Posts Tagged ‘Lead Management’
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 . . . .
Read MoreSEO 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 . . . .
Read MoreInside 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 . . . .
Read MoreSales 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 . . . .
Read MoreInside 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 . . . .
Read MoreInside Sales Tips – No Vacations the Last Week of the Month
The message of this post is pretty simple: Managers and reps should never schedule vacations during the last business week of the month. I’m sure some of you—most likely front-line sales reps—growled a little bit at hearing that. On the surface it sounds harsh, right? Companies don’t control our lives; we should have the freedom…
Read MoreSales Management – “Hello, Massive Disconnect? This is Your Friend, Crappy Performance.”
I bumped into this post on The New Sales Economy, and thought it was a worthwhile read on inside sales best practices (thanks to Trish Bertuzzi for the link). Using The Bridge Group’s data, author Chad Levitt asks nine highly relevant, incisive questions about the current state of professional inside sales. I was particularly interested…
Read MoreInside Sales Best Practices – Kill the “Sunny Day Salary”
Time Waster #3 of our classic 15 Time Wasters of Marketing and Sales is what I call “Sunny Day Salaries.”
A “Sunny Day Salary” is a pay plan or commission structure that can only be met when “every single star falls into alignment.”
When every decision maker acts exactly the way we expect, when every sale goes according to plan.
As long as there’s no obstacles, no off-the-wall objections, as long as “Everything’s bright and sun-shiny,” the sales rep can meet their quota, and earn their performance bonus.
As every sales rep knows, real life doesn’t work this way.
Ever.
To wit: . . . .
Read MoreLead Management – JS Bach, Music, and Your Sales Pipeline
I absolutely loved this recent post by Copyblogger. As someone who took piano lessons for over eight years, I’ve played my fair share of Bach minuets, and hearing about the sheer amount of effort he put into creating his music inspired me.
And I think there’s a lesson to be learned here that’s eminently applicable to sales:
“Researchers concluded that the rate of [musical composition] hits to misses was pretty constant between major and minor composers. The truly great composers produce more masterpieces than the others, mainly because they produced more work overall.”
Change “musical composition” to “prospects,” and “masterpieces” to “sales” and suddenly we’re on to something.
You want to know one of the secrets of the top sales people? The agents in the “20 percent” category of the “80/20 Rule of Sales” (i.e., “80 percent of all sales are generated by 20 percent of the reps”)?
Read MoreAligning Lead Management and Sales Management
Stumbled across this blog entry recently on Glance Networks, and having done exactly what Tom Scontras is talking about for three or four years now, I related completely.
He nails #4 on the head—it’s a constant game in both sales and marketing to not outsmart ourselves. Don’t toss away something that works pretty well in hope of chasing the “home run” without really, really researching it out first.
We’ve wasted a lot of dollars over the years because we forgot to split test everything. When it comes to your lead generation efforts, don’t make decisions based on your gut . . . .
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