Knowing the company’s problems, initiatives and opportunities before starting a conversation with a new prospect is extremely important. Using their latest earnings call transcript, you can determine the company’s business goals for the short-term and the long-term. You must align your solution and value proposition with their business drivers so the decision makers can better understand your solution’s long-term ROI. CSO Insights’ 2009 survey found that sales reps that align their solutions with the company’s business drivers are far more successful. Account planning and forecasting are the two best things you can do before you start the conversation with a prospect. However, they are two of the most difficult things for a sales rep to do. Both must address what is driving their business now and in the future.

Source: http://www.ciber.com/blog/article.cfm?articleid=2010011934601

If you do your homework and determine the business drivers, you’ll start seeing if your solution really fits at the company you’re targeting. The information you find can enable you to ask the right questions at the right time, and to demonstrate that you’re very knowledgeable about the company and aren’t just trying to make a quick sale. You’ll most likely close the deal faster and exceed the client’s expectations. The following are some examples of real business drivers at Fortune 1000 companies that you may be able align an IT solution with:

• Boeing has been working to consolidate their data centers. They began the project with about 60 data centers and are down to six as of December 2009. Their final goal is to have three, which will create significant cost reductions in the power drain.
• Hertz has expanded company-wide efficiency initiatives utilizing the Hertz Improvement Process; their own version of Lean/Six Sigma. They are eliminating wasted time and resources from car and equipment rental operations and administrative functions, and cascading “best practices” throughout their global organization.
• A Morgan Stanley IT project in 2010 is to grow their grid-computing environment, which includes the engines that the firm uses to conduct risk and analytic computations. CIO of Enterprise Infrastructure Dave Reilly said, “We set ourselves a goal of being able to provide 18,000 to 20,000 grid servers at a remote computing site that will dramatically reduce our server cost.”

Business drivers are the groundwork for starting a sale. Once you know what they are, you can determine if you should go after that account or move on to the next one. Don’t try to force your solution upon a company. You probably won’t get the sale. Even worse, if you do close the sale, the solution might not live up to their standards and won’t provide the ROI they were expecting.

The best approach is to ask the right questions so you can better understand your prospect’s business drivers and get a clear picture of what they’re trying to accomplish before wasting any more of their (and YOUR) valuable time.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978-749-9999 ext. 118

In our last blog post, we talked about the earnings call transcript and the kinds of useful information that they generally provide and how this free resource can be used as a prospecting tool and to better qualify leads.

As previously mentioned, doing a search for “capital expenditure” on the page can lead to a prediction for capital spending for the coming fiscal year. This result will may be an indication for you to hold off on your prospecting, or to abandon the account completely, if the budget prediction is especially low.

But, this number can also be a green light for a sale. For example, in Verizon Communications’ fourth quarter earnings call, CFO John Killian notes, “Our capital spending in 2010 is targeted to be in the range of $16.8-$17.2 billion. We expect wireless CapEx to be modestly higher year over year, reflecting increased demand for smart phones and higher data usage.” This kind of foresight into the coming fiscal year is a huge opportunity because it allows you to begin to create a strategic plan for selling into this account, as they have noted that they will be spending more in 2010 than they did in 2009.

Depending on the type of company you’re researching (energy and oil companies tend to be as vague and candid as possible in these calls), the executives on the call will discuss initiatives and projects within the company. These insights are the “golden nuggets” that you can find when you take the time to sift through transcript:

• corporate restructuring
• major employee layoffs as cost saving actions
• plans to acquire companies
• plans to invest in new technologies
• outsourcing initiatives

All of these actions are crucial to understanding the account you are prospecting; the corporate strategy is coming straight from the horse’s (CEO/CFO’s) mouth, and all of these “nuggets” can be actionable business drivers for a sales rep.

For instance, another example from Verizon’s Q4 call is John Killian’s announcement of a “comprehensive redesign of [their] entire call center infrastructure.” This kind of information is an extremely hot lead for a rep who is selling call center technology, or even a consultant that provides services to assist with restructuring initiatives. These reps can now approach this account KNOWING that their product or service can help solve an existing business problem at Verizon because the CFO himself revealed this initiative that will be carried out in the future.

The CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Survey notes that, “the advent of increasingly informed and demanding buyers has made it essential that reps get up to speed quickly on what pain buyers feel, what solutions they have considered—and possibly unilaterally dismissed—and how they envision their needs being addressed.”

While you may not be able to gain insight into what the company’s buying cycle is, at the very least you can formulate an idea of what their budget might be (based on if they state that they are attempting cost reductions or will be investing more) and also what kinds of business problems they are trying to solve within the company. Being sensitive to these issues and approaching a potential sale in a new account can only benefit from empathy and a pitch that is custom tailored toward easing their woes.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

One of the most under-utilized resources for sales research is a company’s quarterly earnings call transcript. Earnings calls are held four times a year to update investors on the performance of the company over the last quarter and their future outlook. They generally include financial information like operating expenses, capital expenditures, stock share prices, and GAAP analysis.

