Bill Rice Internet Marketing > pipeline management

Effectively Following Up On Sales Leads

June 18, 2009 By

The old adage that the sale is in the follow-up has never been more accurate in today’s marketplace. Businesses are suffering and finding new customers can be an expensive chore. However, by working on your pipeline management techniques and finding new ways to create leads, you can stay on top of this economy and start to see some definite results.

Sales Leads Process

Whenever you’re dealing with sales leads, you’ll need to have an effective sales process in order to manage them properly. If you do not have a sales manager, it is even more important to take the time to develop a process that is going to take you from start to finish in the easiest means possible.

You have enough to do without having to worry about what’s going on with your leads and your sales team and taking the time to handle pipeline management now will free you up in the future to handle the day to day needs of your business, while your sales are moving smoothly.

Utilizing a leads CRM system can help this process go even more smoothly, especially if you are dealing with numerous sales leads. By having a software application that can assign priority, send reminders for customer follow-ups and help you manage your sales team more effectively, you can guarantee that your sales department will function more smoothly.

Setting up a System That Works

Each company is different and you’re going to have different needs when it comes to organizing your team. The important thing to focus on is what works for your company, not necessarily what may work for another. There will be a time where you will need to test different strategies to see which ones work the best for your organization.

Pipeline management is most effective when you have a dedicated team that knows what they are doing. Do your best to make sure that the learning curve of how you handle leads is easy to understand and make your expectations clear. This will help your sales process immeasurably.

Customer Follow Up Schedules

Whether you decide to use a CRM system to schedule follow-ups or you are doing it the old fashioned way, figuring out which team members will be assigned to these tasks is an important step. You’ll want to put your best and most persuasive sales members on these calls. Don’t make the mistake of handing this off to an inexperienced sales person.

Scheduling the frequency of follow-ups is another important step to ensure your success. You don’t want them to forget about you, but you don’t want to be a nuisance either. Since some industries are more competitive than others, you’ll need to test what length of time works best for your specific organization.

Putting it Together

Your company can only be successful if you keep adding new clients and prospecting for sales. Having the right pipeline and the right lead management techniques is a vital part of this system and should never be overlooked.

Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: crm, Lead Management, pipeline management, sales force, sales leads

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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