Last year was a very turbulent year for IT spending. Most companies were trying to reduce their costs and weren’t spending cash on their IT infrastructure until the dust settled from the great recession of 2009. Luckily, the tech industry tends to rebound fairly quickly from recessions because it plays such a critical role in the business functions of Fortune 1000 companies. Without maintaining and innovating their IT infrastructure, companies are at a competitive disadvantage, and it can start to affect their revenues and customer satisfaction.

EMC is one of the largest sellers of enterprise IT software and hardware and they have been an industry leader in developing innovate technology for decades and have weathered many recessions. In January 2010 they released their quarter four earnings report and their CEO, Joe Tucci, had a lot of commentary on where he thinks companies will start to spend their 2010 IT budgets.

He stated the number one priority for CIOs in 2010 is storage. CIOs will use a significant portion of their budgets to optimize their storage systems and methods including back-up disks with data de-duplication, storage consolidation, unified storage, tiering of storage, and business continuity. Companies’ data requirements are increasing every second and their valuable data needs to backed up and secure. Data storage initiatives will accelerate throughout the next decade, and cloud computing will be a major player in the data storage industry.

Virtualization is another area that Tucci identifies as somewhere that CIOs will be spending their budgets. Virtualization decreases the amount of physical hardware and redistributes how networks and computers are allocated across the infrastructure. It reduces company costs and increases the efficiency of their IT systems. Along the same lines as virtualization, he sees security and governance, risk, and compliance spending accelerating in 2010. EMC is increasing their development of private clouds and are working with Fortune 1000 companies to redistribute their data centers using virtualization. All of this is great news for IT sellers trying to penetrate Fortune 1000 companies this year.

EMC’s CFO Daivd Goulden also commented on how spending started to increase in Q4 of 2009, “I think we also saw even maybe a little extra in some of that spending the customers didn’t do in Q1 and Q2 as companies got more confident in their next year 2010 business plans, they were doing a little bit of catch-up because I think they really starved their infrastructures in Q1 and Q2,” he said.

Now is the time to identify your prospects using sales intelligence resources and start forecasting your sales pipeline for 2010. Sales reps can’t rest on the laurels of 2009; they must identify current company problems and opportunities and then communicate how their solutions can help them leave the low points of 2009 behind.

- Mark Kilens
mark . kilens@salesquest.com
978.749.9999 ext. 118

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Over the past decade, companies have spent millions of dollars updating their technology systems and infrastructure in order to stay competitive and maximize their profitability. However, over the last two years, spending fell off dramatically as most businesses were looking to cut costs rather than invest money in their IT systems. Cost cutting isn’t over, but companies are starting to increase their technology spending in 2010. According to the December 2009 CIO Economic Impact Survey, CIO budgets and capital spending are both increasing from the previous years levels. When asked the same question in May 2009 only 14% of respondents said their budgets would be increasing compared to 40% in December 2009.

This is terrific news for companies trying to penetrate new accounts, up-sell current accounts or secure renewals. With that said, the competition going after these newly increased budgets will be extremely competitive. Reps will now need sales enablement resources to help them be the first to the deal and capture the attention and interest of their audience. Now, more than ever, it is crucial to stay on top of prospects and accounts, and using account plans and sales intelligence tools are a great supplement. Decreasing the time spent researching and qualifying prospects, and using that time to begin the relationship building process, can give you a head start on your competition.

Applications, hardware, and mobile/web were the top three areas that CIOs are going to be spending more of their budgets in 2010. New project spending is also predicted to go up, which will contribute to the company’s top line revenue. Most companies indicate they will be spending more of their budgets on their infrastructure and not increasing their employee count or spending budget on consultants. These areas, coupled with the top ten emerging technology trends, are shaping the next decade of IT strategies around cost cutting and greening IT, but productivity and improving the company’s bottom-line are important drivers for those strategies.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Sales enablement tools are your greatest assets when trying to accelerate your sales cycles and target your strategic accounts. Their purpose is to maximize a sales organization’s potential in order to better communicate value and differentiate their services in a clear and consistent manner. Sales enablement includes resource planning, training, sales force automation, lead generation and planning. Great sales enablement tools help you gain insight into which accounts you should target, their problems and initiatives, and what people you should connect with to start building relationships.

