Bill Rice Internet Marketing > leads

Developing Leads for Your Sales Pipeline

March 8, 2010 By

Bettercloser.com - Developing Sales Leads for Your Pipeline

Bettercloser.com - Developing Sales Leads for Your Pipeline

I came across one of the classic deadly myths of sales. It was in the form of a question on LinkedIn Answers. Let’s see if you can spot it:

What do you find works the best for developing leads? I am currently researching other ways to develop leads and eventually fill up my sales pipeline. I currently use the following: Jigsaw, LinkedIn, NetProspex

If you said, “names and numbers don’t equal leads or viable sales pipeline.” I would agree with you.

All passionate and energetic sales people fight this tendency. And with the glut of data available openly on the Web it can be a very hard battle to win.

We know in our gut that much of hitting our monthly goal has to do with large numbers. So, we are constantly hunting and gathering names and squirreling them away in our contact database or CRM. But, at some point you have to determine, enough is enough. It’s time to stop collecting and start processing.

The only way to avoid the idle list gathering trap is to understand that generating sales leads is much more than just collecting names.

The danger with simply seeking lots of venues to supply you with unsuspecting victims leads is that you forget the objective. A sales pipeline is not a list of names and numbers. It is a queue of leads–people and organizations that have potential need for your products and services. Determining who those folks are takes some effort, a lead generation process.

My guess is that most of you don’t need more names and numbers—especially unqualified ones. Most of your lists are already sufficient. In addition, your sales organization is probably filled with prospects, many of which have inquired or were already qualified in some manner.

Now dig into those names and learn who they are and why they might need your help.

Then figure out how to turn them into leads. This simple process gets you ready to take that list and turn it into an engagement plan–social media, conferences, trade shows, webinars, email, phone–this is lead generation.

The real beauty of processing those lists is that this effort will continue dumping new leads into your pipeline.

Bettercloser.com - Sales Leads

Bettercloser.com - Sales Leads

Filed Under: Featured, Lead Generation Tagged With: crm, Lead Generation, leads, social selling

What You Don’t Know that Your Customers are Telling You

November 10, 2008 By

As I scroll through Google Analytics I am amazed at what consumers tell me about my business. What amazes me even more are those of you who don’t listen like this. Long ago I was a counterintelligence case officer, which taught me a lot about marketing and sales.

Without taking the analogy too far let me dive deeper into two powerful skills I acquired during that time: looking for patterns of what my targets might “buy” and then creating the perfect “product” they would greedily gobble up.

Looking for Buy Patterns

Consumers are constantly providing us with buy signals and patterns. They browse our retail stores, read certain periodicals and books, they buy other related products and services.

And, in the Internet world they do searches and visit our websites!

Nothing is better intelligence on your prospective customer than the web searches that land them on our website, where they came from, and who they are. If you are not looking at your web analytics search keywords, referral sites, and traffic sources you are ignoring amazing business intelligence.

  • Keywords tell you how customers talk about your business and the problems they face
  • Referral sites tell you who your natural “partners” are
  • Traffic sources tell you who is looking for answers and where to target

Every time you go into your web analytics you should come out with marketing and sales tactics and strategies.

Creating Luring Marketing and Sales

Now that you have the intelligence, what do you do with it?

I like to work this information at three levels: tactical, strategic, research and development. Depending on how you run your marketing and sales each of these levels can have a variety of levers you pull in your organization.

  • Tactical marketing and sales moves might be reshaping sales scripts and language, new keyword PPC campaign, or new keyword targeted article on your blog.
  • Strategic marketing and sales moves may include developing a new strategic account targeting plan, repositioning product or services marketing, launching a new category of whitepapers, or buying differently targeted sales leads.
  • Research and development moves might be the prototyping of a new product or service, trying a new marketing media or methodology, trying a new lead management process, or creating a pre-sales team to test and qualify leads.

