It’s not my job to grow sales. It’s my job to grow great sales people…

So I learned this the other day from my 2 day offsite with Jack Daly. Wow… I’ve been totally off base.

I wound them up and let them go- with the expectation that they’d succeed. And if not, I cut them loose. I cut more loose than I kept. I just believed it was hard to find good quality sales people. But now I know it was me. I wasn’t a good quality sales manager. I wasn’t clearly defining my expectations (just expect to make your quotas DAMN IT). I assumed they had the tools, the path.

For those of you who don’t know of Jack Daly, he’s a mad man of sales. His tag line is, “If you think you know sales, you don’t know Jack.” And honey, I believe it. He has passion, processes, and experience to drive sales leaders and sales teams to excellence.

I heard of Jack from Vern Harnish, of the Gazelles. Vern grows CEOs. Jack grows Sales Managers and sales people.

So I flew out to Vegas, checked into the Encore and hiked to the Marriott everyday in search of excellence.

I liked Jack from the beginning. He started his first business when he was 7 (sold pot holders), then went on to lead sales teams (his largest was a team of 2,600). He grew 6 companies into national firms, including being on Inc’s #10 Entrepreneur of the year award winner.

Besides that, his list of personal goals is astounding. Even though he had traveled to 26 cities in 27 days (just before I saw him), he keeps himself in race ready condition. I mean marathon race ready. Did I mention he’s 62 years old ? I wasn’t being dyslexic when I typed that either.

I asked him how he exercised when he was on the road. He said it was hard when he finished a conference at 5PM, had to head to the airport and fly to his next destination. Get to his hotel by 9 or 11PM, then he’d have the hotel open up their exercise room and run on the treadmill from 1:00AM-3:00AM. That’s mad man stuff. In all my 40 years, I’ve never seen commitment like that.

Since I’ve been back from the conference I’ve implemented 4 key things that have already made a big difference in my sales team.

1) I changed our weekly sales meeting from talking about deals to talking about processes.

2) I implemented weekly 1 on 1s. We talk about deals and strategies. We identify weaknesses and how we can strengthen them.

3) We are doing some role practicing (as Jack calls it. He thinks we only get good when we practice, not play). We’re breaking up into groups of 3. One person is the sales rep, on is the prospect, and one is the silent observer. It’s amazing how much we all learned from this experience.

4) I’ve started shadowing on their sales calls. At first they resisted, but I insisted. I was astonished by what I heard. I had sent a new sales rep out to pasture who was totally not ready to be there. He was show up and throw up and only sold feature. The person on the other end of the phone asked him “so what’s the value of that?” at least 5 times. I wanted to throw the phone down and throw him out…

Then I realized it wasn’t his fault, it was mine. I’ve got to do a better job at growing great sales reps.

I’ll chart my progress as I go. In tomorrow’s group meeting, I assigned 3 tasks: One rep is going to review Jill Konrath’s book, Snap Selling. Another will come up with 3 great voice mails, and the last one is tasked with coming up with ways to create a burning platform.

I’m pretty excited about this meeting. I’ll let you know how it goes.

Oh and here’s a shot of me and Jack.

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The VisiStat and AdCam technology goes the “last mile” by showing you who clicked and captures the almighty conversion- thereby measuring return on investment.

Check this out. To sign up for a free trial of the VisiStat technology, head to http://www.visistat.com.

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After doing some further research, we discovered that it’s there’s a problem in the SF/SJ Bay Area where local websites cannot be loaded. Turns out there’s a Gigabit Access Router out due to AT&T doing some fiber optic work.

Oops.

VisiStat subscribers who use PageAlarm were notified within 5 minutes of it happening as they receive email or SMS alerts when their website is down.

Thankfully all websites are not down as we can still load our VisiStat.com site, however, many are affected.

So ask your self, if your website was down, how would you know? Does website downtime mean lost revenue? Does it mean you can’t be found and your message not heard?

To learn more about the VisiStat ecosystem and how it can monitor the heartbeat of your website, check out http://www.visistat.com.

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B2B Caller ID: Your Best Source of Warm Leads from Jigsaw Video on Vimeo.

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B2B Caller ID, Your Warmest Leads

Sign up here: http://jigsaw.rsys3.net/servlet/website/ResponseForm?qlEVTUTTZWT_yLn_MhktEqPhhsMFntHpsDJht

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Avinash, we both share “minor mental orgasms” (Mom, I didn’t really just say that) when we think how online marketing channels can be measured down to the click and to the all mighty conversion.

