Sell: Welcome New Leads with a Planned Follow-Up Strategy

Michael Faul
President

You worked hard to deploy a great marketing campaign and the phone rings, your inbox fills, or you start racking up registrations for your next seminar or webinar. Leads are heading inbound and your job is done, right? Not exactly. In fact, your job has just begun, and what you do next and how quickly you do it greatly increases or decreases your sales success. So we came up with some tips to help you maximize your ability to qualify and advance leads toward a sale.

Who took the bigger risk in forming this new relationship: you or your new lead? They just stepped out of the comfort of anonymity to provide you contact information and put their valuable time, energy, and privacy at risk. What your lead experiences first will determine if and how quickly you can replace that fear with trust. Achieving that objective determines when and if you can convert leads into sales.  Here are four tips to help you build goodwill with new members of your lead generation community.

Get to know the people contacting you. When someone contacts you they tend to provide you limited contact information. You need to complete contact information and conduct some customer intelligence. Go to your lead’s website and:

·         Complete all contact information,

·         Make notes about their product or service offerings,

·         Note if they have multiple office locations,

·         Review their client list, and

·         Check their leadership team

Use the information you gathered to personalize questions and comments for your first contact with your new lead. Being able to personalize your first contact will increase trust and differentiate you from the competition.

Roll out the welcome mat. Send every new member of your community a welcome letter or email. Set up your welcome letter or email as a template with mail merge fields. This allows you to generate personalized welcome notes with consistent messaging and little effort or time investment. In addition to welcoming new members, make them aware of other resources they may find valuable. 

Provide new community members a copy of your privacy policy. This demonstrates your respect for their trust in you with their contact information. Also explain to them your keep-in-touch program, focusing on the benefits of being a member of your community. Invite them to participate by posting comments on your blog or other online forums and download relevant resources from your website.

Begin interacting with new community members—quickly. The longer you wait to contact a lead, the more dramatically your probability of converting them into a sale declines. How much time do you have? Research published by Insidesales.com and The Sloan School of Management at MIT indicates your probability of sales success begins to decline after the first 5 minutes of a new relationship. By the end of your first business day, your chances of qualifying the relationship can decline by more than 25% and the probability of realizing a sale by as much as 20%. Think about that: if you don’t pick up the phone to contact that lead, you become 1/5 less likely to win the deal. You need a process that ensures phone contact within the first business day of a new relationship.

Begin the process of qualifying leads. In Xsellerate’s community marketing model, anyone can enter your lead-generating community. They only need to exchange contact information with you. But, you still need to qualify your community membership. Qualifying leads is not meant to determine if they are “in” or “out” of the community; rather it determines “where they live” within the community.

Do not over-qualify on the first interaction. This tends to turn off your new lead. Rather, determine if you have only a relationship or if your new friend is a true prospect. To do this you need a check list that describes what a good prospect looks like to your business and which describes the behaviors manifested by a prospect. Work your checklist items into a series of qualification questions. You can learn about relationships and prospects at http://www.xselleratesolutions.com/resources.php.

Keep in mind qualification needs to take place throughout the entire sales process (a subject for a future article.) For your first interaction, work your positioning questions into the conversation. Interweave qualifying questions with informational statements so you don’t sound like you are interrogating your lead. Strategically leave some qualifying questions for your next interaction.

The first step in a strong lead management process involves receiving the lead into your community quickly and establishing a meaningful interaction. This needs to take place within the first business day of the relationship. The interaction should be used to initiate lead qualification, but must add additional value to the relationship while inviting the lead to interact with your organization. Properly executed, a strong lead intake process will increase your close rates and, ultimately, your growth rate.

Sell: Increase Sales Success by Qualifying Leads

In a tight economy, qualifying leads can help you allocate resources appropriately and increase your success rate. If you qualify and continuously assess every lead in your pipeline, you can expect to generate more successful deals faster, even in tough economic times.

Qualifying leads has more to do with assessing the behaviors of your prospect than it has to do with externally observable factors. Consider four areas of behavior as critically important when implementing a lead qualification process. For each behavioral area, you can continuously ask yourself which of the behaviors your lead demonstrates.

Ability to make a decision and commit to a decision-making process.

You can spend weeks and months pursuing someone, but if they don’t take action you wasted your time and money. Similarly, your ability to engage through their active involvement indicates you have a fair shot at winning the business. Consider if your prospect:

1. Articulates how this decision will happen
2. Identifies key decision maker(s)
3. Has made similar decisions in the past
4. Budgeted adequate resources to support the decision
5. Allows you to engage to win
6. Meets with you in person or over the phone
7. Responds to your sales initiatives

Willingness to build specific solutions for specific challenges

Does your prospect have a need or a want? Prospects with needs move more quickly. Needs arise out of specific business problems or challenges. Wants include those nice-to-have items which enhance operations. Ask yourself if your prospect:

1. Needs or wants a solution
2. Has specific challenges prompting the inquiry
3. Demonstrates a consensus on their team regarding the challenges and solutions
4. Articulates when the need was first identified

Desire to share the competitive landscape

Large competitive purchases convert your specific solution into a commodity. In that world, price becomes more important or the most important criterion. If you can engage earlier and avoid competitive horse races you will win more business at a lower cost of sales.

