Here’s what to tell your salespeople when they want “the good leads”…

If you’ve got a sales team or a salesperson, you’ve probably heard them complain that they need better leads. That they want more leads.

Here’s the harsh reality: Any lackluster salesperson can close a highly qualified, hot lead.

But a really good salesperson? They can nurture the relationship of a cold prospect and convert them into a customer over the course of days, weeks, months … or even years.

I used to be a one of those “I Need the Good Leads!” salespeople. I used to complain that the quality of the leads weren’t great; that it was the fault of the marketing campaigns that I didn’t have motivated cash-in-hand prospects waiting to talk to me. What I came to realize was that sales isn’t a transaction, it’s a transformation. And transformations take time.

I was foolish to think there were hundreds of prospects begging to hire our company. Instead, there were thousands of companies that, while they could benefit directly from our services, didn’t really have the time to consider bringing in outside talent. They were qualified but not actively searching. In order to grow the business, I figured out that I needed to not just talk to those who wanted help yesterday but also work with prospects that would want help in months or years, and build that relationship.

Objective 1: Contact Prospects at least 8 times.

In order to build a relationship, a quality salesperson will contact leads and prospects a minimum of 8 times. If they’re savvy, they’ll do it in a few different ways; utilizing phone calls (primary!), email, webinars, LinkedIn articles, sending gifts and even meeting in person.

With more competitors in nearly every market, it’s difficult to grab a prospect’s attention and build trust. Truthfully, it’s more difficult than ever before to differentiate (more on how to effectively differentiate in a later post).

As your salespeople plan their week, encourage them to game out the sales process. Have them write out a 180-day plan to convert a lead. If they’re eager, let them plan a 2-year conversion process. Game it out with initial phone calls, emails with value (whitepapers, case studies, tools, etc.), gifts, and whatever else makes the most sense for a predictable sales funnel. It’s not difficult to game this out; it should take about two hours to high-level define the sales follow-up process for prospects.

Once it’s done, mock it up in a simple flowchart and print out the checklist for the salespeople to keep at their desk. The ultimate dream is to build workflows within your Customer Relationship Management tool (CRM) that will allow you to follow-up with people more automatically but please please please don’t make perfect the enemy of good. Paper and flowcharts are better than what you likely currently have!

Objective 2: Record all Prospect Communication inside your CRM

If you’re not currently using a Customer Relationship Management Tool like Salesforce.com, Infusionsoft, Ontraport, SugarCRM, or countless others, you’re not effectively tracking the most important information on your prospects. Because of this, your competition can out-sell you.

If you’re a new business and bootstrapping it, I love Insightly CRM. It’s cheap, mobile friendly and does all the bare minimum sales tracking needed to keep you competitive. If you’re company is larger, has complexities and multiple people working on a sale, look into more sophisticated CRMs. For that, the Tech Guys team would love to help you find the right tool.

By recording all past meetings, all communication and all associated files, it’s easy for a salesperson to hop back into a conversation with a prospect, having everything needed at their fingertips. Sales close faster, more predictably and easier with a CRM.

Objective 3: Record Opportunity Size and Focus Appropriately

The term “Sales Opportunity” is a strange one for those outside of the sales paradigm. An Opportunity refers to the opportunity to sell a prospect. One Account (a company if you’re B2B, a person if you’re B2C) can have many Opportunities associated with their record. Here’s what that would look like…

Say you sell 2 digital products online and high-level one-on-one coaching. When a prospect purchased the first digital product, a $27 PDF and MP3 download, there should be an Opportunity populated against their Account stating the product was purchased. The Opportunity stage is “Closed, Won” as in “We closed this Opportunity because they purchased the product.”

The Opportunity size would be $27.

Then, they receive a series of emails to push them to purchase the next product; a $197 home study course. They purchase it. An Opportunity is created against the Account with a stage of “Closed, Won” and a size of $197.

By looking at the Account, anyone with access inside the team would be able to see that the Account had made 2 purchases for the aforementioned prices.

Now comes the big dog – the high-level one-on-one coaching. This is selling for $3,000/month. The prospect responds to an email saying “Yeah, I’m interested. Let’s chat.” With that, the salesperson manually creates a new Opportunity and sets the Opportunity size to $3,000/mo. They task themselves within the Opportunity and change the status from “Prospecting” to “Needs Analysis Call” to “Proposal Delivered” to “Waiting on Payment” and finally to either “Closed, Won” or “Closed, Lost”, all the while keeping the “Anticipated Close Date” updated.

This level of specificity allows everyone with access to the CRM to see the sales in the pipeline.

It also allows salespeople to focus on the Opportunities that are closest to closing and that are the largest. Otherwise, typical salespeople tend to focus on the prospects that are the most fun to talk to or those who are easiest to work with. This is dangerous because it prioritizes fun and ease over maximum growth.

On our upcoming webinar, our Fearless Robot, Mike Cline and I will be discussing sales processes, augmented reality and Mike’s musings from spending time in the Black Rock desert! Click here to sign up, ask questions and chat with us.

Have a productive, opportunity-focused week!

Casey
PS – Our upcoming webinar is Tuesday, September 13. RSVP right now so we can talk about sales forecasting, answering any questions you have!