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Tag Archives: Lead Management
Lead Generation – “Showing Up First” Means Showing Up
If you’ve followed my blog or my company for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard me say that immediate response to sales leads is one of the crucial factors for creating new sales prospects (and that a good
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Leave a comment CRM and Customer Service – Dump the “Rule Zero” Fallacy
I had a conversation last week with one of our support reps that demonstrated with perfect clarity what I call the “Rule Zero Fallacy.”
If you’re a board game or card game enthusiast, inevitably you’ve run across a rule in a game somewhere that you simply didn’t like. And whether it’s pinochle, Rook, Ticket to Ride, or the Settlers of Catan, players usually create a replacement rule, or modify it to better suit their tastes. In some circles this type of “house ruling” is called “Rule Zero,” meaning, “No rule is ever broken because I can fix it.”
The problem is, “Rule Zero” is a fallacy, a contradiction in terms. The fact that you were willing to take the time to fix it yourself (and are generally satisfied with the result) doesn’t change the fact that it needed fixing to begin with.
But back to our real point:
A support agent came to me last week about a client who wanted to access a feature in one of our systems. Due to an admittedly poor interface design for this particular feature, getting access to it was problematic. It took navigating through a number of screens, hunting through the right links, and inputting some user-defined data . . . .
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In Small Business Selling, the Rule Isn’t 80/20 – It’s 98/2
Though published back in 2002, author John Warrilow’s book Drilling For Gold presents a fascinating take on the tried and true (some might say cliché) “80/20″ rule of sales and marketing—namely, that when it comes to small business selling, the rule should closer to 98/2.
Using a chart that breaks down accounts and prospects into a series of “buckets,” he demonstrates a process for evaluating the current profit levels of customers and prospects, and each account’s potential growth.
While Warrilow states that good qualitative research should back up the basic “Profit/Potential” profile, generally speaking the trick is to expend the highest levels of time, energy, and money not with the top 20 percent, but the top 2 percent of clients and prospects—the ones who are currently highly profitable, and have a high potential to remain so.
The 2 Lead Routing Criteria that Produce More Sales
At some point, every sales manager on the planet has heard a sales rep gripe about how and when they’re getting their leads.
“Who’s deciding this?”
“Why aren’t I getting more leads?”
“Why aren’t I getting more leads from industry X / hot leads / leads for large accounts?”
Most companies struggle to find and keep a consistent stream of good, warm leads, and handing out a fresh, qualified lead can almost feel like an event in and of itself—but that doesn’t mean a rep asking these questions is out of line.
However the decision is made, the fact is that lead distribution is a selection process. Somewhere along the way, someone is making a decision about how leads are being handed out. Even if the decision is totally random / ad hoc, that’s still a decision . . . .
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4 Sales Tips for Making Contact and Avoiding “Prospect Badgering”
One of sales reps’ most common questions is, “How many dials does it really take to make contact with a decision-maker, and how do I know when I’ve reached my limit of “pleasant persistence” and am now merely angering the prospect?”
By the numbers, every piece of sales research we’ve ever done indicates that it takes between 6 and 8 call attempts to reach a decision-maker (though this number generally goes down if you’re mixing in other media like email and voice messaging at the same time).
However, our research also shows that most sales reps only make 1.7 call attempts to reach a new prospect (far below the statistical mean to actually make contact), that they overestimate the total number of calls they’ve made (most reps think they’ve made far more call attempts than they really have), and that they rarely combine all three of the major “contactable” media—phone, voice message, and email—to produce the best results . . . .
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Sales 2.0 – The “Thin Line” Between Sales and Marketing Grows Even Thinner
An outstanding article by Propelling Brands’ Adam Needles discussed the fact that according to SirusDecisions, less than 10 percent of B2B businesses have successfully redefined the necessary role of high-impact lead generation and lead nurturing that will be required in
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SEO and Lead Conversion – Hubspot’s Fatal 6 Web Design Flaws
I’m going to share a little secret about a mistake we made about a year and a half ago when we redesigned our Web site.
On the surface it was a beautiful redesign. Oh, so very beautiful.
Slick, shiny, “the new hotness,” slick, and slick (did I mention it was slick?).
And it killed our Web site conversion rate.
After two months of awful performance, we finally bit the bullet and furiously rolled the old site back out, and started from scratch . . . .
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Inside Sales – Getting More Than the “Desperate Three Percent”
CopyBlogger recently posted an incisive blog about The Desperate Three Percent.
The core concept is relatively simple. Taking data from Chet Holmes’ The Ultimate Sales Machine, author Sonia Simone states that the reason SEO and PPC marketing continues to ratchet up in competitiveness is because we’re all fighting for the “The Desperate Three Percent”—the top-tier potential clients that are ready to buy now.
I don’t want to summarize the entire article (just go read it instead), but the crux of Sonia’s argument is that the vast majority of any business’s future sales are more than likely people not in the Desperate Three . . . .
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Sales 2.0 – Psychology, Self-Selection, and “Getting There First”
I’ve read, heard, and studied lots of talk about the psychology of sales and marketing.
What makes buyers tick.
How decisions are made.
Prestige, Pleasure, Pain (relief), Profits, or Preservation.
But I was reminded today of another key psychological aspect of sales:
Get there first.
“Getting there first” is a simple rule that Paul Castain’s Sales Playbook talks about.
Want to be a budding (sales) rock star?
Get there first.
When it comes to lead management and generating new sales, showing up last is often worse than not showing up at all . . . .
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Inside Sales – Lead Management, CRM, and Knowing Something About “Something”
Today Seth Godin stated that one of the revolutions of human economy was when man first discovered that knowing something about “something” was just as valuable, if not more valuable than the “something” itself.
Consider:
How much more valuable is a library when it has a card catalog, digital or otherwise?
Without the card catalog, the usefulness and utility of the library itself decreases by a factor of 50, 100, 1000 or more. How hard would it be to find something in even an average-sized municipal library without an efficient, easy-to-follow system of organization?
Now think about the Library of Congress.
So what does this mean for sales and marketing?
It’s simple:
How much more valuable does your sales team become when you have a “card catalog” of what they do . . . .
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