Prospects who don’t openly discuss the competitive landscape probably don’t care if you win or lose. Your solution is being viewed as inconsequential to their success. As a result, you do not have the leverage you need to win. Rather, you’re gambling that a fair and equitable evaluation will occur. Some top of mind questions to ask about your prospect include:

1. Are they speaking with your competitors? If so, when did they start?
2. Do any of your competitors claim them as a client?
3. Has someone championed your solution and become your advocate?
4. What were the decision criteria on their last competitive purchase?
5. Why haven’t they made a decision yet?

Posses a compelling reason to take action

People probably will act if they have a need. They might act if they have a want. They almost always act if they have a compelling reason. Having a compelling reason tends to motivate all other behaviors the prospect will demonstrate. Compelling reasons to take action have two components—time and consequence.

A specific quantifiable consequence that occurs on a specific date compels people to move forward and conclude business. Otherwise why should your prospect act? In fact, they have every reason to wait for a better deal, more options, a different approach, or any other reason not to finalize a purchase. Consider the following when assessing a prospect’s compelling reason to act:

1. What happens if they do nothing?
2. When will consequences of inaction start affecting their business?
3. Does the solution cost more than the consequence?
4. Can they quantify the consequence?
5. Do they have a deadline and why is that specific date important?

Many of these conventions need to be adapted to specific circumstances. They tend to hold true for larger, more complex, solution-oriented sales situations. In a tight economy, qualifying leads can help you allocate resources appropriately. Just remember, as a sales campaign unfolds, the qualification can change in either direction as you meet more contacts and ask more questions.

Woo Hoo… A 45% close rate!

So we’re bragging! Year to date Xsellerate closed 45% of the leads we’ve been honored to serve. Not half bad since in most industries you’re a quota killing lead stalking president’s club making superstar if you convert 20% of your leads into revenue. Onward to 55%… There are still 6 selling weeks before year end!

By the way, what would your business look like if nearly half of your sales leads converted to revenue? Sorry… I couldn’t resist.

Xsellerate declares war on your sales funnel!

Michael Faul
President

It’s war! Xsellerate declares war on the sales funnel. Perhaps that sounds silly: we think not. The sales funnel may have helped many businesses in the day, but now we need a new model for community marketing in the new millennium. Someone has to offer the challenge, stand up to convention, and say the emperor has no clothes. If that means war, then the gauntlet is thrown.

If you have a 20% close rate, then 80% of your sales leads do not flow through to the bottom of your sales funnel. Where did they go? Your funnel has holes, lot’s of them.

Through sales qualification, leads get evaluated according to their sales potential . Qualified leads move forward toward the throat of the funnel. Disqualified leads spill out of the funnel through the holes in your funnel.  

According to research conducted by Forrester, Gartner, and the Sales Lead Management Association, up to 80% of disqualified leads never hear from the selling company again. Now consider that 80% of spilled leads make a buying decision in the 18 months following their disqualification. That means about 64% of the pipeline makes a buying decision without considering your solution.

Granted, the funnel as a metaphor doesn’t directly cause this. But, it reinforces a way of thinking that says we will sell to fewer than we start with. The funnel gets you thinking in terms of “in” and “out”. It discourages you from thinking about degrees of readiness.

Most people start shopping before they become ready to buy. If the sales and marketing model doesn’t accommodate this reality, you run the risk of forming the perception that most leads are “tire kickers,” “time wasters”, unqualified. As a result they get disqualified out of your marketing and sales process.

Instead of the sales funnel, we need a model that has no easy exit. In the new model, qualification should have one job: to properly position people according to the type of relationship they want with your business. We need a model in which people find it easy to move in and become reluctant to leave. This same model should simplify the process of planning and executing your marketing program, and doesn’t promote a feud between sales and marketing.

Enter the bull’s eye and community marketing. You will see the bull’s eye appearing everywhere on our site. It provides a straight forward way of managing the entire community across both the marketing and sales function. Outside the bull’s eye lives suspects, people you think might want to hear what you have to say. Inside the outer boundary of the bull’s eye resides people with whom you have a relationship.

Marketing converts suspects into relationships, and then grows those relationships until they become prospects. Sales works with prospects through the buying process until they become new clients. Rings inside the bull’s eye represent various stages of relationship development. You can learn more about these at:

http://www.xselleratesolutions.com/resources.php.

Each ring of the bull’s eye sits inside the prior indicating that the people inherit the characteristics and programs available to stages represented by the out rings of the bull’s eye.

In future articles we want to explore in greater detail the bull’s eye model.  We will break down each ring of the bull’s eye; define the behaviors people in your community exhibit as members of each stage. We will show you a great way to qualify your leads according to their behaviors, and a way to manage leads that virtually eliminates spillage and lost future opportunity. You will leave less money on the table, boost your revenue, and grow.

Do you get all that from using a different drawing? No, all of that comes from thinking differently about the people who belong to the community around your business.

Yes, we think we have a better approach. And we do want to make it available to you. If someone wants to defend the sales funnel of yesteryear, by all means drop us a note.