CIO Advisorapac
Close
  • home
  • Conference
  • Newsletter
  • Subscribe
  • Whitepapers
  • News
  • about us
  • Agile
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Augmented and Virtual Reality
  • Backup and Storage
  • Banking
  • Big Data
  • Blockchain
  • BPM
  • Cloud
  • Contact Center
  • Cyber Security
  • Data Analytics
  • Data Center
  • Digital Marketing
  • Disaster Recovery Services
  • EdTech
  • Emerging Technology
  • Enterprise Mobility
  • Enterprise Security
  • Financial
  • Healthcare
  • Human Capital Management
  • Human Resource
  • IBM
  • IoT
  • ISP
  • IT Service Management
  • IT Services
  • Logistics
  • Marketing Technology
  • Mobile Application
  • Oracle
  • Payment And Card
  • Payroll
  • Procurement
  • Risk Management
  • Robotics
  • RPA
  • Supply Chain
  • Telecom
Menu
  • Specials

  • Backup and Storage
  • BPM
  • Data Analytics
  • Disaster Recovery
  • Human Resource
  • ISP
  • Procurement
  • Mobile Application
Specials
×
news

Subscribe to our Newsletter

news

Subscribe to our mailing list for the latest articles, news, and exclusive insights.

Thank You for subscribing with us. We sent you an email regarding this.

news
SUBSCRIBE

loading
  • Home
  • Digital Marketing
Editor's Pick (1 - 4 of 8)
left
5G:More than Just Five Bars

Imran Akbar, Vice President & General Manager, Wireless Networks, Samsung Electronics America

How Voice Technology Has Transformed Online Search

Harsha Kiran, SEO director, Seotribunal.com

Digital Transformation and the Path to 5G

Daniel Herb, Director of IoT, T-Mobile US

Latest Innovations around SD-WAN

Art Cartwright, Chief Operating Officer, Macquarie

Pushing the Limits on Enterprise Communications

Miguel Lopes, VP, Product Line Management, Dialogic

Five Key Trends in Telecom and Their Impact on Businesses

Craig Wigginton, Vice Chairman & U.S. Telecom Leader, Deloitte LLP

Being a Leader in a Digital Era

Cecile Umana, CHRO, Ooredoo

The Five C's of Human Capital with a Dash of Technology

Rochelle Gesoff Krombolz, SVP & CHRO, Tekni-Plex, Inc.

right

Delivering Meaningful Customer Conversations for Driving Sales

By David Anderson, Corporate VP Sales and Marketing, Radware

Tweet
Migrating from Analog to Digital

David Anderson, Corporate VP Sales and Marketing, Radware

The Get-Set-Go for a Sales Head

Building the revenue, especially on new products, is my key concern. Radware sells a sophisticated suite of technology-driven products. One of my primary objectives is to translate the product features into specific customer benefits for each vertical market so that my salespeople have more meaningful conversations when presenting to customers.

"Today the focus is on a consultative sales model and partnering with the client, if your sales person does not understand the space, they will fail before they even walk through the door"

Three Radars to Developing A Sales Program?

First- try to hire people from the industry you are selling to. They have instant credibility with the customer. Today the focus is on a consultative sales model and partnering with the client, if your sales person does not understand the space, they will fail before they even walk through the door.

Next- It’s really important for modern sales teams to understand the role of social media in the selling process. Platforms like LinkedIn help sales professionals identify more than just one successful account, but many of the same types of opportunities throughout the industry What’s more, LinkedIn not only helps connect sales people to prospects, but the transparence of the platform allows the prospect to feel confidence in the person selling to them.

Last but certainly not least- The salesperson must be able to meet and converse comfortably with executives and not focus exclusively with the first level technical manager. Unless your product or service has an exclusive lock-out feature, many of the decisions will be made by executive staff on more intangibles including company size, local support, market share, experience through the sales process, etc. If your sales executive is both confident, knowledgeable and able to converse with a C-suite and first level manager alike, he/she will close the deal.

Technology Needs Yet to Be Met

Many of the issues that keep me awake at night center around lead-flow and the sales funnel.

In large organizations, the sales funnel is often managed by multiple constituencies across the organization. The Advertising team may be focused on bringing new leads. The field marketing teams may focus on nurturing those leads. An inside sales team may work on booking initial meetings, etc.

As a result, it is very easy to measure the lead flow from inbound web leads and inside sales. However, it is often very difficult to determine the quality of these leads, or the likelihood it will turn into revenue.

You can build a very large pipeline of opportunities that in fact are not qualified and present a much bigger funnel than actually exists. This gives you a false sense of confidence on the quarter.

Another key pain point in the sales funnel is CRM data. The CRM on its own often paints too rosy a picture. When dealing with a CRM, it’s easy for a sales manager to experience information overload. While they are often very powerful and sophisticated sales management solutions, CRMs can be extremely cumbersome to navigate or gain quick insight into your opportunities for the Month or the Quarter.

Often it’s very hard to distinguish between an engaged and active lead and leads that have not yet been sales-qualified. This makes it easy to be fooled by overly optimistic data.

What I use to accompany the CRM are secure google.docs that show me an instant by instant summary of the key opportunities that my team is actively managing. My sales force updates this doc sometimes 5 times a day to show progress, barriers and specific requests.

Q Advice for Successful Sales Person?

Understand the specific markets you are selling into. Who are the key target verticals?

Salespeople must be familiar with each market they are selling into such as banking vs ecommerce. This may entail understand of regulatory and compliance issues, privacy, data storage and retention, encryption, virtualization, recovery, real time processing, PCI compliance etc. These are all knowledge areas outside of the scope of the product. The more knowledge the salesperson has the more credibility they will have with the end decision makers. Then, you have to make sure the salesperson can translate the product features into the benefits for that specific customer type. What is this customer ’s win?

Understanding the prospect’s business:

You have to understand what your customers do. Who are their customers? How does the company generate revenue? You need to understand their specific expansion plans. For example, they are opening up a new data center, or a new channel of distribution, or they had a new product launch or just completed an acquisition. Then you have to figure out how you fit into those specific initiatives and covey to the customer how you can accelerate those initiatives for them. By following this process, you take yourself out of the bucket of being a ‘generic vendor.'

Read Also

Democratizing IT Technologies to Improve Sales Infrastructure

Democratizing IT Technologies to Improve Sales Infrastructure

All Marketers Should Strive to be''Full-Funnel Marketers'

All Marketers Should Strive to be''Full-Funnel Marketers'

Piloting New Ways of Modern Marketing

Piloting New Ways of Modern Marketing

Marrying Art and Science : How Big Data is Transforming Marketing?

Marrying Art and Science : How Big Data is Transforming Marketing?

Featured Vendors

  • Cloudera: Turning Complex Data into Clear Insights
    Cloudera: Turning Complex Data into Clear Insights
  • Feezmodo Consulting: Devising Long-Term IT Strategies
    Feezmodo Consulting: Devising Long-Term IT Strategies
  • OneAsia: Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Adoption
    OneAsia: Intelligent Cloud Infrastructure Adoption
  • Consultel Cloud: Simplifying Cloud Migrations
    Consultel Cloud: Simplifying Cloud Migrations

New Editions

Copyright © 2019 CIO Advisorapac. All rights reserved. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy |  Sitemap

follow on linkedinfollow on twitter
This content is copyright protected

However, if you would like to share the information in this article, you may use the link below:

https://digital-marketing.cioadvisorapac.com/cxoinsights/delivering-meaningful-customer-conversations-for-driving-sales-nwid-394.html