The 2016 IDC Report on the Salesforce Economy is out!
It’s official! As an entrepreneur, you tend to go by gut feel a lot. Especially when you are breaking new ground like we are – with technology to manage and grow Key Accounts. It is all about building the solutions you believe in, nurturing the people you think will go the distance, working with partners that can help create value and taking the epic journey into the future just based on intuition. However, on some rare occasions, you get confirmation from a credible, fact-based entity that you are on the right track; that the dream is indeed real; and that the choices you have made are 100% justified. Today is one of those days. Today, we are celebrating the confirmation of something we have all grown with and grown from. Today we are celebrating the success of the Salesforce Economy. Why today? Because we just received word about new research that shows that Salesforce and its ecosystem of customers and partners will create nearly 1.9 million jobs and add $389 billion in GDP impact worldwide over the next five years. Because the research confirms that Cloud computing is slated to grow at more than six times the rate of traditional IT spending from 2015 to 2020. Because Salesforce customers have installed apps from the Salesforce AppExchange more than 4 million times. Also, because DemandFarm is one of the awesome apps on the AppExchange that’s been creating value by transforming the way B2B companies manage and grow their Key Accounts. The Ecosystem that has got our head in the clouds When we set out to build DemandFarm as the preferred technology for B2Bs to manage and grow Key Accounts, our goal was to create unparalleled value for our users. This goal was and is in many ways made possible by being a part of the Salesforce Ecosystem. Being native to Salesforce makes it easy for our customers to deploy and use DemandFarm securely and seamlessly from AppExchange, on the cloud. More importantly, it helps address major pain points for our users – Sales professionals and Sales Ops teams – when it comes to data management and customer-centric insights. Here is how we leveraged being on the Salesforce ecosystem to help solve a major customer problem – the lion’s share of data that goes into DemandFarm is populated automatically from the Salesforce CRM data. That means minimal-to-no data entry for Account Managers – which means more time for real Sales work! Because of everything about the Key Account – including Annual Plans – is in one place in one format in DemandFarm, Sales professionals no longer spend hours just entering, collating or compiling data to generate reports or make Account plans. Because the data and the related intel mined from the data are auto-populated and real-time, Sales Ops teams save hours spent chasing after various stakeholders for customer-related data points, crunching the numbers or other data management tasks. DemandFarm joins the dots across complex Account data, so everything about the Key Account is right there in real-time – customer-centric intel that helps make all the right strategic decisions. A Brave New World As we continue to learn, grow and innovate with Salesforce on this epic journey deeper into the clouds, this seems like a great time to take stock of what we have achieved with DemandFarm. With users across every B2B verticals including manufacturing, automotive, retail, and finance, we are pretty delighted with the response we are getting from leadership and users alike. You can read some of our customer success stories here. This year forward, our renewed focus is on enabling the people (read: all stakeholders) and institutionalizing the processes that drive growth for Key Accounts. What do we mean by that? It is pretty simple – everything that matters to Key Accounts and can be managed, facilitated or enriched with technology, we try and make DemandFarm do it. It is about balancing the art and science of Key Account Management– with all the lightness of being on the Cloud, and the convenience of AppExchange. If you are B2B and if you are on Salesforce, then I would strongly recommend a free trial of DemandFarm to see if Salesforce account planning can transform the way you manage and grow your Key Accounts. This month, it is an all-access pass to every single feature we have, for up to 3 users in your company. Don’t miss it. In the meanwhile, we are going to be in celebration mode along with all our compatriots in the Salesforce Ecosystem, as we make our way together into the future of automation and technology.
