What the hell is Jeff Barson doing?

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This is the blog of Jeff Barson. I'm currently running HireVue Labs, former Director at Sendside, founder of Surface Medical, Nimble, Medspa MD, Freelance MD, Frontdesk, Uncommon, and Wild Blue... angel investor and startup advisor. Oh, and I'm a artist. More >>

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    "Everyone wants to kill the king. But the prince, he just sails along telling all the ladies, 'One day I'm gonna be king.'" ~
    Vince Chase, Entourage

    Entries in sales automation (9)

    Tuesday
    Feb082011

    Strategic Marketing & Sales Communications

    Good sales communications can make a brilliant statement about your business.

    The Package that Calistoga Ranch is using is a phenomenal example of sales materials that set the stage for immediate followup and move the sales process down the field.

    I was impressed when I opened this communications. Not only is the Calistoga Ranch Package beautifully executed sales message, it also delivers just the message that a high end real estate community want's to deliver. A great execution for sales acceleration.

    Thursday
    Feb032011

    Email Never Looked Like This

    Beautiful Sales & Marketing Communications.

    I've been building some training Packages for Sendside's sales automation clients and I have to say, they're some really beautiful communications. Don't you wish your sales and marketing emails looked like this?

    Once you get the hang of how the peices fit together and get your noggin around the fact that you can actually send any content using one of the different tab tipes (Text Editor Tabs for HTML that's built in the editor, Web Page Tabs for embedding any URL or web page, and File Tabs for showing document inside a tab) you can do some incredible things that provide real business value.

    Not only do they look great, but you can see when they're opened and what content's being read. If you're using a CRM you can track all of that information all the way through to sales. It's no wonder that we have clients whose close rates have jumped by as much as 500% within  three months of implementing Sendside into their sales process. Yowza!

    For any sales automation and acceleration clients of Sendside that's using Packages, you'll be recieving the Package above shortly.

    Wednesday
    Nov112009

    Sales Acceleration

     

    Sendside's Sales Acceleration & Sales Automation Platform explained.

    The presentation above details some of the value around Sendside's sales accleration for sales teams. The studies discussed are from MIT Sloan School of Management and Kellogg School of Management and were commissioned by insidesales.com.

    If you'd like these studies, just fire off an email and we'll be happy to send them to you.

    Thursday
    Nov052009

    Sendside Packages: Sales Accleration + Sales Automation

    We've just finished the Package below that showcases sales acceleration, sales automation, strategic marketing, and customer retention.

     

    View this Package.

    When you click the link above a new window will open... a Sendside Package.

    You'll immediately notice that it's unlike email. It's much more like a web site.

    In fact, anything that you can display through a browser can now be sent a a communication that can be controled.

    Sendside Packages

    Packages presents an entirely new way to respond to new leads and follow up with interested prospects. Rather than sending boring, uneventful emails that don’t offer any insights into prospect interest or delivery status, Packages allow organizations to send pre-bundled content that’s branded, personalized and interactive. Packages take sales collateral to a whole new level.

    Monday
    Oct262009

    Asymetrical Sales Acceleration & Strategic Marketing

    Sales Automation & Strategic Marketing. Take a look at this image contrasting convetional and irregular warfare strategies.

    If you swap 'Users' for Population and 'Management' for Military, it's a pretty good analogy of the way companies sell.

    Traditionally, companies have sold into management structures who have then pushed downstream into their users. Installed software companies are a great example of this. If you buy installed software you're making a big investment and taking some risk. The sales focus is on getting the management to buy or adopt. End users usually have no say in what they end up with.

    Increasingly, and espectially with SaaS models, the emphasis has changed from selling to management, to selling (through adoption) to end users. The parallels to asymetirical or irregular warfare are striking.

    Wednesday
    Oct142009

    Sendside gives the CW Network a staggering 14,500% ROI within 60 days.

    As our client list continues to grow, so do the number of success stories we hear around Sendside's sales acceleration, sales automation, strategic marketing, and customer retention capabilities. Here's a case study detailing how the CW Networks local SL affiliate KUCW, used Sendside to close deals that they'd been unsuccessfully working on for the last five years.

     

    The CW Network is America's fifth broadcast network and a joint venture between Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corporation. The SLC affiliate KUCW came to Sendside looking to provide media-rich sales materials and access instant read notifications so that their sales force could follow up immediately. Within the first 60 days of using Sendside KUCW closed deals that they'd been unsuccessfully working on for the last 5 years.

     

    Friday
    Oct092009

    Jazz Bet on Sendside Sales Acceleration

    The Utah Jazz is the first NBA team to begin using Sendside for sales acceleration. Of course, they're not the only ones. We have a growing number of clients who are using Sendside of sales automation, strategic marketing and customer retention.

    In addition to being an NBA franchise, the Jazz sales team have a lot of sales to make... an NBA team, a stadium, a race track, movie theaters, concerts and events... that's a lot of inventory to move and speeding up the sales cycle is the way to do it.

