The Quickest Wins My Business

It wasn't the cheapest. It wasn't the one whose rep had left me a voicemail. I chose to go with Big Foot Moving & Storage because they got back to me quickly and they were prepared with detailed information based on my initial email. They didn't waste my time with back-and-forth negotiation nonsense. I chose Big Foot because the story I told myself went something like this: “I don't like waiting for service people to arrive. I want to have people do what they promise, and I don't mind paying a little extra to get better service.”

Big Foot was the quickest to get back to me and was prepared with an answer based on the information I had given. So it won my business because, in my mind, Big Foot was the company most likely to show up to my office at the appointed time and do the work as agreed.

This chapter is about agile selling. It is about how the concept of instant engagement with buyers is an important way to close more sales. I'll show you how you can win more business by being agile in many more ways besides responding quickly to inquiries.

The Ideal: Agile Sales

Today buyers are in charge. The idea of mystery in the sales process is over. We research someone online before agreeing to a first date—is he a creep? We fire up LinkedIn an hour before an initial business meeting—does she have anyone I know in her network? We watch on-demand movie trailers before deciding which film to see that night at the theater. We check out restaurant reviews and browse menus before booking a reservation.

We're in a new world. But you know that—not because I say it a lot in these pages, but because you're living in this new world every day.

Even though sales managers understand the role of web content in the buying process, many still run their teams the same way they did 20 years ago. Intellectually, we all know what's happening, because we all use the web to research products and services. I find it fascinating that many sales directors I've met go online regularly to purchase expensive products without talking to a salesperson—a set of golf clubs, for instance—but then tell me their market is different and insist the salespeople they manage use the cold-calling, hard-sell approach to sales that they learned in the 1980s. It's amazing that vice presidents of sales will go to the mailroom and systematically throw all of what they call “junk mail” into the recycle bin without reading it and a moment later march down the hall and insist that the marketing department create a “direct mail campaign.” I don't understand why these sales leaders don't recognize the hypocrisy at work here—they themselves don't respond to traditional sales techniques, yet they insist that the salespeople who work for them practice the same outdated strategies. There's a huge disconnect between the sales strategies and tactics that worked last century and what works today. And today, as buyers operate in real time, sales strategies must include being agile as well.

Fortunately, just because you rely on salespeople to interface with buyers, this doesn't mean you need to stick to the same old strategies and tactics. Rather than a one-size-fits-all sales strategy, evidence suggests that an agile sales approach works best today. Agile refers to both the individual as well as an entire sales team focused on being hyperresponsive to buyers. Instead of forcing buyers into the company's sales process, an agile company responds to individual buyers based on what they are doing and how they are interacting.

“When somebody had to buy something 10 or 15 years ago, the only way to truly conduct a transaction with due diligence was to talk to a salesperson,” says Mark Roberge, Chief Revenue Officer, HubSpot Inbound Sales. Prior to his current role, Roberge served as HubSpot's senior vice president of worldwide sales and services from 2007 to 2013. During this time he increased revenue at this inbound marketing software platform company over 6,000 percent, expanded the team from one to 450 employees, and was instrumental in HubSpot reaching number 33 on the 2011 Inc. 500 Fastest Growing Companies list.

“Previously, a major aspect of the sales process required everyone in sales to memorize the price book and be intimately familiar with the competitive landscape. Salespeople had to be ready with quick responses about how their company was different from the competition,” Roberge says. “You had the power and control. And you could use that to your advantage to win over the prospect. Now, buyers conduct their research at any moment of the day or night—perhaps even midnight on a Saturday night.”

As an example, the buyer locates the top six vendors. She researches what their products do. She looks at their price books. Sometimes she can try their product for free. And oftentimes, she can even buy it right on the website. However, in this case, the salespeople need to bring more value to the buying process than just basic information found on a website. And that value is being able to transform the website's generic messaging into specific information tailored to the needs of a particular buyer. “Today successful salespeople play a role much like a consultant,” Roberge suggests.

Roberge describes the best salespeople as participating in a kind of doctor–patient relationship. In the same way that a doctor knows that every patient is unique and that a judicious medical response can come only after first carefully listening to and observing the patient, an effective salesperson in today's world must use analytic skills not dissimilar to those of a doctor—skills that can be mastered only with practice.

“A consultant comes into your business to learn about everything that's going on, and learn about what you're trying to achieve,” Roberge says. “And then they can tell you if their product is a fit or not—because it's possible it might not be. And if it's not, they need to tell you so, honestly and up front. And if the fit is good, they need to explain it within your context, using your vocabulary, using your business strategy, using your business goals, just as a consultant would. That's where sales is going today. The best salespeople out there have the business acumen to be able to have that conversation with a buyer at a company, and have the required intelligence to be able to tell a slightly different story on every single sales call—a story that's precisely attuned to that buyer.”

Gerhard Gschwandtner agrees with Roberge's assessment of the consultative sale. Gschwandtner is CEO of Selling Power, Inc., a media company that includes Selling Power, the world's leading sales management magazine, the sales management portal at sellingpower.com, and Sales 2.0 conferences held around the world. “A salesperson has a unique advantage,” he says. “They are speaking to maybe 200 or 300 customers on a regular basis, and listening to challenges, problems, and situations that are all similar in some ways. Through conversations, a good salesperson learns her customer's typical concerns and applies that knowledge to other situations that her customers encounter.”

When a particular buyer has done as much self-education as possible and is now ready to have a conversation about his or her particular needs, the agile sales component comes into play. The buyer has read content on the company's site, followed its blog and Twitter feeds, and perhaps has participated on a webinar. The buyer is ready to discuss details.

“We live in a society where software is getting more and more intelligent,” Gschwandtner says. “Companies have an almost infinite choice of the kind of software they can patch together to create a customer-focused company. And yet there's a paradox. There are always holes in that equation. I've never seen a company where they have a sales and marketing ecosystem that's seamless without any gaps. It's the salesperson's role to identify the gaps—gaps in information, gaps in understanding, gaps in insight—and ask the questions: ‘How can I be the catalyst between the company and this particular customer? How do I fill those gaps?’”

The Decisive Advantage: Speed

With buyers having access to much more information, salespeople now enter the buying process later, at a moment of enormous opportunity. When a buyer raises her hand, it's very likely she has already educated herself based on the content on your site and elsewhere. She knows the basics and wants more. She's indicating that she wants to speak with you about something specific. But this also poses a challenge. Not only do buyers need a salesperson with more knowledge than what appears on your company's site and blog, but they also expect a much quicker interaction.

It's easy to tell people to respond in real time. But it's not easy to actually implement this strategy. The best organizations use a combination of humans and technology, much like an air traffic control system. Technology can take you only so far, but eventually you'll need someone to make a decision about each inquiry that comes in. And just like that air traffic controller, it must be done instantly or there might be a crash.

“There's a lot of evidence indicating that if you respond to leads in a minute, rather than in a day, there is an enormous difference in success rates,” HubSpot's Roberge says. “So as you build to a higher volume of leads, you will need to systematize the response. But in the beginning, you shouldn't overcomplicate it. You can assign leads to someone—perhaps a junior salesperson—who can eyeball the inbound leads and assign them to salespeople for real-time follow-up. But it's important to set realistic expectations and realize that only a fraction of the inquiries received are going be a good leads. And you need to clearly define what you're looking for, because you'll get leads ranging from a VP at a Fortune 5000 company to a PhD student in Japan. The first is obviously a great lead; the second will likely never be a buyer. And unless you do that legwork up front and pass on only the qualified companies to sales, they'll get really frustrated. That happens in almost every implementation that I see. As long as you establish that expectation up front, you'll be in better shape.”