Dreamforce 2016 Parties Calendar
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Its Q, not James Bond
“I’ll hazard I can do more damage on my laptop sitting in my pajamas before my first cup of earl grey than you can do in a year in the field.”– Q The Role of technology in marketing has been growing exponentially in the last few years. It started evolving with functions like accounting, inventory management, project management. Then came technologies to automate sales, service and most recently, marketing. There are a lot of great technologies available now, and like you, I have tried some of them in my own marketing strategies. Needless to say, technology, tools, gadgets- all of them exist to improve efficiencies of the user, save time, money.. whatever. But when it comes to using technology for marketing particularly, we have a unique phenomenon. Marketing is an art as much as a science – it’s not like a production line or logistics management. And you can never fully automate the ‘art’ aspect of marketing- that still needs a really competent human- i.e. Marketing or Account Manager to lead the effort intelligently. The Key account management tool exists to enhance all of the inherent skills of the Marketer and enable victory. Let’s illustrate this with a really simple example. I bought a fantastic e-mail marketing tool once and thought it would do wonders. But, without a great subject line (headline) that makes sense to the recipient and without really great, relevant content, the email tool is useless. In fact, it could be detrimental and annoy my prospects. In developing DemandFarm over the last 3 years, I set out to make a James Bond-like the tool that solves everything effortlessly and wins the confidence of the most difficult customers. But recently while watching a James Bond film, it dawned upon me that DemandFarm is ‘Q’, not James Bond. For the uninitiated, Q is the nerdy genius providing Bond with all his gadgets. In reality, the user of my product (Key Account Manager) is James Bond. I was trying to make DemandFarm a James Bond. It is imperative for Bond to have a Q at his side. Think for a second, what makes James Bond exceptional?The swag, the license to kill or the awesome gadgets that get him out of every near-death situation he gets himself into? All the tools Bond owns come from Q – the Jetpack, laser shooting Omega Seamaster Professional watch, every gun, every bullet in that gun and the Aston Martin. Bond is incomplete without the modified Aston Martin built by Q. The car is a veritable tank, providing the bond with a companion he can count upon every time. It’s Q’s gadgets that make the man on her majesty’s secret service a living weapon. So for every James Bond of a Key Account Manager out there, dial ‘demandfarm.com’ for your very own Q.
How Many Key Account Managers in the World?
If you are into Key Account Management (KAM), this question would have probably crossed your mind? Originating from finding a solution to retaining Key customers to long-term relationship building to a full-fledged Key Account Management practice, KAM has become a vital ritual for organizations. With KAM, Organizations have recognized the need to ring-fence 80% of their revenue and more. We turned to LinkedIn to drum up the global population of key account managers. It stands at 306,000.Isn’t that quite a number? And if we further categorize the data by, Country Gender Age group We find some interesting data points. With data in, can an infographic be far behind? In this article, we have put all the above data onto one very easily consumable infographic. Please check it out here. Did you find anything interesting in the above infographic? The numbers from Germany and Switzerland definitely deserve a second look. It seems probable that there are job titles that contain ‘Key Accounts’ but are distinct from our conventional definition of Key Account Management. Possibly. What about the age group? Are younger professionals taking a greater interest in an account management career or is it just a function of the talent management approach for KAM organizations? I am interested in knowing your views. The data onto the above infographic were sourced from the LinkedIn Ad management tool. Within the tool, the DemandFarm team used the ‘Job Title’ parameter to determine the numbers. If you like what you see, do not hesitate to share it with the world. Explore the complete guide to Cross-selling and Up-selling to identify unexplored opportunities for your business as well as your clients’ business and grow better in 2021.
Strategic Account Management Association, Heuristics and Beautiful Summers
This was the first time I visited Chicago in the summer, and it was stunning. I think it’s the most beautiful city in the US when it is not cold. Unfortunately, that’s only 3 months a year; I was told.DemandFarm was honored to be a sponsor of SAMA 2016, and I was delighted to be representing DemandFarm at the event. The gathering of a few hundred SAM (Strategic Account Management) practitioners was exciting because of the opportunity it gave me to learn more about a subject I care deeply about. And I was not disappointed.I feel like I along with our small team at Strategic Account Management Association was able to connect some critical dots in our journey of building DemandFarm as the best possible enabling software for Strategic and Key Account Managers. Here are top three lessons I learnt Strategic Account Management is all about co-creating value for your customers. It sounds great and is true. But how do you quantify that ‘value’? We concluded that while some of it can be quantified, there is also undeniably ‘soft/intangible’ impact. We are now thinking ‘how we can make DemandFarm capture both aspects of value creation’? I have often come across this smirk accompanied by ‘Oh! You can’t have software for SAM/KAM’. This is partly true. At SAMA this year, I kept my eyes, ears, and mind open for more on this ‘art-science’ debate. If a phenomenon can be explained with math equations (algorithms), then sure, we can build key account management software. If it is only art (esoteric and mysterious), there may not be any point in bothering with software – the only the human mind can interpret it, and that too in myriad ways. But what if it is in the middle (heuristics)? Many of the world’s phenomena fall in the middle category. I think it depends on which side it tilts to. Our thinking at DemandFarm where we want to ‘enable’ SAMs was fortified with this insight. We will definitely be exploring more of this in future builds. The last lesson is that Chicago is beautiful in summer.
