Nice job, Bev! Your persistance, follow-through, and gracious professionalism paid off big.  Thanks for all you do for our clients and for the Signature team!

• Clarity- don’t make it difficult for them to figure out what you’re saying. The less time you have, the more important each word becomes.
• Brevity- keep it short and to the point.
• Immediacy- if the problem you solve is important enough, you don’t need to pitch your services. Create some urgency around why the discussion is critical to have right now on a strategic level.
• Possibility – focus on what’s possible for the prospect if the problem is solved.

I continually reinforce with our team the importance of the words we choose to use – in our voicemails, emails, and during live conversations. Words matter – even more so with crazy busy prospects in a time and attention starved business world.

SLMA members were invited to nominate women leaders in the field of sales lead management.  From those nominated, 20 professionals were selected.  Nominees were judged on their contributions to a combination of sales lead management, marketing and sales activities.

Tonya launched Signature Marketing Services in 2005 to help companies selling complex, high-value solutions find and acquire new customers, primarily through their teleprospecting services to secure strategic sales meetings with C-level buyers. With over fifteen years of corporate experience in account management, sales and business development, she has led successful engagements with an array of clients from Fortune 50 corporations to small niche companies in both service and product sectors. Their clients include GE Healthcare, Johnson & Johnson, and Ingersoll Rand.

“I am so honored to receive this award and be included among such a strong group of female sales leaders,” Signa noted.  “Our business is growing in these difficult times because companies recognize the value we bring to their business.  Our clients are having more conversations with executive-level buyers than ever before. Sales cycles are shortened and more deals are being won.”

The value of what I call “Discovery calls” goes far beyond just collecting facts about the prospect. This step in the sales process can be a powerful opportunity to differentiate you and your firm’s ability to drive business improvements. This is  not the time to be selling…but it is the perfect time to plant seeds with influencers regarding your point of view of a specific challenge being faced by their market today and how you’re helping other similar organizations solve those challenges.

To maximize the selling time of our clients’ sales teams, we begin the discovery process for them during our conversations with prospects. If the prospect represents a viable opportunity, a face-to-face meeting or a phone call for the sales executive is secured.  If there’s no opportunity, our clients now can spend their time and energy elsewhere.

The results are greater sales productivity (after all, sales execs should be concentrating on winning new clients, not on chasing leads) and a better prepared sales team armed with insights about the prospect’s current challenges gained during the discovery call. Instead of spending the majority of the initial meeting asking discovery questions,  the conversation is focused on what’s most valuable for the prospect. Frequently, the insights gained during the Discovery call actually uncover an even greater opportunity for our client that the sales executive is then able to drive to.

Winners will be announced in early April!

Without differentiation, it takes more time and money to show prospects why you are the best choice; as a result, you often end up competing on price – a difficult position to sustain over the long term.

One of the biggest issues facing sales organizations today is the simple fact that they are not engaging in enough meaningful conversations with executive-level decision makers. There are many reasons for this, but without the ability to clearly articulate what differentiates your solutions, you simply will not be heard.

Here are five thoughts on how to bring your uniqueness to life:

1. Above all else, know your target market, know their problems, and get crystal clear on the value you bring.
2. Sharpen your focus. Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Starbucks became successful because they focused on making a great cup of coffee in a unique environment.
3. Even if what you do for clients is similar to many of your competitors, how you do it and your unique expertise can offer rich sources of differentiation. One of Marketing’s original thought leaders, Theodore Levitt, asserted that every service is differentiated in some way. Don’t overlook exploring all the nuances that add value for your clients.
4. Be a thought leader, not a thought follower. Take a stand and offer a unique and compelling point of view on the problems your customers face. The recipe for a weak pipeline is “greater sameness”, so avoid sounding and looking like everyone else.
5. Look for longevity. For sales messaging to have impact, it needs to have staying power in the marketplace.

Identifying the distinct ways that your clients experience value and building your messaging platform around those distinctions will help you generate more initial leads and gain the attention of the decision makers you are looking to engage with.

How important is strong sales messaging that clearly differentiates?

CSO Insights, a research firm that conducts a yearly survey of sales executives from nearly 2000 companies, found that firms who excelled at creating sales messaging that clearly set their services apart from the competition had noticeably more reps achieving quota and achieved higher win rates.

One of our services is helping our clients craft their marketing and sales messaging to grab the attention of their target market. If you are not having enough valuable conversations with prospective customers because you can’t gain access to decision makers, let’s talk.

Why are sales people spending as much as 40 hours per month creating their own collateral and presentations?

