Not all salesmen are alike: Sales hunters are very different from the rest of the salesmen.
- Sales hunters will come and ask for a job – or the job.
- Account managers will wait until the job is offered.

During the interview:
- Sales hunters will imagine and portray what they will be doing in the job
- Account managers will tell what they achieved in the past

Sales hunters:
- Are impatient and will act quickly: as waiting is a waste of time
- Have a natural resistance to rules
- Are averse to risks
- Are aggressive: nothing to lose – everything to win
- Are extrovert: they will contact and talk to everybody they need or encounter
- Want recognition of their success
- Are tenacious as they will not give up
- Are good listeners
- Will ask questions until they understand what your problem is or discover your problem for you
- Are more interested in the commission formula than the base salary

Sales: The final frontier
These are the voyages of the Sales hunting enterprise
Its life-time mission
To explore strange new businesses
To seek out new opportunities and new markets
To boldly go where no salesman has gone before

Currently everybody wants Sales hunters in their enterprise in order to generate more sales as this is the seemingly the best way to grow the business.

However once a company has become a client the Sales hunter needs to hand over the account to an Account manager as for maintaining relationships, nurturing the client with information the Sales hunter will do a lousy job as he will be missing the excitement of the hunting.
Moreover it is less costly to generate sales from existing clients than to find and acquire new clients: hence the importance of the Account manager.

Are you a Sales hunter or an Account manager ?

Email marketing

Email marketing has been embraced by most companies due to the apparent low cost and far reach for their lead generation.

However building email marketing lists yourself is a slow process due to the little number of people signing-up or opt-in for your newsletter or getting contacts on trade shows.
It will take ages before your list becomes significantly long enough to be useful.
Additionally the maintenance of these lists become costly due to people changing functions and companies which all need to be verified frequently (email bounces).

Purchased email marketing lists

Hence buying an email marketing list seems easy and obvious.
However:
- On average lists available are about 70% accurate, the best are up to 85%
- As lists are generic they are not customized for your specific business
- You certainly have your industry contact list of people who are also in the bought lists: overlap
- Most lists are based upon the function titles not on the real responsibilities in a company
- When using these lists then what’s the difference between you and a spammer ?

Marketing lists can bring you contacts from potential interested parties but without:
- Knowing if this is the right person to contact: titles are not functions and responsibilities
- Knowing if the demand is there: no demand no interest
- Knowing if it is timely to contact them: too early or too late

The more you use these bought listings the more the people will opt-out or will brand your email address and company as spammer.

The ROI (Return On Investment) will drop significantly and is much higher than estimated at first or accepted by general public.

Website traffic of interested companies

On the other hand your website receives traffic of companies that are interested at this very moment.
This eliminates 2 of the three uncertainties for sending an email to these companies.
The only requirement is knowing the companies visiting your website and lead scoring by the level of interest indicated by:
- The search terms used
- The pages visited
- The number of unique visitors by the company
This is like the Caller-ID for your website.

The main hurdle is getting the contact information of the visiting companies for which Internet data bases and searches can be used as well as your own list of industry contacts.

The goal of any email marketing is not:
- The number of emails send
- The frequency of email marketign campaigns
- The number of bounces
- The number of opens
but the number of actual sales or closed deals

How is your email marketing performing ?

Generally, there are 2 kind of people at IT-oriented networking events: you’ve got the ‘suits’, who are savvy net-workers and the geeks, who are wondering what the hell they’re doing there and how they can get out asap.

Now, as far as approaching people on these events goes, here are some of my tips:

No one likes to stand there alone

Anyone standing by themselves are always happy when someone comes to talk to them.
This is a basic rule for these kind of events. Don’t just stand there, go talk to someone: they’ll be happy you did. You too.

Don’t ignore the women

The few women at these events are often ignored, as is often the case in the male dominated IT world. This might be a big mistake, especially when you’re in the market for a better job. (aren’t we all?)

Why?

If they’re being social, there’s a big chance they’re recruiters. If they’re not, still make sure to ask them about job openings at their company. Women often seem to be on better foot with the HR department than men and will remember to talk to the HR department (often women) about ‘that nice guy’ (you). Having you as a colleague could also help them to not have to stand there by themselves again at the next networking event their company sent them to.

