Customer Success Story | Steve Harper Uses Glance to Increase Sales Efficiency

A Glance Customer Success Story

Who
Steven Harper
CEO and Founder, Plan2Win Software LLC, and
Sales Facilitator, The Bridge Group

About Steven
Steve Harper started selling in 1992 and hasn’t looked back. He has used his knowledge of sales dynamics, sales tools, and effective selling to develop training curriculum as a consultant and sales training facilitator. Most recently, he has focused on how the Sales 2.0 world has altered the sales process – for good.

What He Sells
Plan2Win develops software to fill the “tool gap” in most CRM systems around territorial strategy and key account planning. Plan2Win guides users through lists of questions on contacts, customers, competitors and geography, and creates territorial sales plans from the information.

“It asks questions we know most sales people have little time to consider. By working through the answers, sales reps gain valuable insight into the way they do business,” Steve said.

Steven’s Sales Challenge
Technology and economics have conspired to compress the sales cycle so radically that sales people typically must accomplish in one call what would have required several calls and an in-person meeting as recently as two years ago.

“Buyers no longer take meetings,” Steve said. “Every company today is smaller than they were a year ago, so decision-makers are much busier and they’re getting calls from more sales people than ever. You don’t have a call to introduce yourself and sound them out, then another to make your sales pitch and start talking about your solution. When you get the prospect on the phone and they show interest, you had better be able to show them something or the sale is going to the next person. If you don’t have me at hello, you’re done.”

Web-based conferencing and traditional demonstration tools, however, weren’t designed with this pace in mind. Most of them are complex, unreliable, and require the hassles of software downloads, pre-scheduling and registration, which won’t work with today’s harried buyers.

How Glance Helps
Steve has a Glance sales demo ready to go whenever he calls a prospect. If the prospect is interested, he can instantly transition to showing what’s on his desktop and enhance the engagement immediately, with little to no effort on the prospect’s end. 

“At my seminars I always ask, if you think sales is a process, why do you treat it like an event?  “Most screen sharing tools treat sales as an event, where you have to schedule a session in advance. By using Glance to make screen sharing part of my process, I can ask my prospect if they want a quick demo, and within 48 seconds they’re looking at my screen.”

Results
Steve says Glance gives him the “two degrees of improvement” that provides an edge over his competitors.

“A constant challenge in sales is what can I do differently from the other guy so I can be more successful,” he said. “Even a one or two percent efficiency increase is going to get me more attention, and I’m getting way more than that from Glance.”

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About Plan2Win

Plan2Win Software was founded by sales veterans and former vice presidents of sales to provide tools for real territory sales strategy and key account sales planning. The company’s software and sales training push sales people to think like business people. They learn to think analytically, methodically and strategically about their industries, their selling techniques and their sales territories. More importantly, Plan2Win makes them think in new ways. To be successful in today’s environment, sales people have to have business acumen as well as sales skills. For more information visit http://www.territoryplan.com/

About Glance
Glance is a simple, quick-connecting screen-sharing tool designed to help sales pros maximize every conversation within all steps of the sales cycle; prospect, demo, close and support. The Arlington, Mass.-based company’s technology is used by thousands of companies worldwide. For more information, or to sign up for a free, 7-day trial, visit http://glance.net or call 1-888-945-2623.

Sales Coaching from My Mother | If You Want Opportunity, You Have to Make It

If you’ve read any of my previous posts you will see a theme of referring to my father. For most of us, “these guys” have a way of impacting our lives.

This Sunday my mother celebrates her birthday, however, I can’t begin to guess her age, as she never has told us. My father was born in 1929, so you might start there.

We grew up in a small house in Kittery, Maine; a street called Love Lane. In that small 4 bedroom, my parents raised 7 kids. I can remember every morning my father would take his lunch pail and walk to the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard while my mother would see to the needs of the seven of us kids.

