Archive for March, 2014
How to Cultivate and Harvest Your Leads Effectively
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on March 26, 2014
Businesses often set aside a large budget to generate leads. But they don’t follow up with enough eagerness, vigor or persistence. That’s lead waste, and it’s preventable.
Consider a farmer who has gone to the trouble of tilling his soil and planting, watering and fertilizing his crops, but come harvest time, neglects to pick the crops. After all that time, energy and money, the produce is dead on the vine.
No business owner wants to be that farmer, which is why it’s so important to eliminate lead waste. Evaluate your processes and sales strategies to ensure that not only are you harvesting new leads, but you’re also cultivating them in ways likely to convert them to sales and long-term customers.
The Causes of Lead Waste
You may be losing money and opportunities simply because there is no efficient system in place for following up on leads. Re-evaluating your processes could reveal ways to make more meaningful and lucrative connections with prospects.
Poor communication between departments can result in lost leads. For example, marketing teams are often expected to generate interested customers, while sales teams are expected to convert them. This multi-department process can cause miscommunication, accountability problems and finger-pointing — not to mention wasted budget dollars.
Leads need to be nurtured and encouraged to opt-in — not just by well-crafted automated emails. Phone calls or in-person meetings will provide you with far more information about where prospects stand on your offers, what their financial circumstances are, and what might be needed to convert them into paying customers.
Assessing Lead Waste
It’s smart to establish incentives for your sales team to go after shiny new leads, but don’t forget about existing contacts. Look at how you’re doing with customers you’ve already brought in. This can tell you a lot about where you’re falling short and likely losing money.
Simple reports from your customer relationship management system (CRM) can highlight lead waste in the following areas:
- Leads with no activity
- Leads with no activity in last X days
- Leads with no future activity set
- Lead inquiry date to first lead activity date
Another option is to run reports on the number of inquiries in the past month, the number of introductory meetings based on those inquiries, and the number of opportunities created. Use this information to develop a strategy for gaining traction on lapsed leads.
Preventing Lead Waste
Now that you’ve raked out lead waste, you can work on yielding more sales than before. Here are four ways to do so:
- Establish a clear process to assign, manage and track leads. Make sure there’s a backup plan for every process. Don’t let the system break if one person doesn’t follow up with a contact.
- Research industry metrics and set realistic goals for lead creation and conversion rates.
- Make sure sales and marketing are aligned and playing nicely. Streamline their communication processes and clean house when it needs to be done. If something doesn’t work, say so, and fix it. Avoid finger-pointing.
- Allow for an amnesty period during which everyone who committed a lead-related sin gets a do-over.
Slow Down and Smell the Revenue
Nobody’s suggesting you turn off the faucet for new leads in order to revisit existing leads; you need to do both. Consider splitting your teams in two:
- New/active leads team
- Older/reinvigorating leads team
This division of duty can lend focus to your sales team and ensure that every type of lead is being touched or revisited regularly. And if anyone’s ever suggested that nurturing email marketing is good enough, I can tell you firsthand that it’s not. Our company has made millions in revenue running inside sales campaigns behind failed email-only campaigns.
Before you tell your sales team to chase those new leads, stop and see what actually makes sense. Are you converting when you bring in leads? If not, why? When it comes to marketing, get your people in the habit of having live conversations with prospects. Follow-up based on accurate intelligence gets leads unstuck.
Most importantly, consult your books. The numbers will show how well you’re doing with leads. If the bottom line stinks, it’s time to rethink your approach.
This article was originally posted on the Sales & Marketing Management blog by Steve Hayes on March 13, 2014.
Is your Sales Process Fresh?
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES BEST PRACTICES on March 12, 2014
One of the most devastating conditions to a seasoned veteran sales person is the onset of complacency. This can occur anytime is a sales person’s career. But usually it follows a period of repeated success or recognition of achievement. It’s easy to fall victim, and easier to not recognize it’s happened. The best way to avoid such a situation having an impact on continued success is to be constantly looking for means of improvement. The best place to start is a regular review of your sales process.
As a professional sales person, you know the value of having a sales process or strategy which must be followed to be successful. In developing an effective strategy, it’s often helpful to look at the progression of the sales process as relates to your particular business or service. By reviewing the specific aspects of each step in the process, you can determine an effective method to apply. When you break the sales process down into specific steps, you can often improve your sales results by focusing on areas where you feel you may be weak.
Prospecting – The first part of the sales process is looking for promising leads which can bring you a sale. This can include cold calling and leads generated by referrals. Prospecting is not limited to the phone. This can be done via email or in person.
Appointment Setting – Once you have made the initial contact with the prospective client the next part of the sales process is to set an appointment with the client. It is always preferable to have an in-person appointment. If this is not possible, a phone appointment is acceptable, but you should try to turn it into a face-to-face meeting with the potential client.
Qualifying – The goal of qualifying the prospective client during the sales process is to make sure the client has a need for your product or service, is interested in buying your product or service, and, most importantly is in a position to buy. Part of the qualifying process is to make sure you are talking to the person who can actually make the decision to purchase your product or service.