In any case: A woman standing by herself is even more happy when you talk to her compared to a man.
(at networking events that is)

Any geeks will probably have an interesting agenda

Awkward looking introvert geeks who happen to be stranded there are usually most interesting. There’s no way in the world they’d be in that room full of ’suits’ if they wouldn’t have a damn good reason for being there.

Find out why they’re there!

Talk function, tools and features to them. You’re a Linux sysadmin that prefers redhat and your company offers a voip based service that’s built on perl, ruby, asterisk and MongoDB.

The networking elite need a different pitch

The best net-workers there are often good at just that: networking. These are often the more ‘business’ oriented people who have outgrown pure IT, probably solely by their networking and personal marketing capabilities.

There’s nothing wrong with that, but you should remember they need to be handled in a different way.

Include accomplishments and benefits in your pitch when you talk to these people. They don’t want to know that you’re a Linux system administrator and Cisco wizard, they want to know that you’re a troubleshooter at a company offering a web-based service that helps organizations save money by shortening service desk calls and you scaled that service from 200 to 200,000 daily users during the last year.

If they find you interesting they can often facilitate you or your services/product at a bigger company and always seem to know ‘just the person you’re looking for’. (which often turns out not to be the case)

Parting in a friendly, positive way

Make sure to ask everyone you talk to what they’re hoping to gain from the event and what their current issues are. A lot of people won’t tell you unless you ask them.

This is also the ideal way to part with them on a positive, happy note later on.

After all, you aren’t at a networking event to talk to the same people for hours (usually) and you also want to leave a positive impression when parting with them. Even if it’s not natural for you to walk up to and talk to strangers, you might as well give it your best shot while you’re there and meet as much people as possible.

For example: When they are looking for a way to replace their outdated PBX system, you could later on part with ‘nice talking to you… and when I meet a VOIP expert later on I’ll make sure to introduce them to you’. (you catch my drift)

A/B testing your elevator pitch

I also think these events are great for A/B testing your elevator pitch: it’s amazing how telling it from a different angle can cause a change in interest. As they say: you never get a 2nd chance to make a first impression, but at these events there are enough people willing to hear what you’ve got to say (or at least the first 30 seconds), so you can just try again with another victim later on.

Excellent to practice and perfect your pitch (although I think a real elevator pitch might be too much for a networking event) for when you really need it to be right at the first impression.

Just remember: don’t talk geek to the suits and vice versa.

Have you got any further tips for handling these kind of events?

Free consulting is not part of your sales process

When a company has a problem to solve it can look for a consultant to fill in the job.
Many consultants will or can apply for the job.
In order to stand out from the crowd some could even offer an initial free consulting. Similar to a freemium in web services.

Considerations:
- Free has no value and is valued as no value
- A service is only worth the price you (can) charge
- The free consulting can solve a large part of the problem hence no contract
- The free consulting will cannibalize your fees and can cost your engagement
- Once offered free consulting, then they will consult you for free over and over again.
- The notion of a free consulting service suggests the sales process was never completed and the free consulting still has to prove the value for the company or organization.
- There is no apparent win for the company and too many uncertainties exist whereas the role of the salesman is to reduce the risks.

As David Heinemeier Hansson of 37Signals writes: Eyeballs still don’t pay the bills.

The sales process
However during your sales process you need to show and demonstrate your expertise and provide some value for the organization – but not free consulting. If you can’t provide value during the sales process then you or your services are a commodity.

Your sales process can also be an education for the client as he might not be aware of many issues and problems.

Maybe you can offer the initial session for identifying the needs for free as this allows you to define the size of your project and scope. The more problems and ideas you can identify, the more consulting opportunities you have. Just be smart enough not to list all of the problems in your first offer as then the initial total amount will become way to expensive.
This initial free session is a part of your sales process as ti allows you defining the total project or different projects you can go after: it is your company market research.
Do you offer free consulting to convince your client to buy

Website essentials

The first impression of your website, which is formed within the few first seconds, is utmost important on the Internet.
Depending on the source of study, the type of website and the type of audience, these first few second is between 50msec and 7 seconds.
Additionally visitors of websites have certain expectations and find features evident. If you don’t fulfill these minimal expectations or provide the website essentials, your visitors will already decrease subjectively the value of your website and even your company.

