LinkedIn Profiles in your CRM Cloud

Today started like every other day until I received an unexpected gift. It came in the form of a cloud service to integrate LinkedIn Profiles into my salesforce.com contacts. 

When reading my email today I received the AppExchange Digest, which is a regular update salesforce.com sends out to users to provide updates on new Apps. One of the small updates on the list was a hyperlink to the LinkedIn® Connector for Salesforce CRM from redkite. This looked interesting to me, so I read more about it. The basic idea is that when you pull up a contact in Salesforce CRM, you will also see the LinkedIn® Profile for the user.

I decided to install the software and followed the documentation from redkite, which basically involved:

1. Downloading the App into my salesforce.com instance
2. Registering for an API key in LinkedIn®
3. Entering the API key into my salesforce.com instance
4. Modifying the contact page layout in salesforce.com to move the new LinkedIn® display object into my standard contact page layout.

I completed the installation and setup in less time than it took me to drink a cup of coffee. The first time I used the newly saved contact screen it confirmed with me if it was okay to use my LinkedIn® account to access LinkedIn® Profiles. After this confirmation the LinkedIn® Profiles began to appear on the contact screen.

The integration works like a dream. It knows which contacts to which I am connected and those to whom I am not. If I want to view the contact's complete profile I simply click on the button which says "View Profile in LinkedIn". These has tremendous potential for those wanting instant access to more information about their buyer directly from within CRM. It is convenient and demonstrates excellent interoperability between cloud service providers. Here is what it looks like with the contact information from my account rep at salesforce.com.

It's easy to see how this will be a benefit for sales people in helping them to better understand the buyer - in one screen they can see key information from LinkedIn®:

1. Degree of Relationship Display 
2. Current and Previous Employers and Titles 
3. Summary Profile and Education 
4. View How You're Connected 
5. Seamless navigation to full LinkedIn® Profile 
6. Secure authentication directly to LinkedIn® 

This a super example of how applications working together in the cloud create tremendous value. If you use salesforce.com, have your administrator install this App today. If you are using another CRM system find out how to access it from your system. 

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Exploiting the Cloud to Sell Value

Adversarial selling approaches don't work, especially in our socially networked world. How can you use the Cloud to be customer centric, while collaborating with your buyer to progress the buying cycle?

We achieve this by following some simple approaches, which we also recommend to our clients:

1. Select a cloud-based collaboration tool which will be used by you and the buyer to structure the buying process. We call the implementation of this tool the Value Roadmap. The primary goal of the Value Roadmap is to develop a collaborative plan which is essentially the road map for the buyer to achieve value from your service.
2. Stop doing account planning without the buyer present. Two hours of planning without the buyer can likely be replaced with five minutes of interaction with the buyer. Account planning is a hypothetical exercise without direct input from the buyer. If you have developed a trusting rapport with the buyer and are creating value during the buying process, the buyer they will gladly share the information you require for success.
3. Develop a library of customer Top Challenges your solutions address to be used during the needs discovery process. These are worded in the customer's language and are used to keep the buying process focused on buyer needs and the relationship of your solutions to the buyer's needs.

I should state that while this approach may support the buying process for commodities, it works best for those selling services (either delivered by consultants or delivered through an online service such as an SaaS application).

The basic premise of the Value Roadmap is to build a plan which is built collaboratively with the buyer to document all of the necessary steps, starting with problem discovery and ending with the implementation of the services, which will both solve the buyer problems and provide the expected value. Depending on the scope of your services, this may include activities such as demonstrations and perhaps a business case. The most critical goal of the Value Roadmap is to focus the buying / evaluation activities on high value customer problems which drive a compelling business case. Rather than discussing endless lists of features or providing services which will be need to be priced lower because they solve low value customer problems, the Value Roadmap strives to keep our activities focused on higher value and can be used to challenge the addition of unrelated activities.

The Value Roadmap is an extremely powerful tool in its own right. When complemented by sales representatives who have been trained in customer centric selling techniques - either SPIN or Customer Centric Selling, it can improve opportunity close rates substantially.

