Real-Time, Right Time-Selling Rapidly Sensing and Responding to Prospect Demand within Complex Sales Processes 0
Executive Summary Real-Time Responsiveness Can Transform Complex-Product Industries Some industries have been utterly transformed by the Internet. Commodity industries like book retailing and stock trading now deliver massively improved service and convenience at dramatically lower prices, by using the Web to acquire, build relationships, and process transactions with customers with tremendous efficiency. Companies with value-added products and complex sales processes have not generally participated in the Internet commerce revolution for the past few years as have their commodity peers. Now, using specialized Internet-enabled tools and processes, these relationship-oriented businesses are able to respond faster, more accurately and more agreeably to the needs of their customers. These tools and processes enable Real-time, Right-time selling: the ability to sense the interest level and needs of a sales prospect, combined with the ability to provide an appropriate response to the sensed events right away. The early results driven by these highly evolved techniques are astounding, and the much larger size of these markets suggest that we will enjoy a new era in Internet-driven efficiencies as these innovations are taken up. Real-time responsiveness to customers expressions of interest and need is an invaluable competitive weapon. In their book, Competing Against Time: How Time-Based Competition Is Reshaping Global Markets, George Stalk and Thomas Hout show that the most responsive businesses exceed industry averages for revenue growth and profit by 300% or more. This effect is magnified, although not often used, for businesses with complex products that involving a lengthy, consultative selling process. 1
The Web Is Necessary, but not Sufficient, to Drive The Web has become a key, real-time communication channel used by buyers to gather information prior to making a purchase, for both commodity and value-added businesses. However, only recently have vendors with complex products and consultative sales processes used the Web aggressively to accelerate their sales cycles. Most complex-product vendors today have a strong presence on the Internet. This presence is often a very detailed presentation of products and features, but typically a passive marketing presence with no link into the company s sales funnel, and little effort made to guide prospects through the sales process. These passive marketing and sales communications efforts can be tied together with real-time, rapidresponse selling tools to guide prospects to move forward more rapidly to the purchasing decision. Important lessons can be learned from commodity-based industries like airlines and stock brokerages that have undergone massive changes in the ways they market and distribute their products. Ten years ago, airlines would not have conceived of selling directly to their customers. Travel agents were a critical intermediary. Today, any airline marketing executive who is not continuously improving the process of pursuing customers directly over the Internet is either out of touch or unemployed. Yet, the Internet has not heavily impacted sales processes for complex products like real estate, investment products, enterprise software, sophisticated technical products and other specialties. These are not commodities, and they require personalized, proactive, high-touch consultative sales activities. The added depth and greater level of complexity associated with selling these products makes it tougher to facilitate real-time sales on the Web. Even so, the technology and methods exist today to completely transform even a highly complex selling process when the proper steps are taken and the right real-time solutions are put in place. The Subtle Art of Most people don t like to be sold. High-pressure sales techniques are a quick way to turn off a customer. At the same time, prospects don t like to be ignored. When they have a critical question, they want an immediate answer. Right-time selling tools help customers get exactly the information they need precisely when they need it to make a positive decision. Instead of forcing a sales pitch on a prospect who is not yet ready for a one-on-one dialogue, demand-sensing selling technology leave that choice in the hands of the prospect, thus creating a less contentious, more pleasurable buying experience. This is done by tracking the prospect s needs and desires dynamically over the Web and making a sales consultation available at the instant that the prospect wants it, when sales resistance is lowest and the willingness to be influenced in a positive way is at its peak. With a real-time, right-time selling platform, sales people can immediately respond to customers when they express interest in their products or services. Follow-up rates are increased and lead wastage is reduced or eliminated. Sales responses are more intelligent because sales reps can address the specific interests of the prospects with the precise information they want and need. 2
