1. Products get commoditized, relationships don’t

Here’s a familiar story: a small SaaS startup - we’ll call it Startup X - spends years building a cutting-edge product and finding a product-market fit. Eventually, they achieve market penetration and the organization scales. As a byproduct of that growth, in-house innovation slows - the team focuses on customer retention and margin optimization instead of new features. Faster than you can say “barriers to entry,” small competitors emerge and reverse-engineer Startup X’s product, slap a better UI on it, and cut the price in half. Quickly, their previously cutting-edge product becomes commoditized and Startup X must face an existential problem: their customers churn out for the shinier, cheaper version of their offering.

So long as the natural revolutions of the market remain a commercial reality, companies need a good reason for their customers to remain faithful over time. For the reasons described above, competing on product is tough - few manage to turn a large company operating at scale back into a nimble, innovative software shop. Still, some companies do a lot better in these situations than others. The reason? Customer Loyalty.

Trust and loyalty set top sales performers apart from their peers

Why will I stick with a product when I’m being offered a cheaper, shinier alternative? Certainty that I can trust my current provider - knowing that they will answer my email at 9pm if I need to add 20 seats overnight, and work with me on things like solution configuration and payment terms. That’s why HBR found that meaningful time spent with customers sets top sales performers apart from their peers . A strong customer relationship is born during the sales process between the purchaser and the seller. That means that the sales rep needs to be wildly (and intelligently) responsive. That means not just responding to emails at 9pm, but sending tailored, thoughtful, and contextually-appropriate follow-ups.

2. The 9-5 is dead

Another good reason to ensure that sellers can always move a deal conversation along, no matter the place or time of day? More deals, faster. The 9-5 workday is certifiably dead, and deal opportunities now emerge 24/7. The demise of the traditional workday has transformed the sales industry. Whatever you’re selling, your schedule revolves around your that of your buyers’. 10 years ago, that meant you both worked a 9 to 5. Now, your clients check their email on the train home, stay past six at the office, and bring a work iPad to the kid’s soccer game on Saturday. Even in B2B sales, that means clients are starting to look more like consumers than businesses – impatient, with high expectations for responsiveness and limited tolerance for anything but a completely intuitive, on-demand purchasing process. Call it the consumerization of the enterprise or aB2B customer who expects to be engaged as a person, not as a corporate purse holder.

The bottom line is that your success rides on your ability to meaningfully connect with your customers, anytime, anywhere. And mobile helps with that - according to research recent research from App Data, a mobile sales solution increased companies’ win rates by 26%.

3. The competition hasn’t realized yet

At first blush, you’d expect that sales leaders would be rushing to set their teams up on mobile sales tools. For now, the opposite is true.  According to Adobe, 89% of sales leaders believe their company is on the right track with its sales enablement strategy, less than 30 percent of them are implementing solutions that allow teams to adapt to an increasingly mobile environment.

(image credit Adobe)

While some teams will continue on a desktop-first path for the foreseeable future, forward-thinking sales leaders know that a truly mobile salesforce - one that can move deals anywhere, anytime - is a critical competitive advantage in the current sales enablement landscape. We believe in that future at Immediately, and are working hard every day to make tools that empower salespeople to focus on the moments that matter anytime, anywhere. Check it out.

It’s simple enough: they deeply understand people and what makes them tick.

As both seasoned and brand new sellers can attest, the more information you can capture ahead of time on your prospect, the tighter your sales process. While technology continues to enhance our ability to efficiently collect this information, discovery alone is just data mining. What will ultimately make you more effective - and successful - is your ability capture the data, analyze the data, and (most importantly) infer actionable insights.

Capture Data

No matter your team’s prospecting requirements, tools like Rapportive andImmediately make it easy for you to collect and quickly reference data on your targets. Hopefully this goes without saying, but you ought to know a prospect’s social data, news, competitive landscape, and 10K better than s/he does before you pick up the phone.

Analyze Data

All of your analysis should intend to help you understand the question: what matters to your prospect? Today, this is largely a manual collection of disparate data: we use social media inputs, company reporting, news aggregation, and private services to understand our prospects: what they care about, their decision framework, their biggest influences (and influencers), etc.

Over the next few years, I expect to see more products emerge that will help analyze this data and type people without a lot of manual work or a natural intuition. Crystal, for example, already shows you how to communicate with prospects in a way that’s tailored to their personalities and motivations.

Infer Actionable Insights

As a seller, the best (and most commercially important) thing you can do with any amount of prospect data is leverage it to modify what, how, and when you communicate to your prospective buyers.

At its most basic, this looks like personalizing outreach based on personal interests (e.g., “saw you love the Golden State Warriors - me too!”). At a more sophisticated level, personalization means creating messages that resonate with your buyers’ preferences in style (e.g., short and punchy, lengthy with context, etc.), content (e.g., vision focus, culture focus, cost cutting focus, revenue focus, etc.), and frequency (e.g., once a month, twice a week, etc.).