But I started this discussion by presenting the need for a collaborative, cloud-based tool to drive the Value Roadmap process. This is mandatory because:

1. In the online world face-to-face meetings are no longer the primary method of contact. You need a tool which represents you professionally and demonstrates your understanding of how to conduct a sales process collaboratively. Email fails completely (even if you copy the emails into your internal CRM system).
2. Time zones and flexible work hours require a tool which is accessible from any device at any time, to allow the sales process to keep moving.
3. Personal preferences of your buyer dictate how they want to interact with you. Some will work directly in the cloud-based environment, while others will ask you to maintain the online plan on their behalf. Both approaches work - we end up with agreed upon next steps which are transparent to the buying and selling organization at all times. Without an online tool accessible by the buyer, your plan is no better than an account plan collecting dust on your shelf.
4. It forms the repository of all evaluation information, including RFPs, business cases, and presentations. Your client will appreciate the value of this repository and view you favorably as a result.

There are many options for providing a tool for delivering the Value Roadmap online. For companies with large budgets this can be done with the development of an online tool which supports some level of mass-customization. One company I worked with considered the development of a tool which would provide a customized web page for every buyer. Most clients, however, will likely implement Value Roadmaps using one of the readily available online project management / task collaboration tools.

We have used both Basecamp and 5pm Web. Our current preference is for 5pm Web because it is more oriented towards project time lines and our Value Roadmaps are designed as projects with specific delivery dates.

Below is a hypothetical sample of a Value Roadmap from our 5pm Web system. Our guided customer buying approach, which is deployed via the Value Roadmap, starts something like the picture below and is then customized for each client situation.

While we don't represent 5pm Web, we have found it to be a very useful cloud-based service which we use on our client projects (we have joined their affiliate network). Using it for our Value Roadmaps was a natural extension of our use of the tool. If you check their website you will find very competitive pricing plans.

Implementing Value Roadmaps using an online tool where you collaborate with your buyers has many benefits:

1. The buying process is "always-on" and fully transparent to all stakeholders within the selling and buying companies.
2. The seller is viewed as progressive, professional, and value-focused by the buyer.
3. Expensive proof activities, such as demos, are focused on high value customer problems. Low value activities can be negotiated out of the sales process.
4. The approach is customer centric and teaches sales people to make use of that expensive sales training you sent them on (SPIN or Customer Centric Selling). It provides the content that is required to make the sales methodologies work.
5. It accelerates the sales cycle with the buyer's approval.
6. Using the online tool as a central document store saves the buyer and seller time when looking for documents, notes, and next steps.

The Value Roadmap approach can be implemented with very little preparation. You can be executing them in less than a week with your buyers. Follow some simple steps - select a tool like 5pm Web, build your standard plan similar to the example above, and start experimenting with your sales team and selected buyers. The approach is made more powerful by using one of the sales methods described above, and is made most effective when you develop your Top Challenge library as a knowledge repository for your sales team to conduct the Value Roadmap exercise. I will end with a shameless plug - we work with clients to both develop their Top Challenge library and to implement a Value Roadmap selling approach.

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Do you know what your customers are thinking?

Right now your customers are experiencing your services or interacting with your company. Can they easily interact with you to provide feedback, or do they have to vent their frustration into other communities?

I am still surprised at the number of organizations that don't offer their customers the opportunity to provide real-time feedback about how things are going. Many companies rely on the age-old monthly, quarterly or (yikes) annual courtesy call initiated by a sales reps to touch base with the customer to see if they need to buy more stuff. Many companies also incorporate an annual or bi-annual survey (which are now mostly conducted online) into their customer feedback loop, and many others use automated surveys which are sent to a customer after closing each case (or problem ticket).

Do these approaches go far enough? Well, not really. Why?

1. Often the annual survey tries to do too much and in the end only a couple of questions really matter. The questions in the annual survey are broad in scope and typically everything hinges on the responses to two critical questions - "How are we doing overall?" and "Would you recommend us to others?". Usually team bonuses are linked to these two questions and the account team mobilizes (reacts) to focus resources on bringing these scores back in line. Usually at all costs.
2. The periodic survey also lacks any spontaneity. Usually good and bad experiences are not remembered and the general impression "today" is used to complete the survey. 
3. The people who generally complete the case-closed surveys and in some cases the periodic surveys are generally focused on day-to-day issues and may not have an awareness about other important questions (often never asked). They may not have a handle on the critical problems your solution is addressing and the resulting value it delivers. In short, there is no guarantee the person completing the survey understands the business impact of your service.

