Adam Zais is not your average VP of Sales & Marketing. His LinkedIn profile boasts a picture of Aquaman and his specialty list includes: “Generalizations, Stating the Obvious, 20-20 Hindsight”.

Adam’s great sense of humor (evident in his LinkedIn profile) has been one of many key contributors to his 20+ years of sales leadership success. His humor, matched with an honest, frank, low pressure approach helps him to engage his teams, connect with his customers and grow revenues.

Adam currently leads Sales & Marketing for Wistia, a Lexington, MA based SaaS provider for business video sharing services. Their mission….help businesses use video to advance business results.

I’d like to share some best practices and techniques that Adam has used throughout his career and more recently at Wistia that are transferable to many product lines and industries. Read on…

Sales Methodology

When asked about the Wistia sales methodology, Adam shared that “My approach is to find people that want to buy what you have to offer.  That have business problems that I can help solve. There is no place for manipulation and the hard sell.”

This conversation reminded me of an earlier blog post about Jacques Werth and High Probability Selling which includes their “radically honest” sales approach. Adam has intuitively leveraged a radically honest sales approach for most of his career with great success.

When Adam first joined Wistia in November 2007 he began on a journey to sell Wistia’s products like you would with enterprise software solutions.  This makes me think of a long drawn out sales cycle, consultative selling, 100 page powerpoints and field sales reps knocking on your door. Per Adam’s admission, this approach failed.

Instead, he adjusted his approach to one that supported rapidly expanding brand awareness, a shorter sales cycle and incorporated inbound marketing. He wanted customers to find Wistia at the time they discovered that they had a business need.

Add two parts SEO/SEM, one part email marketing, one part LinkedIn and a few Tweets later- Adam was able to develop and currently maintains a very effective lead generation engine.

There are three Wistia employees that are the voice of their Twitter presence http://twitter.com/wistia. They currently have just over 200 followers and have published about 120 Tweets. Per Adam, they have closed 10 customer deals from Twitter alone- Impressive. (I think there is a big opportunity for Wistia to beef up their Twitter presence by adding more frequent, high quality Tweets and to grow a larger targeted follower audience. The 10 sales could become 100 sales in the near future.)

The Sales Cycle and Trial IQ

The sales cycle at Wistia basically has three parts. First is qualification: Is the prospect a good match for Wistia’s services and vice versa? Second is a Free Trial: Prospects are given a 15 day free trial of the product which is supplemented by 3 emails from Adam (automated) and manual intervention from Adam’s sales team and/or the customer. Last is The Close: Most deals happen within a few weeks of the prospect activating their Free Trial.

I loved, loved, loved what Adam described as TQ- Trial Quality. Adam’s team has developed a number of metrics that bundle together into an algorithm to score their trial prospects. Someone’s TQ goes up when they activate their trial, upload media, share media and embed videos. The more interaction they have with the Wistia product, the higher their TQ- and likelihood of buying.

Adam and his team use the TQ to identify their best prospects and align sales efforts accordingly. (The type of trial user, ex. Bank of America versus Joe’s Plumbing, also plays into the level of sales effort.)

I am surprised at how many companies do not incorporate some type of lead scoring methodology into their selling efforts. Without one, it’s kind of like finding a needle in a haystack.  With one- you can become all powerful. (Like Aquaman!)

Cool stuff we can learn from Adam

1. Be yourself- Don’t tone it down. The more you are true to your natural personality and communication style, the more successful you will be.
2. If your sales approach is not working- change it! Many leaders are too slow to act or admit that they made a mistake. By changing your approach swiftly, you will improve your results.
3. You don’t need a hard sell- to sell. By focusing your attention on prospects who actually have a business need for your product, then using a direct, honest approach that includes humor, you will better connect with your customers and close more deals.
4. The name Wistia did not come from a flower or air freshener (sorry Adam). It comes from the word Wist, “old english” for knowledge.
5. Try different sales tools until you find one that truly drives business. After testing Zoho and HiRise, Wistia now uses NetworkHippo which is a CRM solution that incorporates social networking metrics.

To learn more about Adam, visit his LinkedIn profile or follow him on Twitter: http://twitter.com/adamzais

If you would like to learn more about what Wistia has to offer, visit www.wistia.com to view a demo, get pricing info and to contact their sales teams. Wistia is a video sharing SaaS solution with unique analytics and activity tracking (ex. heat maps) that can be used by Sales, Marketing and Training teams.  (Notes: This is not a paid endorsement from me, or The Sales Operations blog. No animals were harmed while writing this blog.)