If your marketing team does an excellent job creating content for your buyer personas, it's also likely that the number of inquiries will grow quickly. Over time, you can start to use technology to do a first pass on lead qualification in real time; however, it's important to monitor the filters carefully when they are first instituted to make sure the parameters are properly defined. It is best to use an algorithm when dealing with high-volume responses because the clock is ticking, but implement this only with constant human monitoring, and quickly adjust and make changes as required.

Context: The Key to Unlock Every Buyer

Once you've got a system in place to manage your inbound leads and respond to them in real time, you'll need to define the buyer's needs within its context. Returning to Roberge's analogy of the doctor–patient relationship, think of the ideal salesperson as someone who treats each buyer as a unique individual, with focused attention on the buyer's specific concerns. “The buyer context needs to be leveraged right from the beginning,“ he says. “I still get cold-called 25 times a day, and I'm amazed that every single call is the same. ‘Hey, Mark, it's John from so-and-so. This is what we do. Give me a call back.’ No context. Same thing two days later, the same call. I get it six times.”

Roberge cites a particular example of dysfunctional salespeople in his own life. HubSpot, a venture capital–funded company during its start-up phase, issued press releases when it had a new round of funding. And because Roberge is listed on the company's management page, people knew he was a HubSpot executive. “When we raised venture capital, I got phone calls from every single wealth manager,” he says. “And yet, when I visit J.P. Morgan's website, I don't get a phone call. If I were to mention J.P. Morgan in social media, I don't get a phone call. When I open the prospecting email they sent me, I don't get a phone call. That's a great example of a company that has access to my interest and the context of my actions, but J.P. Morgan's salespeople are failing to leverage my initiative. In this inbound sales environment, that needs to change.”

The cold-calling approach doesn't work with a buyer who has done his research. Roberge has built the HubSpot sales and support team around the idea of context, and that's a huge reason for the remarkable growth the company has enjoyed. “When you get called from HubSpot, it's contextual,” he says. “It's a dialogue. It's ‘Mary, this is Mark from HubSpot. I noticed you downloaded our e-book on generating leads through Facebook. I reviewed your Facebook company page and have a few quick tips. I'll email them to you now. Give me a call if you'd like to discuss.’ And two days later, I'll contact again and say, ‘Hi, Mary, as it turns out I found a case study of a customer of ours who's been quite successful in your business. I'm going send you their story and what they actually did to trigger some ideas.’ Each message we send relates to the context of their situation, and the impact it makes is very powerful.”

Whenever a HubSpot salesperson makes a call or sends an email or contacts a buyer through a social network, it is to be helpful and provide something in context to that particular buyer's educational journey.

Newsjacking to Find Buyers

Agile sales means engaging the marketplace at precisely the right time. It means understanding what buyers are doing and what they will likely react to at that moment. There are a number of real-time techniques discussed in this chapter, starting with one of the most powerful, and one of the most fun to implement—newsjacking.

The idea of newsjacking is quite simple: It is the art and science of injecting your ideas into breaking news, in real time, in order to generate social attention and media coverage for yourself or your business. It's the subject of a 2011 book I wrote titled Newsjacking: How to Inject Your Ideas into a Breaking News Story and Generate Tons of Media Coverage.

Thousands of people have used the technique to get their names into news stories, such as when marketers at Oreo tweeted an image with the line “You can still dunk in the dark” during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout. That one tweet was seen by millions of people.

Today's online tools can notify you instantly when something is said about your industry or marketplace. By monitoring keywords and phrases on the web and Twitter, you will instantly see the stories that you might be able to contribute to.

Frequently people push back and say that newsjacking is frivolous. “So what if you get into the news?” they say. “We're interested in making sales.” Well, there is no question: Newsjacking drives new business!

While my Newsjacking book is about generating attention with the media, the same techniques can be used to generate real-time sales leads.

Many companies now use newsjacking not just as a PR technique but also as a tool to generate B2B sales leads and drive new business for consumer brands. It works for nonprofits and other organizations, too. Newsjacking works even in highly regulated industries like healthcare and finance.

For example, MultiCare Health System, an integrated health organization made up of hospitals, primary care and urgent care clinics, multispecialty centers, and hospice, home health, and other services, located in Washington state, newsjacked the name of a disease that marketers there knew was on the minds of millions of people.

The MultiCare Health marketing team sprang into action, publishing real-time content to become a part of a conversation happening online after an emotional episode of the popular TV drama Downton Abbey dealing with eclampsia, an acute and life-threatening complication during pregnancy.

The MultiCare Health team wrote a blog post right away and shared it on Facebook and Twitter. The post “Doctor Q&A: Downton Abbey Highlights Dangers of Eclampsia” was available the day after the episode aired right when people were discussing eclampsia. Within the blog post were links where interested people could learn more or book an appointment with a physician.

The team also shared on Facebook and on their @MultiCareHealth Twitter feed with this tweet: “Wondering about #eclampsia after last night's Downton Abbey? We've got answers here,” and included a link.

The MultiCare Health digital content team includes four former journalists who bring a real-time newsroom mind-set to content creation.

The blog post quickly generated well over 1,000 page views, with people spending an average of five minutes on the page.

Marketers at MultiCare Health can directly trace about 30 click-throughs to the MultiCare Find a Physician page in their Women & Children care line, the place where new patients can book appointments.

Newsjacking helped drive people into MultiCare Health's buying process. And it all happened because of agile, instant engagement.

It's this same real-time mind-set that many salespeople and entire sales teams are using to drive success.

Ronnie Dunn's Real-Time Disruption

Most music artists use the usual route to launch a record—try to get radio airplay and attempt to get the media to write a review. Then they hope that people will buy it.

That's not what Ronnie Dunn did to launch three new songs. Instead, he performed a guerrilla gig from the roof of a restaurant, playing as Country Music Television's CMT Music Awards audience was filing out of the venue next door. Dunn newsjacked the CMT Music Awards!

Dunn is well known to the country music world—his duo Brooks and Dunn won more Country Music Association (CMA) awards and Academy of Country Music awards than any act in history and sold 30 million records—so thousands of people gathered to watch the gig. He created quite the scene!

Live video of Dunn's performance was projected onto the walls of Rippy's Bar & Grill (where he was playing) and two other nearby music venues, Tootsie's Orchid Lounge and Honky Tonk Central. At the same time his @RonnieDunn Twitter handle and hashtags were projected onto the roof of the nearby Ryman Auditorium.

At his home in Nashville, I interviewed Dunn about pulling off the disruptive sales strategy. “We didn't ask for permission,” he says. “We had done a deal with the owner of the restaurant so we had our lights and production all set up. As everyone came out of the arena, 15,000 people all funneled through this little spot.”

The hoopla generated tons of real-time attention for Dunn's new music as people shared on social media. Soon mainstream media and the music press wrote about the surprise appearance, too. For example, USA Today wrote a story, “Ronnie Dunn Debuts New Single on Nashville Rooftop,” while the Country Weekly headline was “Ronnie Dunn Ambushes CMA Music Fest.”

Dunn played by the unwritten rules of the music world for two decades. While he enjoyed tremendous success, now he was testing the limits. “Mainstream is the road to mediocrity,” he says. “It took me 20 years to realize that. It got to the point where we'd get cut off at the pass every time we wanted to do something that was fairly innovative. It's time to be different.”

Agile sales and marketing strategies like those from Ronnie Dunn and MultiCare Health drive people into the buying process in real time.

