Bill Rice Internet Marketing > lead management software

Wonder Why You Aren’t Hitting Your Sales Targets?

April 20, 2011 By
Winning More Sales with Lead Management

Winning More Sales with Lead Management

It’s really this simple…

  • 48% of sales people never follow up with a prospect
  • 25% of sales people make a second contact and stop
  • 12% of sales people only make three contacts and stop
  • Only 10% of sales people make more than three contacts

And here is the statistical path to sales success…

  • 2% of sales are made on the first contact
  • 3% of sales are made on the second contact
  • 5% of sales are made on the third contact
  • 10% of sales are made on the fourth contact
  • 80% of sales are made on the fifth to twelfth contact

Now THE question is how are you going to get there?

Here’s my suggestion, no My Guarantee–60 Day Money Back Guarantee:

Get Lead Management Software

Save yourself a click and call 855-868-7225 and find out more.

Filed Under: Featured, Quick Sales Tips Tagged With: lead management software, sales statistics, sales tip

CRM, Where is Your Customer and Your Relationship?

June 13, 2008 By

Customer Relationship Management is the bane of most senior executives’ existence. It has been preached as the silver bullet for most of their careers, but is rarely executed. Why do 90% of these implementations fail? Why does sales hate every system? Why does marketing work around it? The answer is simple–we don’t start with a Customer or a Relationship!

CRM Needs a Little Lead Management

Sales people spend the majority of their productive lives generating and cultivating prospects. The good ones spend the balance of their efforts turning them into life long relationship buyers. Unfortunately, the software that is built for them is deficient. And the deficiency is cleverly hidden in the name–Customer Relationship Management.

What helps them manage their efforts in Prospect Management or Customer Acquisition? Prevailing practice would reveal notepads, spreadsheets, and sticky notes. Not a formula for the GTD (Getting Things Done) lifestyle.

There is an alternative–Lead Management. Smart sales organizations are watching their sales pipelines bulge and their pull-through rates launch with the implementation of simple lead management processes and software.

What Does Lead Management Do?

A lead management system should become the nerve center of your sales force. It is the brains and urgency of a high performance sales team. Whether your are a centralized call center or a distributed retail operation, lead management can return a WOW experience to your customers. Yet, removing all of the pipeline headaches and manual reporting from your sales agents.

Lead management is the process from customer inquiry to closed deal. It has the power to capture inquiries, distribute leads, and drive pipeline management until a deal closes.

A system to manage leads also affords the complexity to nurture leads that are non-responsive or premature to a buying decision. This lead nurturing process, which is only recently drawing attention, is demonstrating remarkable marketing ROI lifts over extended campaigns.

Key Lead Management Processes

The life cycle of a lead from inquiry to customer seems simple enough, but this has been the Achilles Heel of CRM. Sales has been so dogmatic to preserve the perceived Art of the Sale that much of the magic, and sweat, that goes into cultivating a purchase order is lost. A capable sales closer typically runs a tight process of contact and follow-up loops over extended periods of time to bring the deal in. Some of the key components of this lead management life cycle include the following phases–

  • Lead Generation: The processes and marketing means that produces both leads and referrals
  • Lead Capture: The processes of acquiring and securing customer inquiries from a variety of sources
  • Lead Distribution: Any of a myriad of concepts for getting the right lead, to the right agent, at the right time
  • Lead Nurturing: Cultivating a value-first relationship with a prospective client in hopes of generating a future purchase
  • Lead Reporting: Performance metrics and analytics that help you spot opportunities and pitfalls. Maximizing the former and minimizing the latter can obviously take you to the top

What Do I Do With My CRM Software?

Millions of dollars later and hundreds of man-hours sunk into your existing CRM system may make scrapping your current CRM unbearable. So, don’t. Most CRM systems can make very capable client loyalty systems for ongoing relationship building. As a result these systems can become excellent former and current client referral and lead generation platforms.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Lead Management Tagged With: crm, crm software, lead capture, lead distribution, Lead Generation, lead management software, lead mangement, lead nurturing, lead reporting

10 Ways to Improve the Performance of your Sales Pipeline

August 27, 2007 By

In sales we are constantly driven by performance and making our numbers. Unfortunately, this can lead to hoarding leads and over packing our sales pipeline with potential opportunities–disadvantaging our real opportunities and overall sales pipeline performance.

Here are a few of the techniques I use to pack a tight and productive pipeline (most of these pipeline management techniques can be implemented into your lead management software):

  1. Keep it clean

    2. To me, a clean pipeline means one that is well attended and accurately documented. Develop a methodology for annotating key actions or tagging each lead as you work it. These annotations function as milestones and statuses that segment your prospects. This segmentation becomes key to observing and acting on leading indicators to convert more prospects into sales.

  2. Keep it tight

    3. Kill the temptation to hoard stubborn prospects. Cut 10% of your leads each day from your pipeline. I suggest withdrawing them from the active pipeline and feeding them back in systematically in about 30 days for a courteous follow-up. Which do you cut? Analyzing your actions or tag data should over time tell you at what point a lead begins to become unproductive, but here are a couple of starter suggestions for Internet leads: leads over 15 days from inquiry, leads attempted and not contacted more than 5 times, leads contacted and not applied more than 5 times.

  3. Give every note/lead a next step

    4. Most of us are managing a pipeline of 100-150 prospects. Unless you are superhuman, or already have a good action/status methodology, it is impossible to know were you are and more importantly where you are going on any one lead. Quick fix: add it to every note. Where am I going on the next call? This becomes your mini-tactical sales plan. Place the answer to the question on every action, even if you don’t make contact.

  4. Put a memorable reference in every note

    5. This little trick will turn high volume sales into high volume relationships. Did Susan say she needed to hop of the call because she need to run Bobby to his baseball game? Note it. And on the next call ask Susan how Bobby’s game was. These are the little touches that make customers.

  5. Give every call an objective

    6. Before you dial know what you want the result to be. And don’t make it so broad as close the deal. Maybe, it should be something like when does their ARM reset? Do they have a steady, documentable income stream? Get to a credit pull.

  6. Look for leading indicators

    7. This is where your action/status methodology becomes critical to seeing patterns that indicate pending conversion. Use time, frequency, and status to triangulate successful sales patterns. Turn those patterns into best practices and leading indicators for projections and sales techniques.

  7. Optimize your call back periods

    8. Call back periods are another key link to your action methods and leading indicators. Set your call backs to trigger off of your leading indicators to ensure each call is advancing the prospect forward into a sale.

  8. Build a rhythm

    9. Create a sales day or habits that have rhythm. Good runners have rhythm and can generally set their watch by their pace. It is not full of surges, but rather a steady cadence. Set your sales day like that: start early, review the market, review your product matrices, envision the top 5 borrower scenarios you will encounter today, build those presentations, get your scenarios and calculator at the ready, clear your desk, start dialing, keep a separate running sheet of objectives, pause at lunch time for adjustments to your scenarios and strategies based on the objections you heard, close the day strong.

  9. Throw out your dialer

    10. Dialers are for robotic, cold calling, fishing expeditions or surveys. Dialers frustrate prospects and your sales numbers. Enough said.

  10. Pick up the phone

    11. This is number 10 because it is the most important. Get started! You have to pick-up the phone and make the call. Overcome the fear to engage.

If you set a rhythm, tighten, action, and call your pipeline–it will produce more for you!

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Filed Under: Lead Management, Social Selling Tagged With: Lead Management, lead management software, pipeline management, sales pipeline

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