Demand Farming – Co-creating Customer Value
Many organizations are late in waking up to the value of a Strategic Account Management program. If you were to look at trends in the lead to deal funnel, Account Managers are predominantly talking about how data is not easily accessible or is not leveraged fully or effectively, there is a sustainability challenge in the process and therefore the results; how a formal Key Account Management process will boost results and how a software platform derived from best practices of KAM will help them. Reproducing here, some trends from DemandFarm Inc.’s report on ‘The Hype & Art of KAM’. Industry reports state that about 60% of organizations lose deals because competitors establish a better relationship with the customer. 50% of companies use the attribute “strategic fit” to select their key accounts, followed by 27% using “past/current revenue” for key/strategic account selection. 8 % of respondents identified access to customer executives and decision-makers as the main KAM challenge. 60% of respondents from best-in-class enterprises feel that their biggest KAM challenge is the balancing of short-term sales goals with long-term CRM goals. 2% of organizations still do not have a formal key account management process. 50% of respondents say data about key accounts in their organization is fragmented and not easily accessible. 83% of respondents believe that KAM planning and strategizing will receive a huge boost, with the adoption of a KAM software platform. 60% of respondents feel a software platform derived from KAM best practices would be useful to them. 28% of respondents feel a built-in account planning process would significantly aid them in planning and optimizing revenue from key accounts. To address these challenges, it is important to learn about the different stages of the enterprise lifecycle, how clients and providers view their relationships, what a good client relationship is about as well as how it can impact your results. While doing this, it is integral to adopt one of the two processes – transactional or transformational. Sitting on the fence between the two could prove to be a hindrance in creating and maintaining a happy account. The presenter, Adrian Davis, President, Whetstone Inc. also takes you through the above, as well as Winner’s Quadrant, the Knowledge Funnel, and other important things. He also helps you discover and discuss effective features of SAM software such as Account Whitespace Analysis, Organization Chart with Heat Map Analysis that could tilt the scales in your favor. The session happens now at SAMA’s Annual Conference 2016. Here’s to customer value! To learn more, join the session by Adrian Davis at #SAMAAC16‘.
You have got Leads. Now make them 4X More Effective.
There are 4 simple yet highly effective strategies for improving sales effectiveness and improving your chances of converting a lead to a deal. Speed: Strike when the iron is hot Shocking truth: In a survey done across 350 companies, 38% took more than a full day to respond. In the fast-paced world today, the speed of response is of the essence; this is succinctly explained through the adage ‘Strike when the iron is hot.’ The lead is open to being nurtured and led further in the funnel if your response time is quicker. The more you let the dust settle down on the lead, the more difficult it gets to convert him. Even the difference between 5 minutes and 30 minutes could mean death in the form of a dead lead. So make sure you set and communicate your response time and follow it through. Persevere: Never say die Shocking truth: 53% made no more than two attempts at contact and gave up after that. There are reams written about how if you hang in there and keep trying, success can be all yours. All of it is every bit true. A sale or a deal is lost not because it was dead, but because the salesperson did not try enough times or gave up far too soon, especially when he was far too close to closing it. The 2-word mantra for every sales person to convert a lead should be persisted and persevere. Even if you have to try for the 8th time or beyond, do so, as this will get you a higher response rate Embrace personalizing Shocking truth: 30% had no element of personalization in their emails. Messages, emails, professional calls tend to impact the personal touch, often making the sales call impersonal and cold. Personalizing the message, call or email makes all the difference in the world as it immediately puts the recipient in an open, receiving mode. Well begun is half done, as they say. The more elements of personalization you add in your communication, the more likely the recipient will click through and open and read the email. The content of the email should also be carefully tailored to suit the recipient as much as possible to garner more responses. It has been proven that personalizing messages make it 137 percent more likely that the recipient will open the email and respond. Perform or perish Shocking Truth: 58% were likely to miss the email at least 10 percent of the time. Checking how the email or your communication works and correcting course to make it work better, is very important. The effort deserves its dues, but so do the results. Performance needs to be the objective and the checkpoints of all your communication. Just as it is true in every aspect of business, it is true here – perform or perish! The truth, as we clearly can see above is that companies are nowhere close to the ideal strategies of follow-up; but they need to get there soon. Else the chasm between a lead and a deal will keep widening. “Act now!” should be the anthem and the action.
