If your sales team is doing its own prospects then kudos to you! You’ve got your team doing a number of things and keeping your life simple.
When you think about it, finding, making contact with and qualifying new prospects involve a very different set of skills and strengths than preparing proposals, negotiating and closing sales.
In the end, the objective is to maximize the dollar volume of sales generated by each sales person. So it makes sense to reduce the burden of the least productive activities they manage and allow them to focus on the most productive. In this case, productive means profitable really. A simple example of this is a business that invests in hiring a sales assistant to prepare proposals for the sales team, based on their specs, so that the sales reps spend more time with clients.
Did you know that most sales people that generate their own leads spend over 50% of their time finding and qualifying prospects vs. presenting, proposing solutions and closing?
So what does 50% of your sales staff’s time cost? A lot!
You can free up the 50% of your sales teams time and feed them with highly qualified leads for less than $100 per sales rep per month.
The following is a step by step guide to making it a reality quickly and affordably.
Step 1 – Make a list of the criteria that make up a highly qualified prospect.
Are they in the right industry? Do they have the requisite number of employees/trucks/facilities, etc.? Does the prospect have responsibility for the appropriate are in the customer organization? Do they have decision making authority this size purchase?
Your business has its own set of criteria and no one knows them like you. Get your team together and get all the criteria into one list.
Step 2 – Get a list of leads that fit the criteria.
You may not be able to get the perfect list. You may be limited to choosing certain industries, sizes of companies and titles. That’s fine. Get as close as you can get. Be sure you’re as inclusive as possible. Get all the industries and titles, etc. that are likely to be a fit.
Step 3 – Develop something to offer this list of people, for free.
Whitepapers, reports, ebooks, event invitations, webinar invitations, etc. are some common examples. Whatever it is, the subject or use of this offer should be designed such that whoever shows interest in it is indicating that they’re likely to be interested in your product or service.
Step 4 – Send your offer to your list.
Email, direct mail, that’s your decision. Whatever you send should intice the leads to request your offer. An email invitation for them to visit a page on your site, complete a form and download the report or a phone # to call, provide their contact info and have the offer mailed to them.
Its that easy. Everyone that requests the offer is a prospect for your sales team.
Clearly, developing the offer is key to the quality of the lead. As an example, a report on the health benefits of water filtration is one thing, a buyer’s guide for purchasing a water filtration system will generate fewer but, more qualified leads.
You don’t have to be a high tech company to do this. Here’s an example:
A manhole repair product manufacturer was focusing its sales efforts on manhole repair contractors. For every repair job needed by a city, there could be several contractors bidding on the project. So the sales team spent most of its time making contact with and nurturing relationships with hundreds of contractors in hopes that the contractor would order the company’s products if they were awarded the job. In addition, often certain products were spec’d into the RFP by the municipate engineer because they had used that product before.
So, they created a document with detailed specifications for manhole repair that municipal engineers can use to prepare a request for proposal to send to contractors. They offer the specifications document to municipal engineers via email. Engineers that download the specs become prospects for the sales team.
The result is that the company can target a much larger list of engineers via email than they could via sales calls and the sales team spends its time with engineers currently working on specs for manhole repair jobs.
A few tools you may want to consider once you’ve gotten your list and your offer ready…
A good online CRM that allows you to easily prepare and send out the offer via email or print. You’ll also want to be sure that as prospects request the offer, you’re able to track their request, easily and quickly fulfill it and make sure a sales person follows up quickly.
At SalesNexus, our online CRM does just that and our Marketing Service partner, Steven Green, can even help you develop the entire campaign.
Here’s what the customer says –
“This is just a note to let you know how much we value what SalesNexus and Steven Greene have taught us. We have only started utilizing some of what you have done for us with tremendous results! I can’t wait to see the results as we implement more and more of our strategy. The time and money we spent on SalesNexus has already shown a return on our investment! We look forward to building our sales force utilizing the SalesNexus online CRM system!” – Michael Farruggia, Parson Environmental
If you’d like to see just how easily you can begin generating quality leads for your sales team with the SalesNexus Online CRM, join our webinar any Wednesday at 2pm Eastern. Click here to register!