Figuring out the best way to exploit business intelligence is the second opportunity. The first, and most important, is to get it into your decision making process.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Lead Management Tagged With: business intelligence, customer, Lead Generation, Lead Management, leads, search

Contact Management-Top 10 Secrets to More Contacts and More Sales

August 29, 2008 By

Increasing your sales contact rate and sales conversion should not be a mystery. It takes discipline and diligence. Is your contact management system designed to maximize sales performance? If you are operating off an Excel spreadsheet or flipping through contacts in Outlook or ACT!–you are static. These are not contact strategies–they are contact miracles.

Here are 10 contact management strategies that will get you more sales:

1. Centralize Your Contacts: Stop the madness with sticky notes, address books, rolodex, business cards, and Outlook. Find one place for sales leads and get them all in there. This is about to become your most valuable asset as a sales professional–so, I suggest you have a sturdy, backed-up, easy to maintain contact database-based system.

2. Script Your Process, Not Your Conversation: Sales scripts kill more sales than they bring. However, knowing exactly how you want to target and the process you want to take a lead through to become a happy customer is valuable. Map the process, and the potential deviations, of your ideal sales process. This mapping process will help you measure your performance and process better as well as making you sharp in front of the prospective client.

3. Put Your Contacts Database in Motion: Static databases cause sales prospects to rot on the vine. Put your contact management system in motion. Unfortunately, most lead management software does not have an automated mechanism to constantly optimize and suggest the next best lead. So, you may have to do a little work here. Segment and build a call list based on last contact–daily. Do not randomly meander through your address book–that is another sale miracle strategy.

4. Don’t Think, Call: I’ll make this real simple. Dial–Hang-Up–Dial. Repeat until exhausted. This is the MOST IMPORTANT SALES TIP you will ever get!

5. Let Email Help You: Email is a great tool to remove barriers and anxieties between you and a new prospect. Make it work for you. Automate email campaigns based on various statuses within your sales process. The primary objective it to create response while you are calling–increasing your overall sales velocity.

6. Schedule a Time, Even If They Don’t Answer: People are busy and increasingly hate to be interrupted–especially by sales calls. Prevent this initial objection by always scheduling a time. This works for an initial conversation, follow-up to the current call, or even a voicemail. Voicemail appointments is a powerful tactic that is rarely used, and it is a dandy. When you leave a voicemail tell the prospect when to expect your next call. This simple psychological trick sets expectations and reduces the perceived interruption on your call back. You will be amazed by the contact rate lift.

7. Try ALL Contact Information: I can’t tell you the times I have seen smart sales people kill sales leads over one bad phone number or incorrect email. Try all of the contact information available data errors and contact information migration is rampant. There is also a wide range of personal contact preferences too. Do loss a sale because of laziness.

8. Never Kill a Lead–Nurture It: Leads should never be killed in your contact management software. People don’t say no because they don’t buy things–they are simply waiting for the right time and value. Treat them as such. Place withdrawn or less promising leads into a lead nurturing campaign that keeps you in a light touch and education mode.

9. Work in 30 Minute Bursts: Calling and sales is an intense emotional business. Like an athlete driven by adrenline and achievement you need to run your race, recover, and then run again. Approach any sales activities in burst of energy and use recovery periods to tidy up lose ends for the next burst.

10. Set A Daily Contact Goal, Not a Daily Sales Goal: Here is another powerful technique that is often overlooked. Don’t base your day on sales quotas. Measure and manage you sales day on activity and contact rates. If you apply the effort and hit your activity rates the sales will come. Continue to tweak and reset your activity goals based on known conversions to consistently hit your monthly quota.

Reread 4!

—

Bill Rice is the founder of Kaleidico, a leader in contact management sales software. He is a frequent writer, speaker, and consultant on marketing and sales. He is passionate about helping organizations execute more profitable sale management strategies.

Filed Under: Contact Management, Lead Management, Social Selling Tagged With: act, Contact Management, contact management software, contact rate, Lead Management, leads

GTD Sometimes Just Means Getting Started

April 2, 2008 By

I will officially confess my affinity for productivity porn. I have read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and enjoy the pearls at 43Folders and LifeHacker. I have even been known to fill a few moleskins in my day. Luckily, I appear to be in good company with Marc Andreessen, whose modified GTD is closer to my own processes.