At that time, I always saw my father as the head of the household, mostly because he would regularly remind us of that whenever we stepped out of line. He didn’t have to say so however, because by watching his work ethic, it was easy to respect him. However, I’m going to put my father aside for the moment, because we all know it was really my mother that ran the joint.

Breakfast, lunch and dinner for seven every day, laundry for seven, ironing for seven, grocery shopping for seven, church for seven, sports for seven, doctors, etc. You name it, my mother did it. In fact, she still does.

I compare it to raising three kids of our own and I just don’t know how the hell she did it. 

I recall one day when I was a young boy, standing in her kitchen watching her snap the ends off of about 5000 string beans in preparation of that evenings' supper, asking if all of the work made her tired?

“Tommy” she said looking down at me from the kitchen sink, “Just because you don’t have any food in your stomach, or money in your pocket, doesn’t mean that you have to let the rest of the world know it.” And with that she turned back to her work.

I have carried this wisdom with me throughout my life, including my career.

In the competitive world of sales, particularly hi-tech sales, you will rarely if ever have a boss that cares if you are broke or starving. They won’t adjust your quota down nor slip you a little extra in the next check. Maybe some will -- I’m not trying to say that all Sales Managers are bastards -- I’m just making the point that the mentality is, if you want opportunity, YOU have to make it.

It always amazes me how many sales people make excuses for not making their number, or the calls they need to, or for failing to do any of the heavy lifting that is required to really create opportunity. It’s almost sad really: they don’t see the forest for the trees, and all the success that a simple shift in perspective could bring them.

I am not above this criticism. Trust me there are many times when my Management Team questions a deal and why we didn’t do this or that. I want to give them a piece of my mind, but I don’t.

Instead, I just think of my mother, and imagine all of the chances she has had in her life to quit, or to complain, or to let someone else worry about it, and how she has never given in to excuse-making. Instead, she takes a small sip from her manhattan glass, thanks god for the opportunity, returns to her work, and moves forward.

I think there is something for us all to learn from my mother, especially these days.

-- Tom Scontras, VP Sales & Marketing

New Webinar: Reduce Your "Sales Drag Coefficient" with Sales 2.0: Three Keys to Increasing Sales in 2010

REGISTER TODAY for the upcoming webinar on Tues, March 16, 2010 at 1pm ET, 10am PT. In it, you'll learn how Sales 2.0 technologies and processes can help you:

• Prospect more efficiently & effectively 
• Have a "killer" opening 
• Know your "sweet spot" 
• Focus on leads you can "win"

Join us for a lively panel discussion that will include Glance's own VP of Sales & Marketing, Tom Scontras; Plan2Win CEO, Steven Harper; and VP of Sales at Merrill DataSite, and Founder and CEO of the AA-ISP, Bob Perkins. 

These accomplished sales leaders will share their unique perspective, insight, and tips on leveraging sales intelligence tools and a developing a revamped sales strategy to successfully engage customers in 2010 with information that's relevant to their current initiatives and urgent business challenges - and in the process increase sales rep performance.

Learn these proven 2.0 techniques and you'll be better prepared to succeed in 2010!
Hosted and presented by the AA-ISP.

 

-- Carla Gates, Director, Marketing

Follow Glance on Twitter and Facebook for daily Sales 2.0 tips.

Build Your Custom Sales 2.0 ToolKit to Fight Declining Sales Effectiveness

Sales pros are realizing the traditional way they sell to their customers isn't working anymore. Golf matches and expensive dinners have given way to online knowledge building, real-time prospecting and brief, pragmatic conversations. If you stay stuck in the old-school methods of relationship-building, you face extinction.   

The good news is that a slew of “Sales 2.0” tools have emerged to help you improve and accelerate the sales process. “Sales 2.0” encompasses a range of web and social technologies that offer new ways to interact, collaborate and share information between sales pros and their customers. It’s all about accelerating sales cycles, gathering more business intelligence, and engaging prospects more effectively.