When Should you Go for Sales Enablement Tools?
As per industry figures, only a third of the sales team meet their quota, and just a few exceed it. So how does an organization get its sales team to deliver a great performance? Simple answer really- get in new tools to help your sales team. Empirical evidence shows that the right sales enablement technology implemented correctly, at the right time, makes the difference between lead, deal, and a loss. Organizations need sales enablement tools for a superlative sales performance. And the perfect time to do it is when you see any of the following happenings in your organization. Onboarding time for new salespersons exceeds the average Thousands of dollars are spent and hundreds of man-hours invested in getting the new salespersons get up to speed in their onboarding. And despite this, the performance is average or even poor. The right sales enablement tool can help cut this time by 30 to 40 % while ensuring the right content and knowledge of products and services are at hand for the new sales team to move ahead with confidence, sound knowledge and perform well. Productivity is suffering due to less time spent on core selling Sales productivity is a challenge, has been one, for a long time for many B2B companies When sales productivity dips, revenue is heavily impacted. The primary cause of this decline is attributed to the sales team performing more functions other than core selling. Usually, these tasks are routine, non-core and repetitive. Perfect candidates for automation. A good example would be a CRM that helps automate major such tasks and increases productivity by at least 30%. A blanket approach to sales The buyer is getting smarter and more demanding. If sales are using a blanket approach to selling, then it is the seller’s loss, for certain. To stem the loss and to transform the selling process vis-à-vis the changing buyer scenario, it is critical to get into automation. These tools can help tailor the offering or solution based on buyer persona, preferences while also tailoring the content, messaging and interaction timing between the salesperson and buyer. Sales strategies have to take this into account to ensure that the sales team meets the buyer one-on-one, thus improving effectiveness. Taking the sales further in the journey is a problem There is a cost attached to not taking the sale further in its journey, in time and in the right manner. Often, salespersons are not aware of how to do it; they get stuck after a point, or maybe they are not so sure about the next step in certain situations. Sales enablement tools like relationship mapping come to the rescue once again by helping the salespersons with the right help through persona-based selling tips, just-in-time coaching, and effective collaterals. These are also instantly accessible to any of the sales team members. Sitting on the fence ends up in more losses than anything else It is incredible to note that anything up to 50% of the sales forecasts ends up as a no-decision. Something that is neither here nor there and as time lapses, the decision goes the wrong end of the funnel and is declared as a lost deal. It is interesting to see that this happens because, in many cases, it is easier to do nothing. “Why challenge the status quo?” is always a better proposition. With sales enablement tools, it is easier to overcome the status quo. This happens by offering value. The more the salesperson gets to the depth of the prospect and understands his business, addresses his pain points, the more the engagement between the salesperson and the buyer. This often results in a deal. Sales enablement tools help salespersons by guiding them on how to build a case, helps them to engage the prospects with value-added content and help them to advance the deal. The right content at the right time is not available to the sales team A survey shows that 90 percent of content is not used. Where we know that impactful content influences 95 percent of B2B sales, sales teams say they never have the right content on hand when they want it. As a result, sales teams waste valuable time away from core selling and in finding the right content or creating it themselves. With sales enablement tools, real-time data shows what content a sales rep may need at what time for a maximum turnaround and helps put up that content for the salesperson to use. Right content, at the right time for the right sales person, is the best thing that can happen to sales effectiveness. Limited insights into what works and what doesn’t, hampers the sale If data is there, then data analytics are not there; this is true in many cases. This hampers the sale as has been proven time and again. Insights help in closing a deal because insights help the salesperson in knowing more about his prospect. Sales enablement tools help in data mining and with predictive analysis helps the sales persons to glean insights from data captured. This helps the sales team to improve sales performance, through improved productivity, increased effectiveness and thus improves revenues. The above 7 signs are clear indications of when an organization should start getting in automation and look at sales enablement seriously. If you have spotted any of the above signs, we recommend you start getting into action immediately and get in Sales Enablement.
Operation Scaling Up – How Sales Operations is the Defining Factor at this Stage?