But!

Far too often we get bogged down in the preparation to be productive. Or, sometimes even worse, the tracking of that productivity.

This has long been a frustration of mine. The business world is littered with consultants, pundits, critics, analyst, and my personal favorite–silver bullet business books. Each can be incrementally valuable, but most times they are simply a distraction to simply getting started.

My recurring itch for this topic was flared today by back-to-back posts at LeadCritic on reports and metrics. You can see where I am going with this if you have ever crossed my banter on this topic in the past, on LeadCritic:

As you will see in the whitepaper, I am a big advocate of instituting metrics in a framework designed for action. My approach starts with a few high-level defined objectives. They should be broad in scope, but specifically targeted at the top line (bottomline, expense, metrics ALWAYS get you looking at your feet and those kids ALWAYS lose).

and my own Better Closer, back in 2006:

Although metrics and analytics are critical to the continual improvement of any business process, it does not ensure what you have learned will get implemented. This can be a critical disconnect in high velocity business process.

Sales is hard. It is a constant roller coaster of successes and failures. Customer contact and engagement is the biggest enemy and fear of even the best sales person.

The last thing a good sales force needs is to be bogged in opportunities to delay that next engagement. Reports and metrics often become that convenient distraction. Slicing and dicing reports to look for that perfect set of leads to try is wasted production. Lead management, by definition, should be maximizing your opportunities–automatically. Reports and metrics should be incidental to performance and indicative of production. More simply, reports and metrics don’t convert they only indicate if you did.

The single best thing you can do for your sales process is reposition the function of reporting.

Metrics and reports do not define or create a process. They should not be the front-end of lead management. They should be the passive observation of trends and behaviors. Indicators and triggers for adjustment.

This is captured perfectly by this story; from a guy that truly gets how you make analytics matter, Jamie McDonald:

At lunch one day with the CEO of the business, I saw him pull a piece of paper out of his breast pocket. It was his one page dashboard. His four key metrics:

  • number of visits to the park in the previous day (volume measure for his business)
  • avg. wait time at the rides
  • avg. spend per park visitor
  • hotel occupancy rate and average daily rate

In my mind, more complex than this often begs the question, “do you know what business you are in?”

Growing your business or your revenue is rarely about focusing on efficiency (reports and metrics), but rather your ability to repeatedly execute getting started.

Filed Under: Lead Generation, Lead Management, Social Selling Tagged With: leadcritic, leads, metrics, mortgage, sparkroom

Top 100 Tips for Lead Management and Sales Success

March 26, 2008 By

I have been thinking about a resource like this for months. Being in the business of providing lead management software to hundreds of sales forces, I am constantly ask for resources on how to get the best out of lead management and build top performing sales teams. So, here it is the top 100 answers and resources in no particular order (feel free to add to this list with your comments):

  1. First, get the lead management lead providers like to brag about
  2. Keep it simple. Start with a simple sales process. Then execute, measure, adjust, re-execute
  3. Learn about Internet lead generation and how to leverage them to grow your business
  4. Don’t call them leads. You will start treating them like leads, and leads don’t buy anything
  5. Make sure your lead management process help foreshadow and set expectations for your customer
  6. Don’t forget to tell past clients what is going on in the market
  7. Read books by these guys: Jeffrey Gitomer, Seth Godin, Robert Cialdini, Zig Ziglar
  8. Lead management is not easy, but it can be broken into critical key performance indicators
  9. Leads will not convert instantly or magically. Lead nurturing is critical to an effective customer experience and sales success
  10. Don’t get caught in a rut of commitment to consistency. Your current “system” may be your weakness [Read more...]
Filed Under: Lead Management, Social Selling Tagged With: kaleidico, Lead Management, leads, marketing, mortgage, social selling

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