The Art and Science of Newsjacking to Reach Buyers and Create Real-Time Sales Opportunities

The original concepts in my book Newsjacking were aimed at marketing and public relations professionals, and I talked about how the technique generates awareness for organizations. However, in the several years since the book was released, I've studied the phenomenon of newsjacking carefully and realized that the ideas are just as applicable to sales. There is no doubt that the technique should be in your sales arsenal, because I've witnessed dozens of examples where newsjacking produces real-time sales successes.

You may find newsjacking opportunities on two levels: (1) within your immediate sphere of business activities and local or personal interests, and (2) in the wider sphere of national or global news. The trick is to devise news-monitoring strategies that keep you instantly informed on both levels.

To cover the immediate sphere, you will want to monitor media you may already know, including influential blogs and trade publications that cover your marketplace. If you run a local business—a restaurant perhaps—then your hometown paper is a perfect place to start. We'll take a look at how to monitor this news first, then turn our attention to news you don't yet see coming from outlets you may not know.

The first priority is to follow bloggers, analysts, journalists, and others who cover your business. Start by identifying as many voices as you can. To find these voices, start by checking the search engines (Google, Yahoo!, Bing, etc.) for relevant keywords and phrases: your company, customers, competitors, prospects, product categories, buzzwords, and whatever else you can think of.

The next step is to begin monitoring what these outlets say in real time. As its name suggests, the really simple way to do this is to use RSS (sometimes referred to as really simple syndication), a tool that allows you to harvest content from hundreds of blogs and news feeds without having to visit each one. RSS feeds update each time a site changes, alerting you to relevant information on topics that you specify. I use NewsFire for this, but there are many RSS readers to choose from.

The goal here is to know what people say immediately, so you can comment in real time when appropriate. And that becomes much easier once you have identified people likely to talk about the subjects that you can comment on with authority. For example, if you are a real estate agent and your local newspaper does a story on the market for homes in your area, you can comment on the story, blog about it, or tweet your thoughts on it, all in real time.

Once you're keeping an eye out for the important voices in your marketplace, it's time to monitor those you don't know yet.

Create a comprehensive list of search terms relevant to your business or interests. Include anything that you might want to see become the second paragraph of a story related to your interests. Again, search for anything relevant: industry terms, competitors, customers, prospects, and products, plus any relevant buzzwords or phrases—every term you can think of.

Set up news alerts on Google News or another platform using those search terms. This will automatically inform you in real time when any of your search terms crop up. Set up alerts on blog search engines, too. Note that if you choose Google Alerts, you can set the alert to let you know when a phrase appears in multiple content types, so one set of alerts can help you monitor blogs, news feeds, websites, and more.

For serious newsjackers, there is no tool more essential than Twitter. It is both a primary source of newsjacking feedstock and a powerful channel to get your message out in real time.

Twitter is a great way to stay on top of breaking news, as many media outlets now use the service to drive traffic to fresh content as it appears. Monitor your search terms on Twitter, too. Use a Twitter monitoring tool like TweetDeck or HootSuite to catch your key phrases. You can also use Twitter's own search function for one-off searches.

A word of caution: Be very careful when newsjacking a story that carries a negative connotation. For example, on September 11, 2013, AT&T tweeted an image of a smartphone taking a photo of the site of the World Trade Center in an attempt to generate interest in the AT&T brand. The image, sent from the @ATT Twitter ID, said, “Never Forget.” The negative reaction on Twitter was swift. For example, @ryanbroderic, with nearly 10,000 followers, replied, “@ATT your cool photoshop makes the memories of watching my parents cry in front of the television a lot easier to deal with today.” AT&T responded quickly, but the damage was done. Its tweet, “We apologize to anyone who felt our post was in poor taste. The image was solely meant to pay respect to those affected by the 9/11 tragedy,” wasn't enough to prevent more than 50 mainstream media outlets, including ABC News, USA Today, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post, from writing about the error in judgment. If a story like the anniversary of the events of 9/11 has negative connotations, it is best to stay away from commenting in public.

When news breaks, we know that many people immediately turn to Twitter in search of news on the topic. If the big news of the day is somehow related to your business and you tweet your take to the world, you just might influence those buyers who are evaluating your products and your existing customers who follow you on Twitter. And you could grab attention from many others who are not yet in the buying process. Just like MultiCare Health, your tweet just might make a sale you otherwise wouldn't have made.

Newsjacking: One Lawyer Considers the Legal Implications

For a terrific example of newsjacking as a technique to drive sales, consider how Mitch Jackson, a senior partner in the California law firm Jackson & Wilson (with the fantastic pointer URL mylawyerrocks.com), uses his blog to newsjack stories in the news that have a legal twist. Jackson & Wilson are an established firm, with local lawyers and past clients frequently referring cases to them.

Even though the firm has plenty of business, Jackson writes a blog where he comments on the legal aspects of stories in the news and shares via social networks. And he gets a plethora of attention as a result. His popularity has resulted in more than 26,000 followers of his @MitchJackson Twitter feed.

For example, his post “Michael Sam Is Gay and the NFL Team That Drafts Him Will Face Major Litigation Exposure” resulted a few hours later in being invited to appear on a Fox Sports show to talk about the NFL and Michael Sam.

Did I mention Jackson is a lawyer? Many people tell me that the ideas I discuss like real-time marketing and newsjacking aren't for them. They say their business is different.

Jackson's blog post “Who Is Responsible for the Death of Philip Seymour Hoffman?” was written soon after the actor's death was reported, and gave people a different way of looking at the story. “Several of my recent posts have increased views by 500 to 1,000 percent,” he says. “The Philip Seymour Hoffman post generated a nice level of dialogue and comments on Facebook, Twitter, and the blog. All links with modified teaser captions were shared on my social platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vine, Pinterest, and Google Plus.”

A few other real-time stories that caught my eye include: “Oscar Pistorius and Reeva Steenkamp South African Murder Trial,” “What Will Happen Next in the Amanda Knox Murder Case?,” “Unregulated E-Cigarettes Mask Hidden Dangers,” “Bill Cosby Gives His Deposition Today in California,” and “Justin Bieber Shows You the WRONG Way to Give a Deposition.”

“My goal is to continue enjoying an expanded sphere of influence through sharing my expertise on social media as opposed to needing to get the phone to ring,” Jackson says. “Although the phone does ring with these efforts, that's not really the focus.”

Jackson's personal favorite was writing his take on the Rebecca Sedwick bullying case, which gave him a chance to share tips and tools with families experiencing bullying and to offer legal solutions. “Readers from across the country have reached out to thank us for sharing ideas and resources found in the post about the tragic Rebecca Sedwick bullying case,” he says. “Bullying is a huge problem right now, especially on social media, and many people and families experiencing bullying have no idea how to go about protecting their children. Several years ago, one of our jury trial verdicts involved protecting a family who was bullied for years by their neighbors. I'm proud to say that on appeal, we helped enact a new California law because of the case. Established professionals have expertise and opinions that can help bring solutions to so many people.”

Live Stream Your Take on the News with Periscope

To quickly get his take into the marketplace of ideas, Jackson frequently live streams on Periscope, a service that turns your smartphone into a virtual TV news station. Periscope (and similar services from Meerkat and Snapchat) are used to share with the world what you're seeing right at this moment, so others can experience it with you in real time. The basic idea is to extend the functionality of photo- and video-sharing applications such as Instagram. Unlike YouTube, which generally requires you to upload your video, Periscope allows you to broadcast live from your smartphone.

For example, Jackson live streamed “11 Insurance Claim Tips for Snow and Earthquake Property Damage Victims” after news stories started appearing about people's damaged homes from natural disasters. The use of Periscope is even faster than writing a blog post, and, because new Periscope feeds automatically appear on Twitter, the use of a hashtag allows nearly instantaneous commentary about any breaking news story.