Stats from the American Marketing Association reveal that 90% of the materials marketing creates are not perceived as useful….and that tell me there’s a big problem going unsolved in business today.

In a new webinar, Tim Riesterer, CMO and SVP of Consulting for Corporate Visions, contends we could address this problem if we stopped thinking in terms of collateral creation and started thinking about how to be successful at various “moments of truth” in the “customer buying cycle.”

First, it’s critical to recognize that it’s a “buying cycle” and not a “selling cycle.” Customers move at their own pace and have their own set of demanding decisions to address before moving forward at any stage in a larger purchasing process. The key is to have the right conversations and deploy the right sales enablement tools at each stage.

Second, it’s important to clarify and define these moments of truth.   Riesterer observes that companies tend to focus their time, effort and resources on the latter stages of a buying cycle — after a decision is made to proceed and begin comparing vendors.

At this point, the opportunity to help identify a business problem and frame a potential solution already has been lost. It’s too late to become the prospect’s “trusted advisor.” You are, at this stage, merely another hapless contestant in a vendor “bake off.”

Finally, it’s vital to tell  a compelling story. At each stage of the buying process, you are challenged to create not only compelling messages but compelling tools – website content, marketing campaigns, appointment setting guides, call prompters, solution presentations, confirmation letters, value-driven proposals. Each stage is a moment of truth. Your challenge is to tell a story in these moments — one that makes the customer the hero and addresses the questions that are now front and center. In some form or fashion, you must contribute to a narrative that addresses a difficult challenge and leads to impressive outcomes. But messages must be incorporated into actionable tools.

The question for us is:  What is the appropriate tool for the moment? What will help sales professionals provide valuable guidance? What will help buyers make smart decisions that propel them forward in the buying cycle? “Tools must be relevant to the task at hand,”  says Riesterer.

So what will it be? Bakeoffs or Big Numbers? This is your moment of truth.

Bottom line, executives and decision makers are super busy, have more responsibilities than ever before, and are being pressed to achieve greater results in less time. We have to convince them to give us a precious slice of their time and attention, and we have to do it in about a minute’s time. More than that, you risk losing them.

So how do I do this? It helps to keep it simple. I want to say just enough to make them curious enough to want to hear more. Because truly that’s what we’re after, right? I’m not trying to convince them to buy anything…that would take a lot longer than the 60 seconds I’ve been given. I just want them to be interested enough to agree to further conversations…and that’s the goal. Plain and simple.

Thanks Tonya for the update, these updates are helpful and I will indeed take a look.

I also wanted to give you some positive feedback; just had my second campaign-generated meeting this morning, with XXXX (name removed by me).  She was very complimentary of Monica in the way she was pleasantly and professionally persistent in her pursuit of a meeting.  These school Business Administrators like Jamie are very busy, so this sort of persistence is key.  Had a good 2hr meeting and we’ll see where it goes…  but this campaign is helping us get out in the marketplace which is the goal.

This is why we do what we do every day …making proactive, outbound calls to build market awareness for our clients and connect them with executive decision-makers with a need.

Great job, Monica! Thanks for all you do:-)

One of biggest reasons marketing efforts fail is a lack of clarity and focus on two important things: WHO and WHY….and a shot gun approach to sustainable revenue and market penetration rarely works.

So when we begin working with a new client, we develop what I call a Market Pursuit Plan to laser in on these two critical components to make sure our efforts hit the mark.

The first step is to identify a group of target clients who share a common problem that you can solve better or different than your competitors. This clarifies who you want to have conversations with.

You then identify who within those companies care most about solving the problem you fix. Which executive or executives derive the most unique value from your services?

We’ve now defined what companies and who within those organizations to contact.

The next step is the WHY.

Why would these individuals want to have a conversation with you? What value would they get from a 20-30 minute conversation with you?

This step is extremely powerful because it forces you to put yourself in your buyer’s shoes and really think through and clarify the unique value you can offer to his/her organization.

We can now craft several compelling reasons we’re calling the executive to secure a meeting. Think beyond just “we want to meet to introduce our services…”. Is there an event, an idea, or an opportunity that you can lead with? The last important part of the WHY is binding it by time. We’ve found we’re more successful securing executive meetings if we have specific dates (ideally a month or so out) we’re asking for.

Now the client’s work is done, and ours begins. After crafting each communication touchpoint (voicemail, email, intro script), my team is ready to pursue conversations that matter with specific executives within a defined market with focus, speed, and professional persistence.