Three client projects this month are about making talent decisions using talent analytics; the work is evaluating the talent, identify fits and gaps, make talent recommendations, help create job standards/job benchmarks, and help set up hiring processes that are based more on information and less on gut.

Job Benchmark Example

Company #1: A technology business that wants to improve the performance of their 60+ salesperson organization. Turnover is around 20% which is below their industry average of 34% but their hiring practices are based too much on “gut” decisions. We assessed all their salespeople and sales managers and worked with them to create an agreed job benchmark for each of their three sales divisions (each sales division has slightly different needs) and they are now using a “balanced hiring scorecard” process to consistently evaluate sales candidates and take most of the “gut” out of the hiring process.

Company #2: An established manufacturer with about 40 employees. They want to improve their hiring processes and improve company performance by getting employees better positioned in roles with responsibilities that match their skill set. We assessed the whole company and are now shifting some employees to roles that allow their skills to be better used, a promotion or two for individuals with management potential, and have improved the hiring decision-making process for the open requisitions.

Example of Management Team Ambitions

Company #3 is a New York City based publishing firm. They recently launched two new businesses and are evaluating which current employees fit which roles in the two new companies. Who is ready for management, who is better for selling which business offering, is this person a fit for quality control, etc.

Now imagine the work I would have had trying to evaluate all of this talent at three different companies by looking at the employees’ self-assessments one at a time – it wouldn’t have worked. I’d have had to print over 100 different assessments, and organize them by team, division, and/or company and it would have been really hard to “see” the trends and to easily quickly compare people to their job benchmarks.

I’m pleased to say I didn’t have that problem; I use an on-line system called Advisor that collects the assessments, organizes them any way I want, and then allows me to conduct real-time talent analytics. I can create real-time “Team-at-a-Glance” reports and conduct on-the-fly “what if” visualization like “what if we promoted this person to manage this team” or “what is the common characteristic between all of the top salespeople in this division.”  Advisor (from Talent Analytics Corp) is a powerful talent analytics tool for making talent decisions.

The marketplace is crowded with lots of companies who have similar products and services. Potential customers have lots of choices, are easily confused by your messaging, and are willing to invest very little time doing work to figure out what you are offering. Most first time visitors to Web sites “abandon” quickly so you typically only have a few seconds to clearly get across what you do.

Think of it in terms of someone shopping in a mall. A shopper is browsing and walking around. They walk past your store window and decide to walk in the front door because something catches their eye. Once in the store they quickly look around to see if they understand what you are selling and if they’re interested in exploring more. If they are confused by what they see and don’t see a strong match with their needs they quickly turn around and leave. The same process happens with visitors to your Web site.

A helpful exercise:

Do some reflection by yourself or with your team and think about who your ideal customer is and why they specifically buy from you rather than the competition. If you haven’t surveyed your customers to find out why they buy from you, now is a good time. Then complete this statement “we are the only company/service that does…” When you come up with your statement, challenge it and say “so what!” Why should your prospect care that you are the “only software company that makes an enterprise class, scalable widget.” Try again until your positioning is clear, valuable, and quickly understood.

I understand that you may offer a range of products and services but lead with those products or services that make you stand out. This will give you much stronger at drawing prospects in to learn more about you.

A current example:

A current example of making it unique and selling the difference is the Southwest Airlines “bags fly free” campaign. As you know, there’s not much difference between the major airlines today but Southwest has found a fun way to be different. They position themselves as the “only” airline that lets your bags fly free, which saves you money and supports the long-term positioning that Southwest offers cheap air fares. Southwest is supporting this unique positioning with some humorous TV campaigns. Here’s a really fun example of their campaign:

Southwest Commercial \”Bags Fly Free\”

Until next time,

Garth

Some of the email report information is easy to understand, some is more subtle. Here’s some additional info that may be helpful:

Email open rates – the percentage of delivered emails that were unique opens. In an earlier post, tracking in marketing automation systems, I revealed that many more people open and view your emails than you can track. Currently, our B2B clients are seeing email open rates in the 14% to 25% range. The variance depends on a number of factors but especially list quality.

Unique email opens – This is the actual number of individuals that opened the email. So you send the email campaign to 100 people, 90 are delivered,  there are 18 unique opens, you get a 20% open rate.

Total email opens – Why aren’t unique opens and total opens the same?

1) the contact could have opened it multiple times

2) the contact may have forwarded the email to other people. The tracking still records the opens back to their record. Depending on the email system you can get some fascinating clues. In the past I have been able to see multiple opens at about the same time for IP addresses in different parts of the U.S. – obviously the email was forwarded and opened by different people in different locations. This is usually a good thing – unless it’s competitive research – people open and forward emails that are of interest to them so that means your company or offering is of interest.