One of these website essentials is the favicon (favorite icon) that you see preceding the domain name in your browser or in the bookmarks and history of the sites visited.
Having a favicon probably doesn’t bring any significant additional tangible value. However not having a favicon on your website will give the impression of a less professional website. A less professional website implies or suggests a less professional company.
Keeping up the appearances is utmost important on the Internet as for Miss Bucket to be called ‘Bouquet’.

Favicon benefits

Although no real tangible benefit can be attributed, still some benefit improvements can be expected:
- Helping your website standing out better.
- Adds a professional touch to your website.
- Improves branding.
- Create awareness.
- Adds credibility to your website.
- Easier retrieval of your website in a long list of bookmarks and history list.

The favicon design issues

The main problem is that in a tiny space with limited pixels (16×16 or 32×32) you need to make an impression, an indication of functionality or a statement and it has to be recognizable.

We started out with ‘LE’ in upper case as the name LEADSExplorer consists of 2 parts: ‘Leads’ and ‘Explorer’.
However nobody will know what ‘LE’ stands for as it has no meaning. Having still space available on the 16×16 square, we decided to add on ‘ADS’ so this would read ‘LEads’. This makes a very clear statement indicating the website is about ‘Leads’.

For the corporate Engago Technologies Ltd. website we wanted to express the ‘engage’ in the name. An indication of movement should be expressed by the favicon. In order to do so we used a few parallel lines that increase in distance and an arrow pointing upwards.

Keeping up the appearances is important on the Internet not immediately for increasing sales or improving business, but in order not to miss business.

How well do you keep up the appearances on the Internet ?

This blog posts counts as Prior Art proof for the LEADSExplorer favicon as it gets distributed over the Internet into several data bases.

One of the main current problems of marketing is to create relations through the use of advertising instead of just sending out promotional campaigns as marketing used to do.

Sales has the advantaged position to create relations with their leads, prospects and customers as they have one-to-one communications and even have face-to-face meetings. They do have two way interaction or a conversation.
They even can bring advice or even bring free consultancy in order to build further the relationship.

Marketing will only:
- Communicate using one-to-many channels
- Push the marketing message through the communication channels to the audience.
Hopefully the target audience is listening.
Building a relation using these communication channels is hard to do.

Transactional vs relational advertising

Previously most advertising was and still is transactional by addressing to the transactional customers who are people that are ready to buy and probably looking at the best price or price/value on the market.
Transactional customers will easily switch if a better deal offered.

On the other hand relational customers mainly care if you meet their needs and your relational advertisement brings valuable content to them. The relational advertising needs to have affinity to the potential buyer to build the relation.
The content of the advertisement needs to start a conversation that should turn into a “Conversational Currency” as Jay Deragon describes it.

Create relations for relational customers

Esthetically superb looking advertisements or amazing technology effects in ads will not create relations: they might just impress but not create value.

What is needed is content that affects or influences the target audience.
The content needs to be relational that has context to the target audience.
Those in the audience that relates to this content will propagate your information and even add content to it.

Relational customers will listen and switch to you only:
- If you communicate the right thing and keep on saying it.
- If they can identify with the situation or person in the advertising.

The change from transactional advertising to relational advertising that creates a relation through the content is a disruptive revolution.

Is your marketing still brewing transactional advertisements? Or are they already into relational ads?

Social Media

Since the event of Social Media and the Social Media being praized for the next goldmine, Marketing and Sales have been digging into LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter in the hope to connect with buyers and to find leads or prospects.

Chances are that the rate of success is very low as finding a lead or somebody interested in your solutions is like finding a needle in a haystack especially if you are in business to business.
This is mainly due to the fact there is no focus or no business intention in these Social websites.
The goal of people on Social websites doesn’t match your goal of getting leads.

You might try to build a relationship with people on these Social websites, but it will take ages before you reach your goal of lead generation as you miss focus and not all possible relations will relate to your business.

The company website for lead generation

Instead of wasting your time on Social Media, your leads are already right in front of you: on the company website.
Interested people, managers or even CxO people of companies will visit your website if they are looking for solving a problem. A problem that your solutions solve or help to solve as these problems or solutions have driven the visitor to visit your website out of more than hundred million websites.
If these interested people are on your website, you better take care of them.

All you need is to know:
- Their company name
- Their level of interest to qualify as lead
- Their name
As only 3% of all visitors will ever register for a white paper download, a web seminar or contact you directly (and in many cases using a web based public email system: Hotmail, Gmail, Yahoo, …) most of your potential leads leave without any notification or trace.