The bottom line? The coupling of technology and smart processes enables you to better understand your prospects - you can use that knowledge in constructive or invasive ways. Use it to be helpful.

How many times have we sent (hopefully not many) or received (probably too many) thoughtless and painfully generic follow-up notes in a sales process? As a seller,  you have to balance maintaining high pipeline velocity with building the kinds of meaningful relationships that get deals done (even more important in SaaS models). Your challenge: how do you keep deals moving forward efficiently and effectively?

Get to know your prospects quickly (build that muscle):

Truly seek to understand your customer and leverage the tactics that intelligence agents and ambassadors have used for years. The best sales people I know would make great FBI profilers - they understand their prospects at a motivational level and know what matters most to them. Focus on that skill such that when you send emails or make calls, you get to the heart of what the recipients actually want and need -  be it related to your product or not. There are tools and technology that can help with this as well - leverage them. A book I highly recommend around this topic: Emotional Intelligence 2.0.

Send great and relevant content but also make the ask:

After you’re satisfied that you understand your customers, the next step is to keep them warm with high value content that is helpful to them and their business. What will make them succeed personally and professionally? In understanding them and sending relevant content - you can quickly establish yourself as their trusted advisor. That being said, don’t lose sight of the ask -  your pipeline must move forward. Make sure you are cognizant about timing (knowing when the deal can close) and make the meeting ask to get on the books and push the deal forward.

After the close:

While this post is about moving the pipeline forward - make sure you stay in touch after the close. In this era of transparency and tremendous access to information and people (see Google, LinkedIn and Social Media in general) - the purely transactional sale is dying. On one end of the spectrum is the “sell and bounce”. On the other, the classy way is to stay in touch (connect on social media), and look for simple and easy ways to continue to be helpful over time.

In summary - deeply and truly understand your customer and their motivations first, then provide value but make the ask, and finally stay in touch - referrals and other opportunities come to those who have a long term perspective.

The SDR role will soon become irrelevant, and that’s a good thing - especially for SDRs.

Sales Development Representative, or SDR for short, has become the newstandard entry level role in sales. These days, 40% of technology companies have an SDR team in place. According to Stephen Meyer at Forbes: “Sales development addresses the most important question for sales organizations today – How do I get the right people in front of my “closers” at the lowest possible cost?”

And yet, I believe the days of the SDR are counted. I also believe that is a good thing, as there are much better ways salespeople could be spending their time. Here’s why.

In most organizations, the SDR is responsible for 4 critical tasks: (1) lead sourcing; (2) lead qualification; (3) lead engagement and (4) meeting setting.Impossible to sugarcoat, it’s a necessary evil: setting up a more senior salesperson for an effective conversation.

Now, this is not a good use of a passionate salesperson’s time. I may be voicing an unpopular opinion here, but hear me out. The most valuable - and highest paid - salespeople are relationship-makers. They bring pre-existing customer relationships of trust, and nurture those to drive and grow continued business - making the customer successful in the process. Building authentic relationships which result in mutually-beneficial transactions is the consummate craft of the sales professional. Running mass email campaigns and scrubbing databases is not; nor does it provide experience that directly leads to getting better at the craft of sales.

The good news is that the SDR function will be all but obsolete within a couple of years. What will drive that transformation? Technology, most of which already exists. As an example, below is our sales development tech stack. No mental gymnastics required to imagine a future lead flow that is largely automated, and asks for input/permission only where the value of a human touch outweighs the predictability and scalability of a technology-driven process. And to put my money where my mouth is: we don’t have, and don’t plan to have any SDRs at Immediately.

1. Lead Sourcing: automated account tracking and low-touch research and prospecting that integrates seamlessly with Salesforce via Datanyze.
2. Lead Qualification:  Marketing-qualified leads become sales-qualified leads when they interact with our highly instrumented content marketing campaign run on HubSpot.
3. Lead Engagement: The leads who express implicit interest in our product are then engaged via a smart automated drip campaign throughPersistIQ.
4. Meeting Setting: Once an eterprise prospect expresses interest in a demo or a trial, our AI scheduling assistant from Clara Labs takes care of setting the appointment for an account executive.

So does this mean that SDRs will be out of a job in a couple of years? I don’t think so. I believe it means we will see just as many sales roles - most of them will just be focused on the stuff that really matters. The SDRs of today will start to look a lot more like AEs. The entry level sales position will be an apprentice of relationship-building. Everyone on a sales team - irrespective of seniority - will spend meaningful time with customer. On the business side, that means stronger customer exchanges, and more deals and renewals. On the human side, it means a happier, more fulfilled sales team.

At Immediately, we’re building software for the modern salesperson, for the relationship-maker. Ready for the future? So are we.