    Sendside gives the sales reps, sales management and marketing, the ability to craft their messages and be notified when they're opened. For high-value sales prospects that gives you an amazing ability to follow up while your content is fresh in a prospects mind and they're thinking about you.

    For my part I love having the Jazz on Sendside. In fact, I have a personal side bet with the Jazz management. If the Jazz sales team is able to meet a revenue goal that's directly attributable to Sendside (completely at the discretion of the Jazz managment), we'll get four corporate season tickets.

    We're pretty sure that using Sendside the Jazz can beat that goal pretty easily so I'm looking forward to watching a lot of Jazz games from court-side next season.

    Sunday
    Oct042009

    Sendside: Sales Acceleration Experience

    Sendside's customer and member base is growing steadily, which makes us all happy around the campfire. And the largest increas in new clients is coming in from orgaizations looking to use Sendsides SaaS in four areas: sales acceleration, sales automation, strategic marketing and customer retention.

    Since one of my primary responsibililties is creating and improving Sendside's user experiece, I'm constantly rethinking our members experience with the product. With so many sales forcees coming onboard, it put me in mind of something that Seth Godin posted about Google and their push to make the user experience better. 

    From Seth Godin:

    Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google,

    "We knew that Google was going to get better every single day as we worked on it, and we knew that sooner or later, everyone was going to try it. So our feeling was that the later you tried it, the better it was for us because we'd made a better impression with better technology. So we were never in a big hurry to get you to use it today. Tomorrow would be better."

    ...As a result of Google's decision, they made counter-intuitive decisions. No ads, for example. No clutter. No popups, no tricky interpretations of privacy policies. Instead, every decision was, "If this is going to be the one and only choice, the best search engine in the world, what should we do?" The feeling was, if they built that, the money would take care of itself. And the investors who bought in were in on the game from the start.

    That quote is definately tracking with how we perceive Sendside. Everyone will try it at some point because it acutally works in exactly the ways that businesses need it to work.

    Take a look at some of our customer's sales, marketing, and retention success stories. You'll notice that the vertical markets are all different. In fact, drastically so, but the enthusiasm for what Sendside is providing is remarkably consistant. Sendside is solving real business needs around sales and customer relationships.

    As part of the user experience that sales teams are having with our sales acceleration and sales force automation we've added two new features that are about to be released; Salesforce.com integration and Sendside Mobile.

    Both of these features utilize our API set and were derived from listening to how our customers are using Sendside. I have to say that both are really cool. Sendside Mobile allows you to send Packages, Secure Messages or eSignatues from your smart phone. The Salesforce.com integration allows you to send from inside Salesforce.com and use Senside's instant reporting and analytics to see when your information is opended, and what the recipient's looking at.

    From the sender's side the experience is clean and easy. Just what you want when you're accelerating sales.

    Wednesday
    Sep302009

    Sendside Customer Success Stories.

    We've been heads-down at Sendside building. We're sure we're building value and there are a number of our customers who would agree. I've copied a couple of quotes from our site below but we're always looking for more.

    From organizations as diverse as financial services, technology, sales and marketing, media and entertainment, advertising agencies, medical, higher education and non-profit charities, Sendside provides integrated solutions you just can't get anywhere else; sales acceleration, sales automation, strategic marketing, and customer retention.

    Here are some of the nice things our customers are saying about us.


    HireVue is the worlds leading video interviewing service doing business in more than 70 countries. HireVue came to Sendside looking for way to accelerate their sales cycles and provide mind-blowing relationship marketing to their existing clients that include Google, Oracle, and Africa World Bank. Within months, Sendside increased helped increase their sales by more than 35% while cutting their sales cycle in half.
    Read the HireVue success story

     




    Contango and Western National Trust Company constitute the wealth management division of Zions Bancorporation, a public bank holding company with more than $40 billion in assets. Contango came to Sendside to provide secure, high-touch client communications and reporting to their clients. We'd like to let you know what happened but since Contango is a financial service company and can't make any claims of increased business, we can't.
    Read the Contango Capital Advisors success story

     



    Rain Nutrition uses a distributed sales network for anti-oxidents and nutrition supplements. Rain came to Sendside looking for a solution that would set them apart from a host of me-too competitors. Sendside provided.
    Read the Rain Nutrition success story

     



     
    First Western Advisors is registered Broker-Dealer (B/D) and Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) firm handling financial services from wealth management and strategic alliances. First Western came to Sendside to find a way to communicate with clients that conformed to all of their regulation and compliance needs. What they found was a comprehensive easy-to-use solution that exceeded their needs in every aspect.
    Read the First Western Advisors success story

     



     

    The CW Network is America's fifth broadcast network and a joint venture between Warner Bros. Entertainment and CBS Corporation. The SLC affiliate KUCW came to Sendside looking to provide media-rich sales materials and access instant alerts so that their sales force could follow up immediately. Within the first 60 days of using Sendside they closed deals that they had been unsuccessfully working on for the last 5 years.
    Read the KUCW success story