We believe there is a simple solution to this problem. We also believe cost effective cloud-based tools will ensure you appear caring and professional in the eyes of your customers.

Our recommendation for collecting immediate and relevant customer feedback is twofold:

1. Always-on Feedback - Provide an immediate feedback mechanism for customers on your website through which feedback may immediately and easily be submitted. In its most basic implementation this is an online form. In its most progressive usage this is a forum on your website where the issues are discussed amongst all customers. Using this approach, customers are allowed to post new forum threads and interact on any number of topics. Your organization assigns forum owners and ensures each thread is followed. For some of our larger projects we have also implemented private forums with specific customers using Drupal to create highly interactive communities for collaboration and content sharing across all issues of a major project implementation. Drupal also gives us the full power of a Content Management System to create private areas for specific sub-groups. In one implementation we created a private area for the CEO to document and discuss specific ideas, programs and measures.
2. Where's the Beef? - In the days before super-sized fast food this was the question asked by a fast food chain when it talked about its competitors' "more bun that burger approach". In the case of your customers the bottom line question is - "where's the value?" Companies grow their customer base by delivering value. We need to be continually confirming the value we are delivering to our customers. Recently, our company delivered a project for a client where we designed a value discovery survey using Survey Gizmo where we asked specific questions about the value received from their solutions. The potential respondents were selected in our salesforce.com database based on contact attributes we had assigned in salesforce.com. The list was exported to MailChimp, which is our email management tool of choice, due to its capabilities and direct integration to the salesforce.com API. Survey Gizmo has a direct integration to Mailchimp, which allowed us to use the capabilities of viewing email opens, click thrus, and ultimately responses, directly in MailChimp. While we used the survey dashboard and reports in Survey Gizmo to analyse the results, management at our client company simply used MailChimp to view all of the results. In this particular case the value of the solutions were validated through the survey responses and the information collected will be used to launch a very important new partnership and marketing program. We expect to drive even more value for customers and significant new revenues.

As usual, the cloud services we mentioned in this post are tools we use with customers all of the time. We are not paid to write about them, however, we have joined the affiliate programs of some of them.

The online value survey we developed will be made available through the corporate website for any customer to complete at any time. The information collected through these value surveys will have many purposes:

1. Add to our library of top challenges faced by our customers and how our solutions address them.
2. Influence our marketing collateral development and demonstration scenarios used during the buying process.
3. Validate our pricing strategies.
4. Enhance the conversation about customer challenges and value we are having both in sales and through our online presence.
5. Influence our product management function and determine the highly valued features and those which are not valued.
6. Train our customer service representatives on how our solutions create value for customers and how they should be assisting customers.

When you implement a program of soliciting Always on Feedback and Where's the Beef feedback from your customers, your customers will view their relationship with your organization more strategically. In it's simplest form of implementation using Survey Gizmo, you can be doing it in an afternoon. Don't start the program with endless internal meetings to get the questions just right. Just get started!

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Converting Eyeballs into Leads

How can you convert anonymous visitors to your website into actionable leads? A combination of cloud-based services and a good partnership between sales and marketing is the critical first step.

My clients typically use opt-in email campaigns to market offers to their open leads, newsletter list and other opt-in lists they may be managing. We use cost-effective and powerful tools to monitor the effectiveness of our campaigns (see last week's blog). Our tools allow us to track email opens, click-thrus, and landing page hits. Using this information we are able to determine the strength of a buyer's interest in our offers, even if we don't get a conversion (i.e. the online form submitted).

This is tremendously powerful. But what if we could take our analysis further and actually track the progress of the buyer's hits to specific pages on our website? Using this information we could see what information resonated with the buyer and perhaps where our content was not viewed. To put together this picture of visitor behavior, we could likely use the reporting from our CMS and Google Analytics, but it would be an extremely laborious process.