One of the most important sales enablement tools is sales intelligence; you must have accurate and up-to-date sales intelligence on your prospects. Sales intelligence tools will help you answer the who, what, where, why, and when questions in your planning process. If you have that information at your disposal, all you need to do is figure out the “how.” The “how” should be focused on relationship building. Using your sales enablement and sales intelligence tools you can start developing relationships with the key stake holders and decision-makers at the accounts you’re going after.

Relationship building is essential to earning trust and credibility with your prospects in order to convert them to customers. According to Lee Levitt’s IDC Sales Enablement presentation, only 16% of vendors do a good job with “solution selling.” Close to 60% of buyers stated that the vendor needs to better understand their needs and objectives to improve the value of the relationship with the potential vendor. One terrific tool that enables you to start the relationship building process, coupled with sales intelligence resources, is LinkedIn.

LinkedIn will help you determine what your customers are currently working on, what their interests are, group memberships, previous employers, education, their blog or web site, books they’re reading, and more. All the information can be leveraged to help you start the conversation and position yourself as being in tune to their needs. This will not only help you build the relationship better and faster, it will increase your productivity. Being prepared when you start the conversation will help you sell more effectively and will help instill trust and credibility in the buyer. They’ll value your knowledge of their company and them personally, and be more willing to provide you with answers to your questions. Treat the buyer the way you would want to be treated. Don’t hard sell or pretend to know what you’re talking about. Ask intelligent, informed questions that will keep the buyer engaged and wanting to know more.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The Aberdeen Group’s PACE Model rounds out with the “E” section, in which they define Best-in-Class sales teams’ “enablers,” or the technologies that promote sales success. While communication skill sets and documented sales processes are strategies that need to be and should be leveraged, there are a number of technological tools that have helped these companies climb to the top of the ladder.

Of course, a CRM system is a central part of this list. A Customer Relationship Management system is an all-purpose solution for the “C”apabilities defined by Aberdeen’s PACE Model; it is a vessel for documented sales processes, centralized account information and “unifying customer information.” It is this multifunctional ability that has made CRM systems so popular and almost essential for sales teams today.  Not surprisingly, some CRM systems likely support the “enablers” that Aberdeen has defined, but these tools can also be provided through alternative solutions like SaaS or Internet services.

Keeping track of campaigns, especially when they are automated, like e-mail marketing, is essential in order to ensure that leads and prospects aren’t falling through the cracks. Campaigns require a lot of sensitivity and observation in order to make sure that they are successful; personalized attention is crucial in turning a prospect to a customer. These communications can be long, drawn-out and complicated, and without a tracking system, prospects can be forgotten, or even worse, disgruntled leads may accidentally be re-contacted. Sales reps need a way to organize the communications that they have with prospects even from the campaign stage, not just during the process of a sale.

Today, e-mail marketing campaigns are an important enabler for successful sales and marketing teams, and in addition to having a solution, whether it be a CRM system or an outsourced service provider, reps need to know not only what their responses are, but also the metrics on open and click through rates. The data on the success of campaigns, whether e-mail or an alternative, is essential to either continue gaining leads, and more importantly, to highlight a campaign’s failure and consequently assess the cause and thus allow for improvement in the future.

Another success enabler is up-to-date company and account information. While it may be obvious, reps that are pressed for time and don’t have easy access to the information often overlook this step. Online sales intelligence resources such as Hoovers allow for CRM integration so that relevant company information like annual revenues can be imported and attached to an account with the click of a button. This additional information can be ignored in the lead qualification process if the access to it is not quick and easy. The list Geoffrey James put together of free online sales tools on his blog, Sales Machine, provides extremely helpful reviews.

The centrality of a CRM and the simplicity of online research tools and integration capabilities are important enablers for sales reps to be educated and efficient.

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

©2010 Sales Intelligence Blog. All Rights Reserved.