Unique clicks – This is the actual number of individuals that clicked the link in your email. So you send the email campaign to 100 people, 90 are delivered,  there are 2 unique clicks, you get a 2% unique click rate. Currently, our B2B clients are seeing email click through rates in the 1% to 3% range but in certain situations some clients have seen click through rates as high as 5% to 12%. The variance depends on the clarity and value of the email message and the perceived value of the information available by clicking the link. Once again, list quality is a big factor here.

Total clicks – Why aren’t unique clicks and total clicks the same?

1) the contact could have clicked the link multiple times

2) the contact may have forwarded the email to other people and they may have also clicked the link. The tracking still records the clicks back to their record. Depending on the email system you can get some fascinating clues. Like with the email open tracking, in the past I have been able to see multiple clicks at about the same time for IP addresses in different parts of the U.S. – obviously the email was forwarded and link clicked by different people in different locations. It’s likely that your company or offering is of interest.

Until next time,

Garth

That’s a great question.

I help a number of my clients through the staff hiring process, especially hiring salespeople. For any business it’s key to get the right people in the right roles; every hiring mistake (and we’ve all made them) has a negative financial impact on your business.

Start the process by assessing the behavior of your best employee in that role. In this company’s sitation, they should assess the top software training and support person (or people). This step will help create a behavioral “benchmark” (a behavioral job standard) for the perfect person to hire.

Then follow this sequence of steps:

1. Post your ad on Craigslist. Research shows that Craigslist offers much more value for your recruiting dollar. See this article: http://blogs.zdnet.com/micro-markets/?p=916
2. Review every resume and cover letter from candidates who apply for the job (note I handle this step differently for salespeople). Look for well-written cover letters. It’s surprising how many cover letters are poorly written, sloppy, or just make no attempt to be personal. Quickly/easily screen out candidates who don’t pass this simple step.
3. Conduct a short (30 minute tops) phone screen of the candidates that made it to this step. Many jobs today require strong interpersonal skills _on the phone_ so a phone screen is essential to see how well they handle themselves.
4. For candidates that pass the phone screen, send them the link to the behavioral assessment. It takes just 24 minutes to complete.
5. When you get the results of the assessment look to see how much variation there is from the job standard. The assessment isn’t the end-all but it’s a helpful tool to see where the gaps are. Some companies look for candidates with less than 100 points of change from the job standard.
6. Bring candidates that match to your office for face-to-face interviews. Have them meet several employees (support dept., sales, etc.) prior to meeting with the hiring manager. This step educates the candidate about the company and will let you see how well they will fit into company culture (when you get feedback from the other employees they met).
7. Interview the candidate. The behavioral assessment will show where some of the “gaps” are for the candidate; and will provide handy interview questions to assist your interview process. Ask candidates to share actual examples of how they go about doing their job. For example, if you ask a salesperson “are you a closer” they know they right answer is “yes”. Instead, ask them take me through a recent successful sale and what you did at each step and why; much more revealing
8. Narrow your search to at least two great candidates. Make an offer to your top candidate but be prepared to hire your backup if the first candidate tries to sweeten the deal too much.

I have included a link below to an excellent behavioral assessment. I offer one free assessment per organization so you can try it out and see its value. It takes about 24 minutes to complete the assessment. When I receive your report I will email it to you and set up a time to provide a feedback about your behavioral style and the report.

http://response.target-teams.com/assessment.php?ag=NDL89L6873

Until next time,

Garth

How email open tracking works.

When an HTML email is sent, the email system inserts a small unique 1 x 1 graphic/image (sometimes referred to as a Web beacon) into the bottom of the email message. When the email is “opened” the image communicates back to the email server and registers the open. Plain text emails cannot be tracked.

When can’t an email open be tracked?

If the email client (e.g. Microsoft Outlook) only accepts plain text or it accepts HTML email but blocks graphic images then the email message open can’t be tracked.

What does the email client landscape look like?

B2B: A January, 2009 USA Today blog post suggests that the corporate landscape Microsoft Outlook/Exchange has 48% market share and IBM’s Lotus Notes/Domino has 40% market share. IBM claims that Notes is strong and growing in the very largest banks, pharma, and telecom companies.

B2C: Several 2009 Blog Posts including one by Email Marketing Reports suggest that Yahoo Mail is #1, Microsoft Live Mail (hotmail) is #2 and Google Mail Gmail is #3. Registered accounts in 2008 were quite close between Yahoo and Microsoft but in 2009 use of email accounts Yahoo had 56% market share, Microsoft 19% and Google 11%. AOL wasn’t shown on the usage chart but has about 1/2 the number of email accounts as Google so perhaps has 5% market share.