And to your point: “Just thinking of all the data you can get is enough to put give you a temporary high. With 90+% accuracy you can measure the number of impressions of your ads. You can measure interactions with the ads. You can measure how many people end up on your websites. You can understand how many of them puke and leave! You can measure every facet of success (micro and macro conversions!!). You can measure revenue and economic value! For every dollar you spend! Oh my!!” How can facts like these be discounted?

But are the days of faith based marketing coming to an end? Well, maybe not for advertisers like Pepsi or Budweiser (with their endless marketing budgets), but for the SMB (small to medium size business) owners, the data suggests that they are.

I’m on the front lines at VisiStat. Our customers demand this data. Their days of blindfold, faith based marketing have come to an end. They are coming to us because they’ve come to the end of their rope. There is no more budget to be thrown to the wind. There’s a better way and they are here to implement it.

The days of wondering how a campaign performed are gone. Now customers are getting savvy enough to talk click-thrus, page views, and conversions.

The more technically savvy ones are passing order values into conversion snippets. They demand real-time results to stop the bleed and turn on a dime.

Marketers need validation to prove their value. Nothing validates more than web analytics products.

To see conversions in action, check out these videos:
VisiStat & AdCam, basic:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyK6sXo-dyA

VisiStat and AdCam, Conversion Tracking:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=iL_w0mxRyfk

Throw your faith based marketing out the window and get accountable with web analytics.

You can read more from Avinash’s Kaushik’s article at: http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2010/06/online-marketing-faith-based-initiative-fix.html

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I spoke to Garth Moulton a couple months ago when we were going over Sales Jam contracts. While there was no talk of the Salesforce acquisition, he told me of past business ventures he was a part of that passed up offers to the tune of half a billion dollars only to sell their assets for $80k. That hurts.

Well hurt no more because this time it happened for real and we’re thrilled for you.

BlackWeb 2.0 publised a recent perspective article on their thoughts of the acquisition: http://www.blackweb20.com/2010/05/05/what-salesforce-coms-purchase-of-jigsaw-means-to-you/

My take: As companies work to round out their product offerings, the natural progression for SalesForce was to incorporate a business contacts database into the mix.

Why Jigsaw? SaaS, Web 2.0, Crowd Sourced and hip… Jigsaw fits the bill. Jigsaw’s customers are SalesForces’s customers.

But lets take the funnel a step further. We know that SalesForce provides the CRM capabilities, Jigsaw provides the Contact information, but who provides the leads?

That’s where great solutions like LeadCaster come into play. Our real-time B2B Caller ID completes the picture of the entire sales process. It’s the anonymous capture of the warmest leads possible, your website visitors.

Companies everywhere are relying on LeadCaster to fill their funnel, Jigsaw to unearth the contact information of their website visitors, and SalesForce to manage the lead to the sale.

Sounds like a complete picture to me!

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Being VisiStat, as you can imagine, we live and breathe stats and tracking data, so we pulled some reports and data, sampling almost 50 million performed search queries. As a result, I ended up with a good, solid answer to my question…which I’m happy to share.

Here’s how the numbers stacked up, using data from May – July 2009 across our network. (Keep in mind, Bing was released on June 3rd.)

From this sampling of sites across our network, we’re seeing that Bing has doubled in marketshare since its transition from MSN. We’re also seeing a slight migration from Google, 1.7%, with a decrease for Yahoo at .9%.

This tells me that yes, there is definitely a shift taking place in the search space. I’m seeing that people are using Bing-twice as many as used MSN-and the trend is continuing to grow. Could it merely be a honeymoon phase, and will this growth start to dwindle, or does Microsoft really have something here?

As for me, I’ve visited Bing a few times, but I’m still wondering what the differences are. I admit, I like the site previews, which quite often save me from clicking irrelevant links. However, in terms of relevancy of the search, I still think the “Tina Bean” search on Google is far more relevant and accurate than the “Tina Bean” search on Bing. (And I’m pretty sure I’m the expert on relevancy for searching about myself…)

What are your thoughts? Drop me a note or give me a call if you want to discuss it further!

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www.youtube.com/watch?v=L8KdZ-4kmgg

You should get the most benefit possible from your Website tracking reports, whether you have signed up with VisiStat or have another service. For this reason, I want to share inside insights and experiences with our users and site visitors.

I have written and posted short how-to articles that tell about how well Web analytics work for business, sales and Website performance, including ways to utilize the data for better marketing and sales, how statistics reports can boost ROI, and what analytics information can tell you about site visitors and their level of satisfaction with your Website.

I invite you to read on and gain some “insider” hints, tips and tracking tricks!

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