Periscope turns anyone into a citizen journalist—you're the TV reporter, live at the scene of breaking news (or live from your “studio” at your home or office). Periscope feeds are also available as a reply but only for 24 hours, which gives people an incentive to watch before the stream disappears.

For salespeople, live streaming opens up the possibility of sharing all kinds of information that can serve as a way to reach potential customers. A live operation at a hospital, a tour of a home for sale, a peek backstage at a rock concert, a manager's pep talk before the big game, or a product design meeting at a company all become shareable in an exciting and intimate way.

I use Periscope to broadcast sections of some of my live presentations. For example, when I delivered a two-hour session on real-time marketing at the Tony Robbins Business Mastery event in early 2016, I had somebody hold my smartphone to live stream about 20 minutes of the talk via my @dmscott Periscope account.

I'm amazed that more than 1,000 people tuned in to watch the live Periscope broadcast or viewed the replay while it was available for the next 24 hours. There were nearly as many people watching the feed as were in the room where I presented!

We're in a new world where you can share interesting events with everyone on the planet, and this has important ramifications for businesses of all kinds. Live streaming is a new way to share content, and many people love watching streams.

If you're interested in learning much more about newsjacking, I've created an online course called Master Newsjacking. For the past five years I've taught the newsjacking technique to hundreds of live audiences in more than 20 countries, and I've taken what I've learned to create Master Newsjacking. The content of the course includes eight lessons with a total of more than 40 videos and eight downloadable infographics. Best of all, there is a step-by-step action plan for how you can learn the art and science of newsjacking to generate sales leads, add new customers, get media attention, and grow your business—all at no cost and with little effort.

Newsjacking can work for all sorts of outfits and people—it doesn't matter if you are large and well known or tiny and obscure. This technique is already being used by nonprofits, political campaigns, business-to-business marketers, and even individuals like Mitch Jackson.

People you will meet in the course have generated thousands of new sales leads by newsjacking. A few have made millions of dollars by using the ideas taught in my course. Some of generated thousands of news stories about their company. It can work for you, too. To learn more about my course, please visit www.newsjacking.com.

Newsjacking is about putting your ideas out there at the precise moment when people are thinking about your area of expertise. If you do so in a clever way, you will find people lining up to do business with you. Let's move on from the concept of newsjacking to look at other aspects of agile selling.

Automation Runs Amok

With all this talk of big data, real-time engagement, newsjacking, and using social tools like Twitter to communicate instantly, some people have taken the ideas too far, moving beyond welcome interaction into annoying interruption. This frequently occurs when people try to automate the entire process of communicating with the market or individual buyers.

Crunching massive amounts of data to target specific people certainly has benefits. However, there are distinct drawbacks to relying too much on technology alone to reach people by using targeted data. My research indicates that being completely automated, while a noble goal, is very difficult to implement in practice. It is much better to automate when you can, but have smart people as part of the work flow.

My friend @luckyrenee tweeted me from the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival because she knows I am a big live music fan. “I wonder if @dmscott is rocking out at #JazzFest2012.” I tweeted back right away: “@luckyrenee No, I'm not at #JazzFest2012 but it sounds like fun. If you are there—enjoy.”

I was surprised when, soon after, a tweet from @Acura_Insider mentioned me. I checked who @Acura_Insider was from the Twitter bio: “Acura's official Twitter account. Get the inside scoop & other Acura news. On duty: Alison w/Acura PR.”

The tweet read: “@dmscott You're a click away from access 2 the Acura VIP Area at JazzFest2012. Visit the Acura Tent or click [link].” The link pointed to a PURL (personal URL) that offered me a VIP experience at Jazz Fest. The text of the linked page read: “Stop by the Acura tent and check in with one of our representatives for access to the Acura VIP area. There's music, delicious food, refreshing drinks, a special viewing area and a shady spot to relax in.”

I then checked the @Acura_Insider Twitter ID, and found hundreds of other people who had received such a spam message directed at them. In fact, at that time the account was in broadcast-only mode. There was no interaction at all, no humans involved. For the previous two days of Jazz Fest, the account had been generating hundreds of examples of this nonsense.

While I'm all for an automobile manufacturer getting creative and implementing real-time sales and marketing strategies, this was spam, plain and simple.

Just to be sure, I tweeted back to @Acura_Insider and got nothing. It would appear that nobody was monitoring the feed. Heck, it was a weekend. In my experience most companies are active on Twitter only during regular business hours, so would they be checking Twitter?

Obviously, I wasn't at #JazzFest2012, and anyone who bothered to look at my tweet back to Renee would have seen that. This is a perfect example of where a clever automated strategy of offering VIP access via Twitter could have been a great sales tactic had actual humans been monitoring what the automated system was generating. Real people should have had control of a button that sent each tweet after a quick review to make sure the person was actually at the music festival. And then, should someone bother to reply, they could respond instantly. It was a giant missed opportunity. I frequently go to music festivals, and it can get hot and I can get tired. If I tweeted that I was tired at #JazzFest2012 and then I got a tweet back inviting me to the VIP area, I would be psyched. I would have taken them up on the offer. Then if I enjoyed it I would have talked it up on Twitter. That would have worked.

I'm sure Acura spent a boatload of money sponsoring Jazz Fest. And it probably paid an agency a bunch of money for this stupid campaign. But this machine-generated stuff is not a good way for Acura to generate attention. The negative feelings of those who are spammed far outweigh the good vibes of Acura being on-site.

When I blogged about this soon after, more than 20 people commented on my post and dozens tweeted about it.

Soon, Alison from @Acura_Insider commented.

Thank you to everyone for your feedback regarding this situation. As I have communicated to David, we are also disappointed about the tweets that were sent out under the @Acura_Insider handle, offering VIP access to people who were not attending Jazz Fest. The intention of this program was to provide an exclusive VIP experience during the festival to those checking in and tweeting from Jazz Fest. The program worked well during the first weekend of the festival, but it appears that the company we were working with changed something for the second weekend and messaged people that they were not supposed to; essentially anyone using the hashtag regardless of whether or not they were there. For those in attendance, they were grateful for the opportunity and pleased with the VIP treatment.

I manage the @Acura_Insider account and take pride in how the account is run. I personally send out nearly every tweet and try to engage with as many people as possible. It is our goal to truly provide an insider's perspective into Acura and it is extremely rare for us to work with an outside company or send an automated tweet. We have learned from the negative effect of this campaign and will be sure to prevent such occurrences in the future.

Real-time sales and marketing present amazing opportunities. The technology available to us today for free would have been unthinkable just a few years ago or, if one could have imagined it, it would have cost thousands of dollars per month. But just like bond trading, real-time, agile sales require a combination of both people and technology to be successful.

When Real-Time Sales Put You at the Front of the Line

I was feeling smug in the back of a Lincoln Town Car, grinning like an idiot while nobody could see me through the tinted windows. I had just arrived at San Francisco International Airport on a flight from Boston for a speaking engagement at Dreamforce, the biggest cloud computing event of the year. With something like 100,000 people attending, there was a crush of people arriving at the airport and I was confronted with a massive line for taxicabs, perhaps 100 meters long. The wait was more than one hour (I asked people at the head of the line).

So why was I so happy? Because as soon as I saw that ridiculous line for taxicabs, I pulled out my iPhone and fired up Uber to reserve a car. In just five minutes I was being whisked away in style to my hotel. Brilliant. The Uber iPhone app (it is also available on Android) is a real-time way to book private driver service, typically in a black limousine, in major cities in 26 countries around the world.