Presenting – The presentation is undoubtedly the most important part of the sales process. It’s important you be prepared. This includes knowing your product and service inside and out. It also includes knowing the needs of the customer inside and out. You need to make sure your presentation is professional, interesting and relevant to the needs of the prospective client. Try to make your presentation interactive and fun. Make use of different media to keep it interesting. Don’t read your information, but have it memorized and present in a natural manner. Handouts should be relevant, fresh and simple.
Answering Questions and Resolving Concerns – As perfect as your presentation may be, the client is bound to have some questions. This may be one of the more difficult parts of the sales process. Many sales are lost when a sales person is not able to satisfactorily answer objections posed by the prospective client. If you’re not prepared, you may very likely not get the sale. If you are prepared, it makes your product or service look good, it makes your company look good, and it makes you look professional.
Closing – In this part of the sales process, you have completed your presentation and answered all questions and concerns. Now you ask for the sale. Many sales people skip this part of the sales process thinking that the presentation is the same as asking. You must directly ask the client to buy your product or service. You don’t go through the whole process and expect the client to stand up and yell “I’ll take it!” You need offer them the opportunity to buy.
Referrals – After the success of the sale, you feel good and, very often, the customer feels good too. This is the perfect time to ask for referrals. The client may know of other companies or individuals who would be interested in your product or service. Once you have the referrals, the sales process starts again with a new client.
It is important to have a sales process to follow. The sales process will help you to stay on track, keep focused and will allow you to break down each step you take that leads to the sale. Breaking the process down will allow you to make changes and adjustments in any of the stages where you might be able to improve. Reviewing your process and making necessary adjustments regularly will help you to avoid complacency in your activities and keep you on the path to continued success.
Seven Ways Your Sales Team Can Improve Results with Social Media
Posted by Rick Pranitis in SALES LEADERSHIP on March 4, 2014
Are your salespeople actively engaged in social media as part of their lead generation efforts? If not, they (and your business) are missing out on great opportunities for researching potential B2B clients, building new networks and uncovering prospects by investigating their social media profiles.
Here are seven ways to encourage your sales team to embrace social media:
1. Direct your salespeople to refine their profiles. Start by making sure they have social media profiles on the appropriate channels. The marketing team can help determine where your customers and prospects those platforms. Their profile pages need to attract potential customers. While including the basics on an individual salesperson, the profile should mostly focus on your business and the solutions you offer to prospects. Also include videos, PDFs and links to your business website in these profiles.
2. Schedule time for focused social media activity. It takes discipline to use social media properly (and avoid wasting time watching cat videos!). Work with your sales team to plot out a schedule of focused activity on various social media networks, whether it’s a half-hour a day or 2-3 times a week.
3. Generate content your sales team can use. Back in the day, salespeople handed out brochures or fliers to interest prospects. Today, it’s all about customized content marketing. So it’s up to you to ensure your salespeople can refer prospects to first-rate, problem-solving content on your business website. Not only will this draw more traffic to your site, it also supports the sales team’s efforts to position your business as an industry and thought leader.
4. Promote sales blogging. It’s no longer enough to feature a blog post from your CEO or CMO. Members of your sales team should also be blogging and steadily building a rich network of followers. Encourage team members to think about new ways to focus on prospects’ needs and business challenges by answering common questions that prospects ask in their buyer journey. They should also think and blog more broadly about general industry issues, rather than shilling for your business. Again, focus on solutions your sales team can provide and that will draw more interest from prospects.
5. Keep an active LinkedIn presence. For sales of B2B products and services, LinkedIn is probably the most significant platform for your sales team’s activities. Your individual salespeople’s LinkedIn profiles are the first place a prospect will check out, so as noted above, be sure these are up-to-date and contain the right messaging.
Also, each salesperson should be gathering new LinkedIn connections as frequently as possible. Have them build their network by reaching out to past customers, colleagues in the industry, friends and family members. It’s important to have a robust network of connections as part of your LinkedIn profile.
By joining and participating in LinkedIn discussion groups, salespeople will come in contact with a wide range of potential customers — though it’s important to remember these discussion groups are about specific issues, not a venue for blatant self-promotion. Encourage your sales team to answer questions that demonstrate their problem-solving knowledge. An interested prospect will often follow up, on their own.
6. Use Twitter to make connections and follow trends. The businesses and prospects you want to connect with may be tweeting. Shouldn’t you and your sales team be listening? Twitter offers a wealth of opportunities for staying abreast of industry trends, which can in turn help your team anticipate future sales opportunities. Once your salesperson has become comfortable on the platform, he or she can reply individually to a prospect’s tweet, thus initiating a one-on-one exchange which turns a cold lead into a warm one.
7. Have a vibrant Facebook presence. Your business should already have a Facebook page. From there, encourage members of your sales team to create a Facebook group that relates to your business offerings and invite people to join. Once the group starts talking, there’s always an opportunity to send targeted messages to individuals within the group and get the sales process moving forward.
Being active in social media isn’t a substitute for picking up the phone or firing off an email to prospects, but it represents a dramatically different way of cultivating leads and enriching your sales pipeline.
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