Traditional, labor-intensive sales methods such as cold-call prospecting and telephone or postal mail follow-up are outdated and inefficient. Instead, sales teams are now able to rapidly relay trackable digital collateral in response to dynamic customer requests, and quickly measure results by determining who is most interested and precisely where their interests lie. This enables sales reps to focus on the hottest prospects and those most likely to buy, thus accelerating the sales cycle to increase revenues and profitability. Tools Rather than sending paper brochures or unformatted email messages crafted from scratch, sales and marketing professionals can communicate with interested customers using customizable digital collateral. This approach enables a faster and more professional follow-up. By tracking a prospect s search engine, email forwarding and Web site activities, the sales platform can generate a clear demand signal for the sales team, prompting the appropriate level of focus and response to that individual. Customizable and trackable digital collateral can also be triggered through a form-linked autoresponder message. Depending on how a lead generation form is filled out, custom on-brand digital collateral is sent immediately to the prospect, encouraging more site visits and delivering an even sharper demand signal to the sales and marketing teams. Autoresponder email messages enable businesses to respond in a personalized manner to web prospect requests very quickly. These messages are also designed to drive prospects back to the site so they can find the information that they seek, and their activity can be tracked for sales and marketing purposes. A traditional postal mail campaign can require four weeks or more for results to be tabulated and leads presented to sales for follow-up. Embedding messages with a personalized URL link to a custom Microsite (such as www.samplesite.com/johndoe123) enables individual responses to be identified immediately and associated with detailed buyer information to ensure timely and effective follow-up responses. Detailed Web site activity is one of the strongest signals of purchase intent, yet most complex-products vendors do not have visibility into this activity. 3
1. Profile the visitors on your site 2. Custom business rules identify most valuable prospects 3. Reps invite prospects proactively for an online consultation Anonymous Web site visits can be turned into genuine sales opportunities when business rules are used to sense a prospect s purchase intent (a certain number of page views, searches, form fills or downloads) and the prospect is sent a discrete instant message offering assistance. This approach is most effective when the prospect is actively considering multiple vendors. The best-equipped real-time, right-time vendor often gains a strong competitive advantage. Turning Months into Days and Days into Minutes Industry studies show that companies that employ real-time, right-time digital selling are able to reduce their sales cycles, significantly in many instances. A four-month sales cycle may be reduced to two months or less. Responses to prospects and customer follow-up are shortened from several days to minutes or seconds. Consistently high levels of quality are injected into the sales process and corporate profitability can be substantially enhanced. In the same way that modern tools have made people in medical science more effective enabling much higher quality treatments and surgeries in much less time - real-time demand-sensing tools and right-time digital collateral are making salespeople more productive and more successful. Improving salespeople s ability to build effective relationships, as well as removing much of the drudgery and repetitive tasks involved in long sales processes, accomplish this goal. Jim Dickie, a partner with Insight Technology Group and coauthor of The Sales and Marketing Excellence Challenge, says that complex-product companies should be focusing on processes and technology that increase the effectiveness of salespeople not to be confused with merely increasing efficiencies, like reducing paper work. Making an average salesperson more efficient just gives you an efficient average salesperson, he says. 4
Sales reps must still respond to customer inquiries and follow-up in a timely manner with customers who show sincere interest. But proactive sales systems make it much easier to do that by providing tools such as pre-written messages and letters, digital brochures and other documents that support and accelerate the sales process. Trackable digital collateral is a recent innovation that represents a major advance in Internet-based selling, often producing impressive results. The age of Internet-enabled, real-time, right-time selling is here. Those sales organizations that most effectively leverage the dynamic opportunities that the Internet offers are most likely to be successful during the next economic cycle. Example: Global exchange Services Implementing Real-Time, Right-Time Company Global exchange Services (GXS) exchanges manual lead generation processes for a digitized, web-based