For a passenger, you use the app to see if available cars are nearby. Then you tap a button to request a ride and immediately see how long it will take for your driver to reach you, all done in real time with geolocation. You get a message with your driver's name, mobile number, and car license plate number. And in just a few minutes your ride appears. Uber pricing is between a regular taxi fare and the fare for a typical telephone booking of a private car service. I paid $65 for my ride from the San Francisco airport into the city, and the Uber app took care of billing and a tip for the driver.

Uber is terrific for passengers, but for limousine drivers, this agile, real-time application is a fantastic sales tool, transforming the way they do business. I had lengthy discussions with about a dozen Uber drivers to listen to their side of the story. The drivers told me they are independent owner-operators who sometimes use old-style telephone broker services to book business as well. The drivers are incredibly enthusiastic. I heard the following: “I love Uber!” And: “I target $300 a day from Uber and almost always hit my goal.” And: “I average 15 rides a day through Uber.” For these drivers, this is additional business above what they would normally get in an average day. And because the app is real-time, the drivers can choose to offer rides and close the sales based on the other jobs they are working that day. When they have downtime, perhaps while waiting for the theater to let out, they can accept a ride, make some extra money, and still be back to the theater to meet the client who booked ahead using traditional telephone services.

The iPhone and Android Uber app used by drivers is just as slick as the passenger one. If they are free, they get a beep on their phone and can instantly see that a passenger is waiting for a ride. They can choose to accept or decline the ride. If they accept, the passenger's name and mobile number are made available and the passenger's exact location displayed. When the ride starts, the driver hits the start button, and then again at the destination, the driver terminates the ride on the app. The geolocation and clock functions on the mobile device calculate the cost of the ride based on miles driven and time waiting. Because the passenger's credit card number is charged and the credit made to the driver's Uber account, no cash changes hands and it is very quick. Both passenger and driver can rate one another on a five-star scale much like eBay. Easy!

Like many businesses before it, the market for private car services is being transformed by real-time mobile sales technology. Just as the publishing of books has changed with the advent of instant e-book downloads, real-time sales from services like Uber are disintermediating traditional businesses. So the question, of course, is this: Is your industry already being disintermediated? Or is it the next marketplace to be a part of the revolution? Because real-time, agile sales are growing everywhere.

Who Is Selling Whom?

At the many hundreds of live music venues I've visited, getting a drink is the worst experience.

The venue is loud, of course, making it tough to communicate. It's dark. But the biggest problem is that there never seems to be enough bar staff. That usually means that thirsty patrons must jockey for position and try to make eye contact with bartenders. Some people wave tens or twenties in their hands. Some make their way to one end of the bar or the other, hoping that when the staffer moves, they will catch his or her eye.

It is one of the few places where the buyer–seller relationship is reversed. At a crowded bar, the buyers need to work the angles to get the seller to serve them. Thirsty music fans need to work hard to spend money.

Obviously, an understaffed bar also means that people don't order as many rounds as they might if there were no hassles.

If I'm enjoying the show, I might take a few minutes to grab a drink. But I won't bother if it looks like I'll be there for more than five minutes waiting. Multiplied by lots of people, that could be thousands of dollars lost per night in a crowded venue if people forgo drinks.

One fine evening when hitting some of the live music spots in Nashville, I was surprised to see at Tootsies World Famous Orchid Lounge the bartenders raising their hands and making eye contact with customers. Wow. What a difference! Bartenders looking for us! Gotta love it.

In your market, who is selling whom? Is there a way you can turn the equation around?

Agile Sales Require a Real-Time Mind-Set

The real-time mind-set recognizes the importance of speed. It is an attitude to business—and to life—that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right.

For decades the typical Wall Street bond trader has worked in a high-pressure atmosphere ready to make split-second decisions based on information scanned from real-time data and news feeds. The traders peer intently at bond prices displayed on the Bloomberg and Reuters screens, poised and ready to commit huge sums of money when the moment is right. Data from futures markets and stock exchanges update the instant a trade is made.

Fortunes are made in seconds; reputations are lost in a minute.

Now, the same real-time news and data that financial firms used to pay tens of thousands of dollars for each month are available to everyone for free on the web. All of us now have a new currency of success: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second—in real time.

But success requires a new way of thinking. With such a real-time sales strategy, you need to develop an agile mind-set, an attitude that recognizes the importance of speed. It's an approach to business—and to life—that emphasizes moving quickly when the time is right. To implement this, your organization must support real-time sales with the technological infrastructure to monitor and react quickly.

Developing a real-time mind-set is not an either/or proposition. I'm not recommending that you abandon your current business-planning process. The smartest answer is to adopt a both/and approach, covering the spectrum from thorough to nimble. Recognize when you need to throw the playbook aside, and develop the capacity to react quickly.

Larger organizations will want to develop guidelines that permit speedy communications. Try to design and implement an effective code of real-time communications and proactively embed it throughout your organization. Train it, demonstrate it, discuss it, and review it until this becomes second nature to everyone. Have your people internalize it as deeply as the instincts that tell them when it's safe to turn left at a traffic light (or turn right if they're Brits). This is fully possible. IBM's code is called Social Computing Guidelines. The IBM guidelines include all manner of helpful instructions: Be who you are. Be thoughtful about how you present yourself in online social networks. Respect copyright and fair use laws. Protect confidential and proprietary information. Add value. Don't pick fights. Don't forget your day job. But the single most important guideline in the IBM document is this: Speak in the first person. In fact, I believe that speaking in the first person is essential to understanding what we're really talking about here. When you speak in the first person, you are representing both your company and yourself, and it should be understood that the reputations of both are intertwined.

Developing an agile capacity requires sustained effort: encouraging people to take the initiative, celebrating their success when they go out on a real-time limb, and cutting them slack when they try and fail. None of this is easy.

Agile Sales Mean Going Off Script

In most markets, there is a “best practices” playbook that people know is the right way to do marketing. There is an accepted script that people know and follow, and most treat that script as if it were law and there is no other way to work.

For example, venture capitalists have long insisted that the companies they fund must invest a monthly retainer to a traditional public relations agency.

Rock bands have long focused on the major-label record deal as the ultimate goal.

However, I've discovered as I travel the world that the greatest successes frequently occur when a company goes off script. Those salespeople and marketers who improvise—coming up with something new and interesting that the competitors aren't doing—get noticed and build business.

Yet, the business world traditionally rewards the safe approach. Salespeople are encouraged to stay on script. People and companies are afraid of veering from the “best practices” script.

Amanda Palmer fired her record label. Rather than following the traditional rock star script, she self-funded her album via Kickstarter, and the buzz she generated put the album on the top 10 Billboard album list when it was released.

Here are a few beliefs people repeatedly cite as part of their playbooks that are worth reconsidering. I'm sure you can think of others:

• “Facebook is for personal connections, and LinkedIn is for business.”
• “Older people are not on the web, and seniors don't use social media.”
• “You can't reach physicians with online sales.”
• “Because of strict regulations, the pharmaceutical, healthcare, and financial services industries cannot use social media.”
• “Newspapers are a dying medium.”

What conventional wisdom that “everybody knows” can you challenge? How can you go off script?

Big Data Plus Real-Time Technology Drives Sales

It's impossible to overstate the impact of the innovations in computing and telecommunications on the financial markets of the 1980s, the time when I worked on a bond trading desk at a Wall Street investment bank. Within a decade finance was transformed from a clubby old boys' network to a 24-hour global trading system. A new currency of success emerged: the ability to gather, interpret, and react to new information in fractions of a second—in real time.