One of my clients decided to close this gap without the manual effort and is conducting a trial of a service called LeadLander. My first impression of the service is very positive (and no, they are not compensating me in any way to write this post).

First I will show you how we are using the tool and then describe the potential benefits.

The purpose of LeadLander is to track the companies or ISP's hitting pages on your site. You insert the LeadLander code into your pages, much the same way you insert the Google Analytics code. I have inserted the code into the site pages and also into Unbounce landing pages. It does not seem to degrade performance of the pages as near as we can tell.

We have noticed that about 80% of the visitors to our site are reported to us as companies, while the other 20% are reported as ISPs. This makes sense as this client sells a B2B offering primarily to large and mid-sized enterprises.

When you enter LeadLander you enter via the dashboard. On the left of the screen you will see a running list of the hits to your pages. It looks like the picture below. You may click on any of the links to see the detail of the company's visits. If you click the search term link in the lower box, you will see the companies who arrived at your page(s) via that specific search term.

On the right of the dashboard page you see a summary of statistics as shown below. There are some very useful stats about the most active companies on your site, number of unique companies visiting your site and what State or Province they are visiting. This helps you to get a picture of who is active on your site.

We have used this information to correlate the activities of accounts in active campaigns, in our sales pipeline or on our open lead list. As you might expect, this has been very revealing. We have also noticed a high degree of activity from companies where we have had no recent contact (or maybe not ever). More on that later.

 

When you follow a search term link from the dashboard you are taken to the company detail page. You will see the information below on the left of the page, which is the list of companies using the specific search term to find your site. 

On the company detail on the right of the screen you see information about the company and the pages visited by that company.

LeadLander has a few standard layouts which are very useful, one of which is the most active visitor page. This tells you how many times a company has hit your pages. We find this to be very interesting when compared against our sales and marketing activities for campaigns and sales. This is the left side of the page.

And on the right we have the detail for any company selected on the left of the page.

When using a service like LeadLander, it is critical (like every other tool), to integrate it into your periodic processes -  daily and weekly. This is an extremely valuable tool for synchronizing the activities of sales and marketing. Often these two groups will work at cross purposes and LeadLander can help to get them working better together. Depending on the volume of activity on your website, a periodic meeting (and daily might be the right frequency) between sales and marketing to compare the website company visit activity from LeadLander to your active campaigns, open leads, sales pipeline, and companies who are completely new to you, should produce action plans which will lead to proactive conversion of eyeballs, leads and opportunities.

We also think it is important to be ethical in your approach to using the information in LeadLander. All the principles of permission-based marketing still apply. When you find a new visitor which you want to pursue you will need to approach them and gain their permission to begin the sales process.

For your existing target companies, LeadLander can validate their interest. More progressive conversational websites (instead of pure brochure sites) can exploit the knowledge LeadLander provides that much more.

To summarize a few of the benefits:

1. Validate the interest of active buyers (in a campaign, open lead, or active opportunity) and focus your efforts to convert/close them quicker
2. Determine which content gets used the most on your website and develop more of it and get rid of less-used content to streamline and improve the buying experience 
3. Take your sales campaigns further by tracking the click-thru patterns of email targets and others within the same company to obtain a better return on campaign spending
4. Create leads from eyeballs. One of my clients receives about 5,000 visits per month to their website. Of those, about 500 open the registration page (our permission to sell to them), and of those 500 less than 10% sign up (or convert from an eyeball to a lead). If we could successfully target another 50 of those in a month we could double our eyeball to lead conversion rate!

LeadLander has a lot more functionality that what I have discussed here today. It is configurable, can provide alerts, and also sends out daily summary emails. There are a number of other vendors offering solutions in this arena. Assuming you can build a service like this into your processes, it is worth evaluating.

I would not recommend implementing a solution like LeadLander in a chaotic sales environment where you have not first implemented good processes for permission-based marketing, email and landing page campaigns, and good sales execution, including lead and opportunity management. It will simply add more "todo's" in an environment where things are already not getting done.

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