approach, unlocking profits, and customer satisfaction. GXS, formerly a division of GE, operates one of the largest B2B e-commerce networks in the world, with more than 100,000 trading partners, accounting for $1 trillion in goods and services, providing supply chain services and software to 60% of the Fortune 500. Challenge GXS needed a better lead generation method. Before implementation of their real-time, right-time selling system, GXS generated leads through cold-calling and inbound web forms. A typical rep made 50 cold calls per day, resulting in about 2 qualified leads. While several hundred web form leads were generated monthly, the process of following up with them was not automated, posing challenges in tracking sales rep responsiveness. GXS has an active web site, with tens of thousands of visitors per month, but only approximately 1.5% of traffic generated inbound lead activity. GXS had many of the components of a successful lead generation program an aggressive inside sales force, an effective high-traffic web site and powerful marketing collateral, but these were not coordinated and integrated. Solution GXS implemented the following tactics to increase lead generation effectiveness, speed up their sales cycle, increase customer satisfaction and reduce costs: Business-rules driven proactive chat with hot web site prospects. By alerting the right inside sales rep, in real-time, to the presence of prospects looking for immediate customer service on the GXS web site, and then enabling a collaborative session to ensue, the inside sales team was able to increase web site lead generation by over 70%. In addition, the average order size and closing rate were significantly higher for web site leads Sales collateral Autoresponder. Prospects that fill e-newsletter web lead forms receive a digital collateral piece by email. More than just a thank you for contacting us form, this autorespond email entices the prospect back to the web site to view deep content that is relevant to the inbound request. This ensures that prospects have a very positive experience on the web site and do not fall 5
through the cracks, and also gives the inside sales team another opportunity to address the need in real-time, while the prospect s interest is at a peak. Sales-driven, trackable digital collateral. Providing the inside and field sales teams with websitetrackable digital collateral pieces dramatically speeds up the sales cycle. Both as prospecting and follow-up tools, these email tools allow the reps to respond to requests faster, and focus their sales efforts by working preferentially with prospects that demonstrate high interest levels through their email and web site activities (e.g. email opens and forwards, web page views, form fills, downloads, and search engine queries). Also, GXS saves hundreds of thousands of dollars on print brochures and mailing costs. Value-added, Educational Newsletter. GXS now publishes a value-added, educational email newsletter targeted at decision-makers for its e-commerce services. The e-newsletter was informative and built the GXS reputation for knowledge leadership in its market, but it was also a potent lead generation tool. The e-newsletter has web-tracking capability, informing sales reps of new needs, and GXS marketing team on emerging trends in the market. By embedding sales-oriented calls to action in an educational e-newsletter, GXS has generated over 1,000 qualified leads, worth several million dollars in probability-weighted pipeline revenue, in three months. Results Eloqua Conversion Suite provides automation and increases the scope of GXS marketing campaigns. By embedding sales-oriented calls to action in its e-newsletter, GXS has generated over 1,000 qualified leads, worth several million dollars in probability-weighted pipeline revenue, in three months. 6
About Eloqua Founded in 1999, Eloqua provides software and expertise to B2B marketers to execute, automate and measure highly effective marketing programs. Eloqua s mission is to make our customers the most effective marketers on Earth. Eloqua Conversion Suite is the industry s leading integrated demand generation platform for businesses that expect measurable results from their marketing efforts. An on-demand family of solutions, Eloqua Conversion Suite automates and integrates the key sales and marketing functions of e-mail, direct mail, web site analytics, campaign analytics, and sales force automation to improve the quality and quantity of sales leads, eliminate waste and accelerate the entire selling process. With market-leading technology backed by expert professional services, Eloqua automates best practices in demand generation for B2B marketers who need to produce a continuous flow of qualified leads for their sales force. Eloqua s customers include Sybase, Seagate, Nokia, JBoss, Administaff, Nuance and many other leading B2B marketers. Eloqua Corporation is headquartered in Toronto with offices in London and throughout the United States. To learn how Eloqua can help you reach new levels of marketing performance, please visit www.eloqua.com or call 866-327-8764. 7