Those exact same dynamics are playing out today in your business. You can instantly see what people are doing and saying on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. Free, web-based services like Google News display real-time news feeds in the same way that bond traders see them.

In the emerging real-time business environment, where public discourse is no longer dictated by the mass media, size is no longer a decisive advantage. Speed and agility win.

Today, sales can be made by watching real-time data feeds in the same way that bond traders do. Take the example of Avaya Inc., a specialist in telecommunications technology used in call centers. People at Avaya carefully watch social networking sites and monitor what's being said to achieve sales they otherwise wouldn't realize.

The strategy delivered a quick payoff when somebody tweeted, “[The name of a competitor] or Avaya? Time for a new phone system very soon.” The tweet was spotted in real time, and just minutes later Avaya tweeted back using the @Avaya_Support Twitter ID: “Let me know if we can help you—we have some Strategic Consultants that can help you assess your needs.” The individual who tweeted was indeed evaluating telephone systems right then and engaged with Avaya, resulting in a quick $250,000 sale. Less than two weeks later, the customer sent a tweet in which the company was identified: “We have selected AVAYA as our new phone system. Excited by the technology and benefits for our company.” The customer was so happy with Avaya's services and the people he interacted with that he tweeted again a few months later: “Getting ready to install our new Avaya phone system—our customers will love it.”

A 57-character tweet became a sales lead that resulted in a $250,000 sale just weeks later.

To support real-time business, you need a technological infrastructure every bit as sophisticated as what's found on a financial trading floor. The good news is that smaller organizations can rely on free services like Google News and TweetDeck. This is the combination I currently use every day. Larger organizations will want to invest in backbone technology and a real-time data environment that feeds the dashboard used every day by your marketers, PR professionals, salespeople, and executives.

Predictive Analytics

Every move you make on the web can be measured and tracked and used to help move you through the sales process. This played out for me when I was poking around the True Religion brand jeans website. True Religion jeans fit me really well, so I have a few pair. But they are expensive, so I tend to wait for a sale to pull the trigger on a new pair.

I noticed a particular model called Men's Ricky on the Road Jean, but the retail price of $395 was way more than I would spend. So I popped over to eBay and searched on “Men's Ricky on the Road Jean” to see if there were any on offer there at a lower price. There were, but I didn't buy on eBay.

The next morning on Facebook there was a personalized ad from eBay sitting on my homepage as a “Suggested Post.” The text: “Still Interested? Don't miss out on this item!” And there was a photo of the jeans I had been interested in the day before! Wow. Talk about real-time personalized targeting. I'm on eBay and look at a very specific item. The next day an ad for that exact item pops up within a social network I'm in.

In the past, I've noticed examples of ads that appeared on my browser that had been triggered either by a site I had recently visited or by my recent Google searches. But those ads tended to be much more generic. This was a first: One of my specific searches was redeployed as an in-context ad that appeared within a completely different site. And it was targeted right down to an image of the thing I was looking for.

Our world has been heading to this level of targeting for a long time. Salespeople might use such tools to target a specific buyer in interesting ways. Imagine a B2B salesperson inserting an ad into someone's Facebook stream shortly after the person downloaded a specific white paper.

The idea of predictive analytics is a very powerful one. Let's look at a few more examples.

I buy stuff from Amazon.com nearly every week. I don't buy just books. I use the service to shop for electronics, personal care products, even clothing. Sure, I love the selection and Amazon Prime's two-day free shipping. But what I really love is how quickly the Amazon.com search engine shows me exactly what I'm looking for. And when I find an item, I can see information about other products that people who did a similar search also shopped for. I can see reviews of the product and quickly browse other products in the category. And Amazon.com will suggest other things I might be interested in based on my buying patterns. This way of selling couldn't have existed just a few short years ago, because it relies on massive computing power to analyze the purchase behavior of tens of millions of customers. Amazon.com bases predictions on the purchasing habits of millions of people by focusing on those individuals who are similar to you. Perhaps they live in the same location and bought the same kind of sporting gear and books. What did they buy next? Amazon.com has a remarkable recommendation engine at work, which has helped lead to Amazon.com becoming the world's largest online retailer, with $107 billion in sales in 2015.

Other well-known companies using recommendation engines to sell in a new way include Pandora Internet Radio, a music streaming and automated music recommendation service, and Netflix, the on-demand Internet streaming movie and TV media company. Pandora will recommend new music to me based on my previous choices, and Netflix will serve up a list of movies I might enjoy. The massive databases and computing power behind the scenes drive sales.

Those same predictive analytics engines are now being deployed at much smaller organizations as well, providing salespeople with critical information that will help them sell more. In a simple incarnation, real-time website data can help a salesperson with what to say to individual buyers based on what they are doing on the site. For example, as a buyer visits your website and registers for a webinar, an alert is triggered on the salesperson's real-time dashboard, providing details about the buyer based on the page that person is visiting. The alert notes that the person downloaded a white paper a few days ago. In fact, the alert is flagged as high priority because that combination of actions—white paper download plus webinar registration—is highly indicative of a propensity to buy.

The alert, a trigger event, instantly pulls up information on the buyer's company. Is it already a client? Have others from this company visited the site before? Even the buyer's LinkedIn and Twitter profiles appear. And all this happens in real time. It is this kind of technology that informs an agile sales strategy, transforming the one-size-fits-all sales efforts of the previous decade with just-in-time intelligence.

This is just a simple example of a trigger event that might happen in real time based on somebody visiting a website. Predictive analytics can be so much more when combined with external data. In the nonprofit world, trigger events are being used to gather information about active and potential donors. Intelligence gleaned from publicly available resources such as recent real estate transactions, reported executive compensation, and political contributions can be harvested by a nonprofit organization to estimate the level of an individual's ability to donate. Until very recently it was extremely difficult for a small nonprofit organization to access such valuable information in detail, as it was unlikely to have the staff, time, or resources to conduct background research on active members, past supporters, and potential donors.

For a nonprofit, cultivating financial support usually requires a deft combination of diplomacy and nuanced verbal choreography. Louisa Stephens, executive director of the Associates of the Boston Public Library, a small nonprofit with only two full-time employees, describes the challenge. “If you enter a delicate conversation about possible gifts, it's always helpful to have some idea where you stand,” Stephens says. “When you lack sufficient background information, you could either leave a lot of money on the table or worse. If the donor was considering a gift of around $20,000 and you ask for only $5,000, they will say, ‘Sure, I can give you $5,000.’ But if you were to ask for $200,000, they are likely to laugh at you.”

Stephens's development efforts for the Associates of the Boston Public Library further its mission to ensure continued public access to the Library's irreplaceable treasures by underwriting its cataloging, repair, restoration, digitization, and exhibition expenses. The fruit of many of these efforts is now available online for everyone and includes items from John Adams's personal library; letters, documents, and papers documenting the antislavery movement in the United States; medieval manuscripts; and even photographs documenting the history of the Red Sox.

Stephens now uses the Raiser's Edge, a fundraising and donor management software package to research active members, potential donors, and others she communicates with during her workday. “With a click of a button I can see who purchased tickets to our annual black-tie benefit dinner, Literary Lights, or view a list of past donors to reveal who failed to respond this year,” she says. “That allows us to swiftly target and follow up our most important lapsed donors, something that would have taken a lot of manual work in the past.”

More significantly, when the internal data held by a small nonprofit in its management software is combined with external data and trigger events, systems like the Raiser's Edge become powerful tools. “When development officers research someone, they pull information from a number of sources and areas of interest,” Stephens says. “What real estate do they own? What's that worth? Is there any information about other charitable gifts that they recently made elsewhere? If they have a family foundation, you can pull down the IRS 990 form to see the grants they made. This information helps inform us when the board chairperson and I sit down to make that ask, so we are not requesting something that's completely unrealistic, a figure that's either too low or too high.”