The bad news is that the flood of new Sales 2.0 tools hitting the market is perhaps too much of a good thing. Despite the all the new innovations, the effectiveness of sales pros is on the decline nationwide, according to the CSO Insights 2009 Sales Performance Optimization Report.

A key reason: Sales 2.0 tools are not a replacement for good old-fashion selling skills and talent. Their technological wizardry doesn’t magically fill sales funnels. Instead, you need both the right skill set and the right tools to excel. But which tools make sense? Sales 2.0 technologies permeate all layers of sales management today, including tools for:

• CRM
• Email marketing
• Customer & business intelligence
• Screen-sharing
• Outsourced selling
• Sales workflow management
• Expense reporting 
• Incentive/compensation management
• Partner program management
• Sales enablement
• Sales training & motivation
• Territory management
• Inbound sales 
• Sales leads and prospecting

You might find yourself a slave to a growing roster of sales software and services! For example, almost 70% of a salesperson’s time is spent on non-selling activities these days, according to the CSO Insights Report. What top sales pros need to do is to cut through the bull and pull out a core suite of best-of-breed Sales 2.0 tools that will help them prospect, demo, close and support customer relationships through the web.

If we can get a bit technical for a moment, the IT world has a good model to emulate: they call it “the software stack.”

A stack is a collection of complementary software that serves a single purpose. Think, for example, of the popular LAMP software stack that powers a majority of the today’s web servers, which is comprised of four pieces of complimentary software:

• Linux (for the operating system)
• Apache (for the web server)
• MySQL (for the database) and
• PHP, Python or Perl (for running the web applications).

Using the stack model, you should assess which Sales 2.0 technologies are most useful to your unique sales environment and customize a Sales 2.0 stack (or toolkit, if you want to call it) that collectively serves the purpose of enhancing, rather than hindering, your selling effectiveness.

Your goal, then, is to create a custom “stack” that gets the job done using the least number of tools. A good rule of thumb is to start with solutions that serve the 4 key steps of the sales process: prospecting, demoing, closing and supporting. And each tool in the stack should be weighed against whether it helps achieves any of the key criteria:

• Get more customer interactions
• Close more deals
• Increase selling speed
• Do real-time prospecting
• Show unplanned demos
• Enhance phone conversations
• Sell face-to-face without flying
• Gain competitive advantage

Using this formula, a typical Sales 2.0 stack might consist of the following components:

Glance is a good stack component example. It fits in elegantly into most Sales 2.0 stacks as a screen sharing tool that lets you show your stuff on-the-fly via a lightweight, lightning-fast web application. This kind of tool is essential because customers' information gathering preferences are changing. Prospects and buyers today reach for the phone and their computers when they want information rather than wanting face-to-face meetings.

And according to the CSO Insights Report, enhancing the sales call experience is key to reversing the trend of poor sales performance:

“We do not believe that success will be achieved by making more sales calls. The number of calls—face-to-face meetings or on the phone—has already been increasing over the past few years with minimal impact on sales results. The real objective is going to be how to make great calls: motivating stakeholders to meet with you; creating a sense of urgency that moves evaluating your solutions to the top of their priority list; differentiating yourself from the competition; selling value (so you can avoid discounting); creating a compelling business case to get the project approved now.”

As a Sales 2.0 stack component, Glance makes you more effective through all steps of the sales process, including:

• Prospecting – Glance helps you open doors and qualify prospects in an instant. It’s the fastest, easiest way to warm a cold call.
• Demonstrating – Glance is the fastest, easiest way to share your information on the fly. It’s the ideal tool for delivering a convincing demo whenever opportunity strikes.
• Closing – Glance helps you negotiate with confidence, overcome roadblocks and close the deal. It removes the friction and anxiety from tough negotiations.
• Supporting – Glance helps you train, support and deliver great customer service after the deal is done.

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