Post-click marketing

These problems can be solved by using a web service that:
- Reveals the company names of your website visitors
- The level of interest based upon: origin on the Internet, search terms used, pages visites, language, geographic location in order to let you qualify each visiting as lead.
- Matches the visitor with contacts or incoming emails for knowing the name of the visitor.

Thus instead of scanning LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter in the hope to build a relationship with the goal of finding any lead, why not just browse your website visit information for qualifying visitors as leads and to cols call on warm (interested) companies.

Still looking on LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter?
Or are you already one step beyond your competitors by knowing who visits your website?

If your solution hasn’t got a well defined and widely recognized product marketing name then you have a serious problem.

Product marketing name required

This is exactly the problem that faces LEADSExplorer and its’ nearest competitors:
There is no market name that is being used universally for the product that we offer.
Revealing the company name of website visitors and recognizing when a customer or potential lead visits the website and shows their interest. For each company the interest increase and decrease for your products, solutions or services.
All this combined with a CRM and email tracking is a not yet defined market.

- Everybody knows what email marketing is, but LEADSExplorer is not mainly intended for outbound marketing.
- Lead management automation is after the lead is captured.
- Sales Force Automation (SFA) is just automating the sales force not lead capturing.
- It is not just a CRM, but more.
- Post-Click marketing comes very close, but this is often confused with quite different solutions.
- Demand generation solutions don’t fit as LEADSExplorer reveals already interested parties.
- Inbound marketing is too vague.
- Lead generation platform is too limited as customer retention and nurturing are a major part of the solution.

What our market currently need is a product marketing name that defines clearly in order to have the different solutions from different vendors grouped together under one flag.

Lacking category – lacking classification

If your products or solutions aren’t identifiable under a commonly known name, all information, directory and review services have a problem to classify them.

When a company has a specific problem that these type of solutions can solve or is interested in these type of solutions, where should they start looking or how should they start searching?

As a result of the missing product marketing name, the products and solutions from different vendors aren’t grouped together in product or solution directories making it harder for any potential buyer to find all vendors and even harder to compare as solutions can be in any marketing related classification.

My name is Nobody

No naming means nobody will search for it specifically and nobody will find the solutions on purpose.
Finding your products or solutions will be rather accidentally: people will not search or look for the products or solutions specifically.

As the tag line of the “My name is Nobody” movie ‘Nobody, but “Nobody,” knows the trouble he’s in!’ (Sergio Leone / Tonino Valerii)
LEADSExplorer should be somebody.

We would like to challenge you to come up with a great and suiting name for this market.

In any sales deal, instead of starting with the minimal or basic configuration for your products or services, start by proposing the full option or the best complete offering that includes already several options.
Do explain the benefits and the necessities of the included options.
Make clear this is the best suited and complete package for him.

Then the buyer will:
- Only take out those options that are not relevant to him or his company.
- Only remove those options that make the price exceed the budget.
- Take a faster decision as the package is the best suited for his needs.

Selling more using endowment

People don’t want to give up ownership of something in order not to feel or minimize the pain that this generates.
This is called the endowment effect by Victor Antonio Gonzalez. People place a higher value on objects they own than objects that they do not.
Once the sales process has reached final phase, people already imagine they own or have taken ownership of the solution. From then on they become reluctant to give something or a part of it up. It will feel like a loss to them.

B2B and budget

This sales method not only works in consumer business but also in selling to enterprises. Not all purchases are completely based upon rational facts and figures as emotion comes into play too.

Moreover if a budget has been set, how would you know the exact amount? You can extimate the budget or have a best guess. Anything you propose below the budget is less revenue.
Proposing a complete package deal that is slightly over the budget that you have estimated will be adjusted by the purchaser to the real budget limit by taking out one or two options.
As such your price will be just under the budget limit, probably offering the best price/quality, best price/functionality or price/features compared to your competitors.

If the purchaser was looking to buy at the lowest price in the market then this endowment method will not work.
However as you are the best salesman around, it is your job to convince the buyer the lowest price is not necessarily the best choice for the company.

If you want to sell more, offer the best suited complete offering.
What did you offer lately?