To learn more about trigger events and predictive analytics, I spoke with Brian Kardon, chief marketing officer at Lattice Engines, a technology company providing data-driven predictive applications that help companies market and sell more intelligently.

“Formerly, when salespeople made a call they would know little more than the buyer's initial interest, their company's profile, their revenues, and where they lived,” Kardon says. “Then about five years ago people started going on LinkedIn to learn about the buyer. ‘Oh, this guy likes to play tennis and he's from my hometown.’ So you could begin to personalize things. And then maybe three to four years ago you knew from marketing automation that they went to your website and they looked at the product page or the pricing page. But now there are thousands of bits of information about each individual. We all leave digital footprints everywhere. It's about you personally, but it's also about your company.”

Kardon says the companies doing the best work with predictive sales analysis understand it requires both technology and human interaction. “Sales reps alone can't get all the information they need,” he says. “It's just too hard to find. You can use bots to find and deliver the information to the salesperson, but it's more than any human can process. People often ask me if a computer is smarter than a person. The answer is no. They're just faster. So a computer can process all this information and rationally organize it to aid a very personalized selling experience.”

Recall my earlier example about Acura mining tweets for the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival hashtag and then sending an automated tweet with an offer. That was technology with no human intervention and it failed, harming the Acura brand in the process. At its base level, the sales process is still about one human connecting with another human. The personal touch is best achieved when technology informs the salespeople, thus enabling them to deliver a unique experience to every buyer based on the buyer's individual background.

To be effective, salespeople need more than their gut instinct and sales skills, and that's where predictive analytics comes in. “We have a client who sells foreign exchange services. We've learned that if someone opens an office in a new country they're 18 times more likely to need this company's foreign exchange services,” Kardon says. “In the past they treated everyone the same. Everyone had the same close rate, 3 percent. Now they differentiate and personalize every customer's experience. A customized, contextual conversation is provided based on the individual challenges faced by the unique customer in combination with knowledge gleaned from working with thousands of other clients.”

Some of the data types that can be used for predictive analysis include online shopping carts, changes in executives, new hires, patent filings, opening up offices, and new funding. There are many others as well, depending on the type of business. Most companies make use of both proprietary data as well as a wealth of information available on the web from news feeds and social media.

According to Kardon, Staples, an office supply store with more than 2,000 locations in 26 countries, has a thousand salespeople and they personalize every sales call. “Five years ago they would call a little company and they would say, ‘Do you need more office supplies?’ Now they call and say, ‘I understand you're hiring 20 new people. You probably need more desks. And you probably need more ink cartridges because you've been buying them every six weeks and eight weeks have gone by.’ So you now have much more information to personalize the experience based on very specific parameters.”

Interestingly, this kind of analysis also allows sales teams to operate in a leaner fashion because there is no longer a need to contact every single lead that comes in. “If a company used to have 20 job postings and now they have none, and their credit score just went from A to C and they just shut down two offices, that's valuable to know,” Kardon says. “If you knew that, would you call them even if they came via an inbound lead? No, don't call them. There are all these things that are largely invisible to most salespeople. Now we can know a lot more, so the first step is not to treat them all equally and expend resources; instead you can discriminate.”

Kardon says, “We used to celebrate the sales rep who called 10, 20, 50, a hundred times and finally got the meeting. What we've learned is that there's folly in doing that because if you haven't reached them initially, your chances of converting them go down dramatically. You're wasting all your time trying to reach someone who's never going to buy.”

Social Selling and Your Customer Relationship Management

As you consider real-time technology to help you with agile, social selling, you'll need to be very careful about the role of your customer relationship management (CRM) software. Many medium-size and large organizations have an enterprise CRM system in place that the entire sales force uses. Frequently the marketing and customer support staff use the system as well. CRM software is used by organizations to manage a company's interactions with current and future customers. It is used to manage the process of how people inside a company interact with existing and potential customers, and typically it includes an automated component that tracks a particular buyer's history of contacts by a salesperson. There are many specialized CRM systems for industry-specific applications such as the insurance industry, healthcare, and nonprofits, as well as general systems for B2B and consumer businesses.

The large providers of CRM software designed their products in the 1990s, and the category of enterprise CRM grew quickly with the widespread availability of networked computing during the 1990s, and then the shift to software as a service (SaaS) computing in the first decade of the 2000s. And that's the fundamental problem—these software systems were developed in the era of traditional selling, when salespeople made cold calls and followed up on sales leads. CRM as it exists today wasn't designed and built for a world in which the buyer is in charge. Contemporary CRM software still reflects the old paradigm in which the salesperson initiates the action, and therefore it is flawed.

Today, the buyers decide when they want to engage a salesperson. When the salesperson was in charge, the old CRM work flow model—charting a path from initial lead, to the first call, to a face-to-face meeting, to the negotiation phase, and ending with the close—made sense. No longer. Today, if I'm interested in buying something, I go to a dozen websites and do the research. And then at some point when I've built up my body of knowledge, I reach out, typically electronically, and tell the company that I'm ready to take the next step. The old CRM systems don't manage this process well.

The word relationship in customer relationship management isn't even that accurate, because the software isn't really about relationships at all. Instead, CRM systems are a transactional database for management reports. They're optimized for sales management reporting based on a hierarchical, top-down, command-and-control process where sales management doesn't trust salespeople. While there is certainly benefit for salespeople to use today's CRM platforms, most people in sales don't like them because the platforms require them to log in and record their every action with a potential customer. This takes valuable time away from their primary task—selling—and diverts it toward updating and maintaining the activity log so that sales management can see what they are doing. Salespeople are required to estimate the likelihood that the deal will close primarily so that sales management can run a forecast report for senior executives.

“Sales force automation is in trouble,” says Greg Alexander, CEO of Sales Benchmark Index, a sales force effectiveness consulting firm. “This software was originally sold with the promise that it would increase the productivity of the individual sales representative. Vendors insisted that if you are a sales rep and use it, you would sell better. But in fact, that didn't happen. Why? People installed the technology prematurely. An automation tool is meant to automate a process, but if you don't have a process, you make chaos. And you end up performing chaotic activities more frequently. It actually hurts. It doesn't help.”

CRM systems should do a better job of helping sales representatives understand buyer context, but CRM wasn't built to do that. Instead the systems were created to help sales reps organize how they're going to take a prospect through the sales process, and bubble it up to the sales VP. And now, in a world where there are so many signals coming in from potential or hungry buyers when they visit your website, interact with your email campaigns, or enter discussions on social media, modern and effective CRM technology should be aggregating all this data. For example, if someone posts a comment or a question to your company blog, there should be a mechanism that analyzes the context of the post against all potential customers and alerts salespeople to exactly which buyer would be interested. Yet existing CRM systems don't do this. CRM should be much more focused on helping salespeople to deliver a better buying process.

CRM pioneer Jon Ferrara agrees that CRM systems as deployed today aren't up to the task. Ferrara founded GoldMine CRM in 1989 with a college friend and built a business that achieved two million customers. GoldMine ranked number 154 on the 1997 Inc. 500 and was sold to FrontRange in 1999. A decade later, Ferrara founded Nimble, a service for small businesses that unifies email, calendar activities, and popular social channels—including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter—and links to business contacts. “The whole idea of CRM goes back to the command-and-control mentality of the old-school company,” he says. “I believe enterprise CRM was invented because management was concerned that the salespeople had their contacts, but management didn't have access or control of the information, and they couldn't report on their sales activities properly. Management wanted to lock up the contacts and own them; they wanted to keep track of what the salespeople were doing and chart the process. They forced salespeople to put their contacts into the CRM. But most don't fill in their real contacts; they keep the keys to their golden contacts in places like LinkedIn, and they only put enough into the CRM to get paid their commission.”