The most friction inducing factor is when companies start growing up at an exponential rate and aim at a skyrocketing of revenue. Typically, companies at this stage end up hiring more and more star sales people; which is good in its place, but the most important hire of the organization’s growth season could be a Sales Operations Star. Here’s why: You are hiring new sales people by the dozen; you need someone to train them and make them productive and at a fast clip. While most of us think that sales directors and the top sales people are the ones who should be doing this, we are sadly mistaken. They are the last ones to be interested in helping HR write Job Descriptions, screening candidates, interviewing, recruiting and once on board, training, coaching, mentoring them. Even if they do, they may take their own sweet time as their primary focus is sales. Time lost is sales lost. The need of the hour is a Sales Operations Star. A great sales leader isn’t always a great operations guy. There may be exceptions, but they are just that. Exceptions. Most sales leaders and star sales people practically hate the operations job of putting together information in spreadsheets, analyzing it, studying metrics and putting together an action plan to hit where it is needed. They would rather work on the actual field sales. They are action guys and not operations guys. Sales and leadership alignment is a back room job – not the battlefield goal. Alignment between sales and marketing may be a good thing to think of and say, but practicing it is often difficult. The sales force is keen to roll up their sleeves and convert the next hot lead they can get their hands on; they are not too fond of pricing, packaging or other high-level strategies and would rather leave it to a representative who is specially cut out for the job – he is better known as the Sales Operations Specialist. Generating reports is not the sales person’s cup of tea. Generating reports is the bane of a sales team. Somewhat like a necessary evil; sales persons may often avoid working on reports like the plague. This job is better left to the sales operations person who will, in all probability, lovingly spend lots of time over generating reports from the CRM insights on a daily, weekly, monthly basis in whatever format they are required for whoever at the organizational level. Choosing the right technology tools is the mandate of the Sales Operations Chief along with the Sales Leadership. Technology planning, implementation, and the preview is the job of a sales operations person along with the Sales Leadership’s support. Technology and choosing the right tool is crucial to every organization’s sales department as it enters the growth phase. Sales operations leaders allow their sales force to focus on sales and handle the operations and sales administrative part themselves. Sales operations without a doubt are necessary to grow sales and revenues.
Setting Up A Key Account Management Process in 9 Steps – Part 1
The title may make it all sound easy, this process of setting up Key Account Management as a process in 9 easy steps, but you and we, both know it is not easy. However, the sooner begun, the better done. Let’s cut to the chase and start knocking out the 9 steps easy and quick. In this part I, we will look at the setting up part. In Part II, we will look at running and the review part. Portfolio vis-à-vis profits: Every business decision needs to be weighed and analyzed for its ability to make a profit. Similarly, the portfolio that will come under the purview of the KAM process needs to be precisely analyzed. You need to make sure that the business sectors, lines that you are in, are deliberately chosen; you need to know why they are chosen and whether they are there for their profit-making capabilities. In business, there is no room for happenstance or chance. Every decision has to be a deliberate one. Understanding the customer in-depth: Dissecting the customer on a whiteboard is a good idea. This will help you know who your customers are? Who is good and who is bad? What makes them so? What are their needs – specify them? What are their loves and pet peeves – professionally and in terms of your products? How much are they worth to your business? Detail their behavior patterns when they make key decisions regarding your product or category- new buys, renewals, moving to a competitor? Why do customers buy from you? What are their deepest fears, issues, and challenges? Remember, God is in the details! Relationship X-ray: A relationship scan is always good to maintain the health of the relationship or improve it. What insights has the relationship mapping of your key accounts provided? How is it seen within your department and within the organization? Do you have the right talent mix within your team to service these customers? Can you accurately or at least closely put a number on the longevity of the relationship, are you aware of the issues involved and the history? How are your key accounts distributed percentage-wise, in your total share? Do you have data and insights on possible opportunities for developing more business? Draw up a Key Account plan blueprint: This blueprint should clearly state the main direction, opportunities, and priorities for each Key Account. It should have a direct link to customer information and should be built as a collaborative effort between internal and external stakeholders. This should then be made available and accessible to all involved in the account. It is a good idea to check if you have had the customer involved and if he has been cued into this plan. You will also need to be clear which information is important and which is not; and also be clear about the source of this information and the source of having it regularly updated and in real time if possible. In the next part, Part II, we will see how to run and review the KAM process. See you soon!
