Funnelvision

The release of Eloqua’s Prospect Profiler yesterday led me to think about a Sales pandemic that has been plaguing Account Executives for years, including yours truly.  It is a virus called, “Sales Blindness” and is highly contagious.  Without proper treatment, it does not go away on its own.  If not addressed, this virus will invade every sales cycle, even those where the symptoms are dormant.  While there is no cure, fortunately there is a treatment that will reduce and even eliminate the symptoms. 

“Sales Blindness” is characterized by the following symptoms:

1. You are never/rarely able to reach your prospects; always getting their voicemail

2. You spend far too much time talking to so-called “leads,” who are really just “kicking tires”

3. You can’t seem to find the diamonds amongst all the coal; it seems like the leads you are calling are one step up from randomly picking names from the phone-book

4. You have little-to-no idea who is interested in your products/services now and over the past week/month/quarter

5. You have no idea what happens after your proposal enters the “proposal black-hole”

6. You don’t know what your prospect might be interested in before a call, so your calls are a bit awkward…like throwing darts at a dartboard to see what sticks

7. You only have one real contact at each prospect company, but you’d love to find out if others might be interested

8. Your pipeline looks ok, but just doesn’t feel that way

9. You’ve been told in a deal that it is non-competitive, but your gut tells you otherwise; You’ve been told in a deal that it IS competitive, but you have no idea who is the competition

10. Your prospects say they (at any point in the sales-cycle):

    * recently were surfing your Website

    * downloaded a white-paper

    * filled out a form

    * watched a video

    * read a case study

    * saw a webinar

    * met your company at a trade-show

…but you are clueless to most, if not all of this

Impact for you: sleepless nights, stress, nervousness, over-worked weekends, poor quarterly performance, being put on a Sales plan, job-hopping.

Impact for your employer: sleepless nights, stress, nervousness, over-worked weekends, poor quarterly performance, an unhappy Board, job-hopping.

Treatment – stop taking credit for sourcing all of your opportunities.  Treat your marketing team to a nice meal or two. Be sure to splurge on some wine. When the mood is right, start with the question, “what exactly is a lead?” Listen and keep the conversation on track. Don’t be surprised if you are on different wave-lengths.  Try to come to a mutual agreement and see if you can set some mutual SLAs.  Work to define consistent lead management processes and ask them to funnel prospect behavior to you so you can see and take advantage of it.  A regular dose of Eloqua’s new Prospect Profiler would be ideal.  Rinse and repeat.

NEXT STEPS:

• Let us know your symptoms
• Introduce yourself to your marketing team to start the conversation…they don’t bite
• Check out http://profiler.eloqua.com/

Eloqua's Prospect Profiler

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Sales & Marketing Alignment. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.