The problem here is huge. Modern social selling just doesn't work on the CRM platforms that were built during an obsolete era when sellers controlled both information dissemination and the selling process. And it certainly doesn't work on burdensome systems that were designed as reporting tools for senior management.

“We now have an opportunity to break free of the traditional CRM approach to selling,” says Greg Alexander. “For example, LinkedIn is getting into social selling with an app called LinkedIn Context that salespeople populate with simple things like telephone numbers, email addresses, Twitter handles, notes about how you met this person, and how you are connected. I can tag somebody as an influencer in my connection taxonomy, for example. A client would be tagged as a client, and a prospect would be tagged as a prospect. The best part about it is that the data entry administration is offloaded. The salesperson has been freed from managing this information because their social profiles are kept up-to-date by their contacts. It's no longer necessary to constantly scrub the database to see if an email address is correct or a telephone number is current. The big burden associated with sales force automation—data entry—is gone.”

Jon Ferrara believes that sales software should be about how a salesperson can participate in a buyer's journey by telling buyers things they don't know. He says aligning salespeople to the buyer's journey will benefit all. “We need to connect and build relationships with our customers, and CRM doesn't do that. It's no longer a sales funnel, or even a circle. It's a pretzel in which you have no idea where the journey starts and stops. But buyers will view you as a trusted advisor if you join them during the journey and share with them a nugget of information or an article you discovered. You're building relationships, and that's how you build your brand and your network. A salesperson's personal brand plus their network equals their professional net worth.”

Obsessing over Sales Forecasts Does Nothing for Your Buyers

Just one manifestation of the disconnect between how people buy today and the ways that most companies use CRM systems is around sales forecasting.

Many companies spend huge amounts of sales managers' time micromanaging each salesperson's pipeline so they can come up with forecasts of how many deals might close in a given month or quarter.

The data they generate gets filtered up to top managers, who ask questions or themselves nitpick, all of which then gets pushed back down the line to the individual reps. It's an unproductive and never-ending cycle.

Indeed, many CRM and salesforce automation software products are primarily used by managers to forecast sales rather than being used by salespeople to work with buyers. Obsessing over sales forecasts and having sales leadership focus on “managing” salespeople to forecasts is a growing problem. It a big reason why salespeople are less effective today.

The sales cycle is no longer. Now it is a buying cycle because potential customers have near-perfect information on the web. But you know that already. Buyers can see what your company is up to, how your products work, what the competition is doing, how much others paid for your services, what your CEO is saying on social media (or not), and much more.

A micromanagement of salespeople via CRM and salesforce automation systems leads to failure because those systems were built and the algorithms developed in the old days of selling. As soon as you obsess over forecasts, you've lost.

Instead, focus on the buyers and their problems, and let salespeople do their jobs without interfering and forcing them to enter ridiculous amounts of data into your systems.

Brawn or Brains?

Over a few beers, on several sun-soaked days during the summer of 2013, I had an opportunity to explore the ideas of social selling, real-time engagement, and how technology can help salespeople to be more effective with HubSpot co-founder and CEO Brian Halligan. Like me, Halligan was also a sales representative early in his career, and he rose to run very large international sales teams. Halligan has evangelized about new marketing with his writing and speaking, and we co-wrote the book Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.

“I started my sales career in 1990 at Parametric Technology Corporation as the secretary to the vice president of sales,” Halligan says. “At the time, the company had $3 million in revenue. Ten years later, I was a senior vice president of sales and the company had achieved $1 billion in revenue. I had a very nice run and learned a ton about selling and the sales process. But it's remarkable how radically different that sales process needs to be today. The way people shop has really changed.” While marketers have adapted to the new realities of the web by delivering information that helps them get found, Halligan agrees that salespeople and sales management are reluctant to change.

“Back in the 1990s, I as the salesperson had the leverage in a relationship because I controlled all the information,” Halligan says. “In business school we used the term asymmetric information, which means I had unfair power against the buyer because I had better information. Today, when the conversation finally takes place between the buyer and the seller, the information is symmetric, or the buyer might even have more information than the sales rep. The power has completely shifted.”

Yet Halligan observes that sales teams are resisting the inevitable change. “Sales needs to lean into change and embrace it,” he says. “For instance, many companies today still don't publish their pricing on their website, which is kind of ridiculous.”

Halligan believes today's successful salespeople need entirely new skills. “Rather than your cold-calling abilities, now it's all about how smart you are, and how you can solve your buyers' problems,” he says. “Companies need to get their act together and embrace change to really delight customers. The element of friction between sales and customers has been dramatically lowered. Rather than worrying about unhappy customers and the implications of negative word of mouth, salespeople should concentrate on delighting customers. Helping their business and making them feel positive can have a far bigger impact today. It's so easy now for people to spread the word that they are happy. At Parametric, I had five criteria for hiring reps, but at the top of the list was being aggressive. In a world where cold-calling isn't the name of the game any longer and the prospect has an information advantage, the number one criterion today should be brains.”

Halligan reiterates the same problems with CRM as Jon Ferrara and Greg Alexander. “I've spent millions of dollars on sales software and I've used a lot of it,” Halligan says, “and I've got two big issues with it. First, they haven't adjusted and transformed it to match the way people actually buy today. It forces sales reps to be stuck in the 1990s. Second, it was built to monitor progress and help the VP of sales produce forecasts, while providing the salesperson with little more than irritating busywork.”

Buying Signals!

Halligan says useful technology for today's marketplace must adjust to the new reality, and build that into the systems that salespeople use on a daily basis. In particular, Halligan says buying signals are essential for salespeople to know about, yet they aren't part of a typical CRM implementation today. “When a marketer sends an email to a list, the marketer gets incredibly valuable intelligence about who opened that email, what they clicked on, and other analytics,” he says. “But this is 500 times more valuable to the sales rep! So why not build these signals into the salesperson's Outlook and Gmail? Every email that a prospect opens will create a signal that will report to the rep, ‘Oh, they just opened their email.’ When that potential customer clicks on a link, there's another signal, ‘Here's the link they clicked on.’ Or it signals, ‘That potential customer's on your site right now.’ It pops up and tells them in real time. Another signal might be sent with the message, ‘That potential customer just changed their job title on LinkedIn,’ or ‘They just tweeted using your keyword in the message.’ These signals can pop up within your browser and within your email.”

In mid-2013, Halligan created a start-up company within HubSpot to build and launch a new notification app called Signals that would do exactly what he envisioned. It's designed to show real-time notifications based on signals coming from emails you've sent, your website, your CRM system, and social media. The Signals app integrates with many of the tools that salespeople are already using daily, including popular email programs and CRM systems from Salesforce.com.

“The Signals product is designed for the sales rep, not for the VP of sales,” Halligan points out. “It's not designed to manage salespeople. It's built to enable the sales rep dealing with a potential customer who already has a lot more knowledge than he has. It provides the means for the salesperson to have more relevant, context-driven conversations with prospects and move them through the buying process in a more efficient way.”

In this new landscape, successful selling requires new thinking as well as new technology. Today's successful salesperson is active on social networks, focused on the signals that buyers are sending, and fully aware that the buyers are leading the process.

Now we will shift our focus to customer support. There are equally radical shifts happening there as well.