These reports are free and easy to find, but the amount of text and numbers in them can seem completely daunting at first glance. Admittedly, a majority of the information in these transcripts is not useful to a sales rep, but taking time to go through with a fine toothed comb will almost always yield at least a few “golden nuggets” of actionable information.

Tom Costa at Eyes on Sales notes that the CEO and CFO “talk candidly” about sales performance, initiatives, and new product announcements, and he discusses how to use the transcript to define prospects and competitors in your industry. Sales reps can (and should) use the information in these transcripts to fully-prepare for a prospecting call.

The CEO and CFO are generally the two company representatives that present to investors during a quarterly earnings call. Of course, much of the information they give is geared toward shareholders and is boring financials, but the one piece of helpful data that they generally give in the call is the company’s capital expenditures. They often discuss the expenditures for the year to date, as well as what their budget/goal amount is for the rest of the fiscal year. By pulling up the company’s earnings call transcript on and doing a search for “capital expenditure” or “capex” can give you insight into how much the company has been spending, and what their budget is for the coming months. This, of course, could prevent you from wasting time trying to sell to a company that doesn’t have the money to buy your product.

Understanding an account does not only mean knowing who the decision makers are and the company’s organizational structure; one of the worst things you can do is to go into a sales call and not fully-understand and be attempting to solve one of their business problems. Coming in to relieve a pain within a company is a much more effective approach to selling than pitching your product blindly to an exec that you have pegged as the exec with the money burning a hole in his pocket.

- Carolyn Sebasky
carolyn . sebasky@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 107

Having long, ineffective sales cycles is a major problem for any sales department. Sales reps want short sales cycles so they can increase their number of contracts, spend less time per sale and close a larger percentage of their opportunities. CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Optimization survey shows that sales reps need sales resources to reduce their sales cycle. More than half of the sales reps they interviewed had cycles longer than six months, and the survey uncovered that the length of cycles is increasing each year.

Most sales cycles are longer because reps are trying to qualify the right companies to go after, or they are spending time gathering information in an attempt to better understand their prospect’s business. Strategic account planning is one of the most beneficial actions you can take to shorten your sales cycles and discover your potential customer’s problems. In order to do account planning, you must first research your prospects and gather sales intelligence data. Sales intelligence resources can drastically decrease the amount of time your spend researching and enable you to spend more time creating a strategic plan for the account. Before making a prospecting call, it will give you a competitive advantage to have a clear understanding of their business, problems, opportunities and initiatives, are and who the people you need to speak with are.

The CSO Insights study found that qualifying your prospects and then meeting their expectations can reduce sales cycles by more than three months. The number of calls it takes to close a deal is directly related to how long a sales cycle is. CSO Insights found that half of deals are closed by calling six or more times into a company, and that number is going up on year-to-year basis. You can reduce your number of fact-finding calls and start the relationship-building process much quicker if you have sales intelligence data at your disposal. Jill Konrath of Selling to Big Companies talks about how to use the news to find “triggering events” to add to your sales intelligence data to connect with a prospect at an opportune time and how that can also shorten your sales cycle.

It is becoming more and more difficult to get in touch with decision makers on the phone. When you do get through, you had better have a darn good reason for calling them. Your value proposition needs to be clear and match with their company’s problems, opportunities or initiatives. Do your homework, plan, and you’ll see shorter sales cycles and close more business.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978-749-9999 ext. 118

Moving into a new decade, technology is only going to become more advanced, and with that, more services are needed to support new technology and its infrastructure. Businesses must use technology to stay in operation and be profitable, but even more; they must be using the newest technology that fits their needs so that they have a competitive advantage and remain profitable. This is especially important in a tough economy as Ann Bednarz highlights in her piece on technology industry trends; if you’re selling to the enterprise, ROI will be crucial to making a sale in 2010 as budgets become tighter and tighter.

When selling an enterprise technology solution, you must communicate how your solution is going to help the customer solve a problem or an opportunity. These technology trends were identified using current business drivers within Fortune 1000 companies and what they’re saying they need to fix or expand in 2010. These are areas will not only be important next year, but over the course of the next few years, and they will have a profound impact on how businesses operate and where they spend their IT budgets.

• Cloud Computing
• Green IT (data center greening, desktop power use)
• Mobile Devices (laptops, smartphones)
• Virtualization
• Security Compliance (government regulations, data breaches)
• IT Cost Optimization
• Outsourcing and Insourcing (service providers)
• Software as a Service (SaaS) (software via the internet)
• E-Commerce
• Grid Computing
Enterprise Technology Buying Trends in 2010
View more presentations from SalesQuest.

Check out our SlideShare document providing more detail and examples of these trends in the Fortune 1000 and why they will be important when selling enterprise technology in the upcoming years.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978-749-9999 ext. 118