What impact does an email client have on trackability?

In 2002, when I was sending B2B email marketing campaigns for clients, we were getting email open rate lows of 30% and highs from 50% to 70% when emailing our client’s in-house lists. As the months went by and we looked to see what percentage of people we could track and concluded that if someone opened our email message, we could track about 90% of those people.

Then Microsoft released Outlook 2003. Outlook 2003 by default turned “off” graphics so no graphic images were displayed in emails. This meant unless a user chose to turn “on” graphic display for all email messages or on a per email basis we could not track email opens. Initially, adoption of Outlook 2003 was slow but by 2005 we had seen the 90% trackability drop to about 60%. Microsoft followed with Outlook 2007 which had the same “off” default for graphic display and as adoption picked up we watched our ability to track dropping even further.

We also did testing with some clients who had Lotus Notes and found we couldn’t track them. Also Yahoo Mail added the ability to block images but unlike corporate environments where standards are set, it’s hard to say what percentage of consumers have graphics turned on or off in their Yahoo email client.

In summary, your ability to track email opens today in a B2B environment is below 50% (i.e. if you send email to 100 people you can only track email opens for 50 of those people so if half of the 50 people open you get a 25% open rate). And it’s possible that your ability to track opens in B2B could be getting as low as 33%. I believe email open tracking rates in B2C environments are higher.

What do you recommend to improve tracking?

Create valuable content and include links in your email messages to that content. Unlike the challenges I’ve described with email opens, if a link is clicked in an email message then you can uniquely track who clicked that link. Some systems even go back and create an email “open” when a link was clicked in that email because they know the only way to get the link clicked was to have opened the email first.

Link click results vary a great deal between B2C and B2B lists, quality of the list, the value of the offer/content, message deliverability, day and time of delivery etc. but I’ve seen as high as 8% for B2B clients (if you email 100 people 8 people click on the link) but link clicks are usually lower in the 2% to 3% range.

Keep in mind that even though your email open rates may be “low” (25%) there are many people who received and opened your message but you were unable to track them. By creating valuable content and including links to that valuable content you will create more powerful messages and improve your tracking.

The Marketing Automation market is heating up with an infusion of venture capital money, aggressive selling & marketing, and accelerating user adoption. Aberdeen Group states that 51% of companies who don’t have a lead nurturing strategy will be adding one in 2009.

• Eloqua has raised over $40 million in three rounds from VC’s and just announced their 300^th joint customer with Salesforce.com
• Genius has raised $34 million in three rounds from VC’s and has used that money to aggressively capture market share. Genius recently announced a total of 161 joint customers with Salesforce.com and also 50 new customers alone in Q1 ‘09
• Infusionsoft (focused on SMB marketing automation) has raised $17 million in three rounds from VC’s and now has over 7,000 small business customers

Marketing Automation Benefits

Marketing automation solutions (i.e. drip marketing, lead nurturing systems) “work while you sleep”, convert more leads, shorten sales cycles, involve salespeople when the leads are “sales ready”, and increase revenues. Nurtured leads also deliver 47% higher average order value over non nurtured leads (Aberdeen Group). Infusionsoft has over 400 small business customers who have successfully doubled their annual sales.

How sophisticated are Marketing Automation Users?

I have recently attended a number of in-person and on-line events, including the recent Sales 2.0 conference in Boston. I’ve listened to vendor presentations, user success stories, and reviewed case studies. Most businesses that have purchased these solutions are in the early days of adoption; marketing has aligned with sales and some simple list segmentation and lead nurturing sequences have been put in place. Much more sophisticated processes are possible and I’m sure there are customer examples but I’ve yet to hear or read about any really sophisticated examples.

Why not more sophisticated use?

I believe that current market use of the technology is fairly simple because adoption is recent and few customers have prior experience using the technology. Marketing automation is complex because it combines things like sales stage definitions, lead generation, prospect psychology, email marketing, and Web site technology. It also requires that the traditional walls between sales and marketing come down. There aren’t many resources at customers, vendors, or among the consultant ranks who have this blend of knowledge and experience. This perspective is supported by CMO/CSO analyst firm Sirius Decisions who believes that the available features in marketing automation systems are well ahead of most customer’s abilities to use them.

