is that most of the good sales people probably read the same books and do the same research.  What I do is write a blog and I used to write a newsletter/email for my team so that I could get book recommendations and ideas out to them in a way they could consume on their own time and not on a weekly call.

4) Agendas are also very important. If you don't tell your team what to expect and what to prepare for, they won't be prepared and won't have thought of questions and will end up not paying attention.  I just read a great interview of Jill Myrick on the MyVenturePad blog by David Stein about how to have better sales meetings.  Jill is a sales consultant whose company Meeting to Win  and blog  are also great places to go for ideas on making your sales meetings worthwhile and motivating.

5) Take the one on one discussions off line.  If you have to talk about a particular deal in real depth or if you have found information lacking in your sales system, then set up another 20-30 minutes with the person to discuss this.  I would recommend 20-30 minutes per week with each rep anyway if you can afford the time to make sure you are hearing things from them that they don't want to mention in the group.

6) Start and finish on time.  If you don't hold the call for people who show up late, they should eventually figure out that they shouldn't show up late.