August 31, 2006

Interview with Dave Ashton

Written by Brian Turner

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Dave Ashton is the director of Bizal and Contact Foundry.

Contact Foundry is one of the UK’s leading specialist sales support and lead generation companies.

We deliver highly qualified, exclusive prospect profiles and sales leads to our diverse client base across the UK. We can assist companies in many areas of OUTBOUND telesales work including:

* Sales lead generation
* Prospect generation
* Market research
* Interim sales staff

You’ve built yourself firmly into the sales end of business to business services with Contact Foundry. What sort of background do you have that has helped you reach this point in time?

I have been in new business sales for over 15 years. Most of this time was working in the High Tech sector and started my career in sales as a telesales person

This progressed to running an internal sales team and various other promotions until I was given my final role as a Sales Director.

During this time was also very lucky to have great mentors who continued my education in sales processes, methodology and management. This was a major factor that helped me rise quickly within the company’s I worked for.

Some people can find managing their own sales process difficult, sometimes too hard or too soft sell. How does any company find the right balance, and does it take a special sort of personality or experience to be able to make those judgement calls?

In simple terms selling to a business is all about following a process and closing as you go along. A salesperson should never be at the end of the process and need to close hard or softly if they have followed the correct methodology in the right order.

Every business knows they need sales, but not every business knows how to go about it. What would you say is the best way for a business to identify its key marketing opportunities for increasing sales and revenues?

If we look at the basic elements of the sales process we need to generate leads which requires

Unique Selling Points (USP’s) that are fact based and not emotive
A defined Target Market User Profile

When this has been done, we strongly recommend that all companies test the various methods of lead generation. This will establish a cost per lead for each method and enable you to expand the methods that work best without spending your entire budget.

The most common areas to investigate and test are:

Online Pay Per Click & Search Engine optimisation (only after you know that Pay Per Click works)
Prospect Profiling
Generic offline advertising
Networking online & offline
Email marketing
Referrals Programs
Mailshot’s (often with a telesales follow up call)
Events / Seminars/ Workshops
Free online PR
PR

Each of the above will generate a cost per lead and some cases additional benefits i.e. very targeted marketing can be achieved if you prospect profile and online PR also generates links for your website.

Tip: Remember that your USP’s will need to be updated as your business grows and the best people to ask to help you define these, are your prospects and clients.

Closing deals :

The key to closing any opportunity has two main areas that need to be in the sales process

Understanding the prospects requirements including, solution, timescales, budget, purchasing criteria, and not just from the decision maker but also from influencers.

Demonstrating that your company can deliver by providing credibility statements i.e. years trading, accreditation, 3 references, company image, etc.

All the above qualification and justifications need to added to the sales process, tested and continually improved.

Remember what is most important is that you create a proven repeatable process and that conversion rates are monitored to enable troubleshooting and continual improvement.

The internet has had a profound effect on how business can operate, but how important an impact do you think it’s had on the sales environment? Has it simply provided new avenues to chase sales leads, or has the sales process itself been fundamentally changed?

The Internet has changed several ways that people in sales and marketing work.

Lead Generation and online PR are the obvious benefits from the internet but many companies have also benefited or suffered because of the image the company website creates. It is also vital that the websites reiterate what the sales & marketing teams are saying to thier prospects.

Unfortunately we often come across large companies who have cheap looking websites that portray the company in less professional way, or does not reiterate the other sales and marketing messages created by the company. This results in lower closer rate because the sale team need to work that much harder in demonstrating the companies credibility and ability to deliver to the product/ service.

Last but not least, because it is very easy to compare prices on the internet, it means that more thought needs to go into providing value added services and creating a solution rather than just providing product.

When a company operates both online and offline, do you see offline advertising as being equal to the challenge of online advertising, or just as complementary, according to the needs of the business?

This depends a lot on the type of business, geographical coverage and the target market user profile. In many cases the two forms of lead generation can compliment each other.

Like most forms of lead generation there are big plus points and potentially big negatives. In the case of online promotion you need to have not just quality traffic but also a website that converts that into an opportunity. Changing sites to maximise the number of leads generated per 100 visitors can often be very costly or in many cases is not done and hence this method provides a poor return on investment.

However a sticky website that coverts traffic well will often generate a very high ROI and can also generates opertunities that could not realistically be found by any other method.

One of your key areas of sales service is the provision of Telesales. As an offline marketing method, how do you find it compares to online methods such as Pay Per Click in terms of customer acquisition costs?

This depends on each clients target market user profile. For most of our telesales projects we work on building prospect profiles which enables our clients to do other forms of very targeted marketing, solution selling, as well as making appointments. Online is a lot more hit and miss but in the vast majority of our clients PPC and SEO will provide a very positive ROI statement

It seems that Pay Per Call is one of the big marketing avenues of the future. As a provider of Telesales services, do you see Contact Foundry as integrating into Pay Per Call, or do you see it as a rival service?

NO I wish I could put that stronger because our clients are all B2b and hence it comes down to a quality business conversation and not a bunch of badly paid people reading a script. Pay Per Call might work very well for B2c where a high volume of automated calls are needed but it will never work for B2b

One of the most difficult parts of running a sales campaign can be measuring the metrics of it, especially in terms of sales conversions. Firstly, what sort of tools and tricks do you use to measure the success of direct marketing campaigns, especially on the internet? Secondly, how important are factors such as brand marketing in sales campaigns, and is it ever possible to factor that into campaign analysis?

Measurement is key and yes we run a variety of tools internally to monitor conversion rates throughout the sales cycle and not just the end result.

As for a tip. On your sales forecast most people put in the chance of winning the deal i.e. If you define what these percentages mean i.e.

20% Arrange meeting and given company presentation and got a scope of works

30% Have spoken to / met all the people involved in making the decision and asked what there purchasing criteria is.

90% Have verbal order

100% Have order

Now each Week/ Month compare with your previous weeks forecast and

2: Establish if any deals have not progressed i.e. they should now have a greater chance of being closed

Now over a few weeks / months you will find that most deals drop off at certain points in your sales cycle. This is now the area for improvement/ troubleshooting / sales training.

Last but not least branding is a nice to have not a must have and helps with credibility that is the real reason people place the order with a specific company. Having the best solution does not win deals, showing that your company is financially stable, well accredited , has plenty of reference sites, creates a strong professional image etc. will!

You’ve recently started a series of sales conferences, where you bring together a group of companies to talk about different methods business can use to increase sales revenues. How important do you think it is that business is made more aware of their options? Is it possible to confuse them with different options?

After the events most people ask to pilot a particular method i.e. prospect profiling, PPC etc. and hence this is not so much of a problem. Interestingly the average rating for content / relevancy is just over 9 out of 10 which shows there is a clear demand for this type of event.

You’ve made a point on the Platinax forums that you love business networking online. Do you think this is something that any business can do, or does it require a specific type of method or even personality, to be able to network with other businesses in any environment, offline or online?

LOL Networking online was part of our marketing plan and I think we have a great advantage because of peoples interest in sales. This results in lots of questions that we can answer and show off our skills.

If you are in an industry that has less inertest in it then networking online would be a lot harder because there would be less questions and hence less opportunity to show off your skills i.e. one of our clients sells industrial chimneys and I am not sure I have ever seen a question relating to this topic so I think he would find it hard.

Thank you for your time. :)

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