The recession is bad for most BtoB businesses, however some industries will prosper thanks to the recession: Yin Yang. These are the industries you should favor to sell to.
If you can generate leads from these recession proof industries, it is more likely to close sales and to have customers that actually will pay your invoices.

Thus knowing what industries or businesses will flourish and grow, and thus have demands and needs, is interesting to know for you in Sales.
Spending more time and focus on these industries will eventually bring more revenue and profit for you and your company.

1. Law firms
Many companies will file for Chapter 11, thus in order to work out all these bankruptcies law firms will have more work and revenue.

As the shares prices on the stock market are many times lower than one year ago, the decreased market capitalizations of many companies have made them attractive to be acquired. Thus many acquisitions are to be expected, which all need due diligence providing work for law firms.

2. Repair and maintenance companies
As companies will be investing less in new equipment and appliances, the need to repair and maintain appliances in the offices and on the work floor will increase.
Thus repair and maintenance enterprises will increase their business.

3. Software as a service – web services – cloud computing companies
Instead of investing in software and setting up a server to run the software, most solutions for businesses are now available on the Internet as a web service, which is also called cloud computing.
The advantages are:
- The lack of any investment
- The pay as you go pricing
- The possibility to stop the service at any one time.
Here is a list of 270+ tools for running a business online in order to give you an idea.

4. Alternative energy companies
Alternative energy businesses will get more interest as there is a tendency from governments to increase the alternative energy solutions by subsidizing the research and development as well as the investments for installing these alternative energies in homes and factories.

5. Infrastructure and major building companies
In order to keep people at work, governments will spend money on large infrastructures, public buildings and other public works.
These companies will employ many people and thus will have demands.

6. The equipment suppliers for infrastructure and major building companies
In order to build and construct infrastructures and public buildings equipment is required.
The companies supplying the tools, machines and appliances for these works will have good revenue.

7. Internet infrastructure companies
President Obama has the ambitious plan to improve the Internet infrastructure in the US.
This will increase sales for companies in markets like broadband chips, broadband appliances, optical fibers, Wifi, …

8. Market research
When the economy is growing, developing, marketing and selling a product or solution that fails will not be life threatening for the company.
In case of a recession, developing and marketing a product or solution that fails, the company will be hit harder.
Thus the increased need to have a market research, before starting the development investments.
There should be an increase in market research in these uncertain times as companies don’t want to launch the wrong product on the market.

9. Consulting companies
As always when markets go down, business goes down too, then companies will call upon consultants to solve their problems.
Even though the board of directors, upper management and middle management all know the solution or remedy, it is easier to have a third party to paint the picture and tell the bad story.
That’s where consultants fit in. Hence the expected rise of revenue for the consulting companies.

10. Internet advertising companies
The most efficient marketing tools are using the Internet for advertising and branding.
Thus companies providing services and systems related to Internet advertising will generate more business.

11. Web design and website development
As companies will be spending less on travel, lodging for visiting trade shows and conferences, companies will still require finding leads and new customers.
The Internet presence of a company will become even more important.

12. Home entertainment companies
In all previous recessions people have been spending even more on entertainment.
As travel and lodging will be expensive, going theaters or cinemas will cost too much and a gambling trip to Las Vegas even more, thus the entertainment will be at home.
Like video games and other home entertainment, in most cases using an online connection.
Even online lotteries and gaming could benefit from the recession.

13. Discount retailers
People will care less about brands but more about pricing: getting the most at the least price.
Hence discount retailers are likely to increase their revenue and their demand for products and services.

14. Incasso – Debt collectors
Many companies and traders will be delaying their payments, while at the same time the suppliers and vendors will be in need for money.
Incasso and debt collector agencies will emerge again.

15. Virtual server remote disaster recovery/backup services
The trend for servers is towards virtualization.
Once the company has switched over to virtualization, it becomes much easier to move or sync your servers to an off-site datacenter.

A business proposition for lead generation and selling to these industries

In order for you to sell better, try to picture how companies in these industries could use or benefit from your products, solutions or services.
Write a business proposition with the benefits and advantages or draft a business plan for every industry that could benefit from your offerings.
Generate leads by addressing companies in these recession proof industries in order to become yourself successful during this recession.

Help completing the list

As it is difficult to predict the real magnitude and the effect of a recession, thus there will be probably other industries not on this list, that will see their revenue and profit grow.
Please do make suggestions if you know other industries that will benefit from this recession.