Conclusion

2009 is going to be a year of accelerating adoption of marketing automation. As the economic recovery initially takes hold, businesses will want to accelerate their sales and marketing without hiring more headcount. Many more companies will move to evaluate and adopt Marketing Automation systems. With increased demand from customers and increased competition for market share among many competing vendors, price points will come down. I’ve seen more established vendors already drop price and offer entry level systems at around $1,500 a month and some newer vendors now have powerful solutions at around $200 to $400 a month. These trends will combine to move marketing automation technology from the early adopter phase into the early mainstream phase. Additionally, with the help of vendors and consultants/channel partners, I believe that marketing automation users will become more and more sophisticated in their use of these systems.

CRM is the central tool used by most sales & marketing organizations to manage their leads, opportunities, and customers. Problem is that many great salespeople don’t have a behavioral profile that is detail oriented. So it’s against their style to carefully load and track all their leads, calls, activities, and opportunities in the CRM. If you’ve ever managed a sales team you know exactly what I’m talking about. CRM is great for management but unless it offers a strong value proposition for salespeople they resist using it and then your CRM system can fail.

Enter Marketing Automation

Marketing Automation can add the strong value proposition that salespeople need to use CRM. What great salespeople want to do is make lots of money; they also want the shortest and most direct path to earning lots of money. If salespeople could spend all day working warm and hot opportunities that clearly have a need and are at the right time in their buying cycle they would be thrilled; Marketing Automation can help do this.

Marketing can now expand their role from generating leads into to real time/right time delivery of leads to sales. Marketing can nurture and “drip market” to the leads and when the leads start to show the right level of interest they can immediately be tagged for rapid follow up by sales.

Strong Sales Benefits

In this scenario Sales will want to have all of their leads loaded into the CRM so they can be nurtured on their behalf. In this scenario, Sales will work closely with marketing to agree on definitions of lead stages, lead scores, and what the follow up sequences to use for leads at different stages. And in this scenario opportunities that stall can easily be dropped back into a nurture sequence with little effort on the part of sales. In all these examples Sales will actively use CRM because it gives them a strong value proposition.

The Bottom Line

Marketing Automation has the potential to help salespeople fully adopt their use of CRM as well as having sales & marketing improve their collaboration. Is it time for you to start implementing a marketing automation system?

1. Sales Managers are HORRIBLE at hiring
2. Sales Training doesn’t work very well
3. Neither does sales technology
4. Sales stars are born not made

I’ve had the opportunity to hire and manage hundreds of inside and field salespeople for different high technology organizations. Here are three factors that I know will help build a high performing sales team with more sales stars.

1. Improve your sales hiring methodology
2. Capture the best practices of your top sales performers
3. Train on sales best practices and train for behavioral change

1. Improve your sales hiring methodology

As sales managers, too often we hire based on the candidate’s personal projection, education, and past work experience. If a sales rep is outgoing, charming and know they need to reserve time for prospecting every day does it mean they will do it? If they were successful at Lotus or Sybase or Sun while that company was rocketing up does that mean they were a sales star or just surrounded by star dust?

When I’m hiring salespeople, I like to assess a candidate’s behavior. Here are two examples of what I do.

First, if the sales job involves a lot of prospecting, my job posting states that the candidate must cold call my designated contact (usually my HR assistant) at a specific time to be considered. My HR assistant has a screening form and quickly assesses clarity of voice, opening pitch, warmth, and marks down if the candidate qualifies and closes. This process quickly produces a short list of candidates for me to consider that I know will prospect and do it well. It’s amazing to me how many people state on their resume that they “love to cold call” but they won’t do it! They want to email their resume and won’t pick up the phone.

Second, more recently I’ve been using a well-known behavioral assessment tool called DISC. If you link to the visual example, you can see the  “ideal”  supervisor standard (HFJD) that is created by profiling your top performing salespeople and creating a composite standard of their behavioral style. Now any other salespeople (internal or candidates) profile (the T pattern in the visual example) can be compared to that job standard. Cleaver International (DISC tool I use) has been using this method with a major insurance company who hired 200 salespeople in one year and at the end of the year had just 16 reps (8%) turn over.

You understand the cost of hiring and training each salesperson as well as the negative impact an underperforming sales rep has on your time, on the whole sales team, and on your results. Assessing sales behavior will give you another objective source of information about your sales candidates and you can make better hiring decisions.

Next Post: Building a High Performing Sales Team- Part Two

2. Capture the best practices of your top sales performers
3. Train on sales best practices and train for behavioral change

• Automation
• Analysis
• Audacity

Automation is using the social media tools that allow you to participate in the dialog (e.g. blog, tweet, comment, phone, webcam). Analysis is having the experience, vision, and/or insight to add value to the dialog, and Audacity is having something to say that is above and beyond the mundane.

The Webinar was taped and apparently will be available on the Hubspot Web site.