Bill Rice Internet Marketing > sales pipeline

Email Marketing to Segment and Reignite Your Sales Pipeline

January 11, 2011 By
Segmenting Your Sales Pipeline - BetterCloser.com

Segmenting Your Sales Pipeline - BetterCloser.com

One of the hardest parts of sales is understanding what’s happening in your sales pipeline. This challenge impacts every aspect of managing your sales process–how you prioritize, how you engage, and how you forecast. Consequently, any little tips or intel we can generate on where our prospects are in the buying process, the better.

Here’s one I came across the other day from one of Blue Sky Factory’s email marketing experts, Christopher Penn. Here’s a short excerpt:

Last week I explored the idea that email is just as effective a sales tool as it is a marketing tool, if not more so. This week, let’s look at an idea from sales and how your email can play a powerful role in building more business.

One of the most effective ways to build business is to work with the prospects who are most ready to do business with you. Generally speaking, people who call or email you are far more ready to buy than someone engaged in an activity that has nothing to do with what you sell. Sometimes, however, people will start down an activity and forget what they were going to do along the way or decide to come back later and never do. That’s where a prospect recovery system is useful.

A prospect recovery system relies on basic click tracking to determine intent and readiness to buy by asking prospects where they are in their buying process. Virtually every email marketing system out there lets you track what’s clicked on in a message. By creating simple 1-click actions for subscribers to perform, you can determine intent with a minimum amount of effort on the part of your subscribers. Here’s how.

I want you to go to Chris’ blog post, on email marketing to sales opportunities to get the tip for two reasons:

  1. It’s a great idea and he has some excellent data to support it in his post
  2. You probably should read more of their stuff–email marketing is key to improving sales

Did you like learning more about how you can use email marketing to improve your sales results? If so, you’ll want to join the Better Closer newsletter there are some similar tips coming this month, exclusively to those members.

Filed Under: Email Marketing Tagged With: email marketing, sale tips, sales pipeline, segment

Sales People are Assholes

July 29, 2009 By

Parking Asshole“Have I got a deal for you…”

“What would make you buy today…”

“I have some aggressive pricing if you purchase before month end…”

“You want to call me back. I have an incredible opportunity…”

Why do sales people start conversations like this?

Pushy, Obnoxious, Aggressive, Narcissistic, Assholes–these are just a few of the cheery labels folks put on sales people.

But, why are we like that? Other than the obvious effects of Post Traumatic Sales Disorder (PTSD) here are a few clues:

  • Sales Quotas – They make us desperate and crazy. Every month is a new treadmill. It is nearly impossible to see the future value of a relationship.

    So, I need to close you right now!

  • Compensation Plans – I don’t get paid for good conversation. In fact, I don’t really get paid anything until a handful of you people sign the dotted line this month.

    So, I need to close you right now!

  • Marketing ROI – These guys and gals are all on my back. Somehow filling my sales pipeline with bad phone numbers, emails, and people who aren’t even considering our solution is my fault. They spent a lot of money to get your info.

    So, I need to close you right now!

  • Sales Tools – I have a phone and email account. What more could I possibly need. I don’t know how I might keep track of you to follow-up when you really need me.

    So, I need to close you right now!

Sorry, sales people are assholes.

But, we can change. Give us a little time to ramp up to those sales quotas, compensate us for building relationships and customer evangelist, measure marketing on more than ROI, and give us the right tools to manage lots of relationships.

Customers will like us better and sales will improve.

(Photo: Davezilla was taken)

Reblog this post [with Zemanta]
Filed Under: Sales Management Tagged With: marketing, sale plan, sales pipeline, Social Selling

Sales Pipeline Management, The GTD Approach

August 28, 2008 By

Getting Things Done (GTD), the powerful efficiency concept from David Allen, is often applied to our task list and our email inbox, but rarely to more complex processes like our sales pipeline. However, the principles are the same and the effects could be staggering.

Sales is an Art, Not Really

Sales as an art form is the lead myth and barrier to consistent sales performance. Sales is a process that is performed. Granted some better than other. Just like an Olympic athlete–the technique is consistent, some just get better at it.

Unfortunately, for our sales organizations somewhere along the way we got the impression that there were a variety of better ways to swim the 100M freestyle. Rubbish!

Sales is about making efficiently making contact, delivering value, and collecting money. Most of those you can’t control. I have said it before, but it boils down to this: If the product sucks–you don’t need sales. If the market sucks–you don’t need sales. So, lets figure that out as fast as possible by contacting more people more efficiently with GTD.

Collection

Get all of you stuff in one place. That means all of your contacts, leads, people. Whatever you want to call them–you need them together. When you start calling you don’t want to be hunting for names, phone numbers, or who they are. Dial–Hang-up–Dial.

This means you need a database, spreadsheet, or contact management software that lets you efficiently move from one contact to the next. I suggest contact management software with a robust lead management database. This is going to allow you to scale and make a lot of notes. Hopefully you are building a rolodex for the ages.

Processing

You need a system. Calling fast and frequently is great, but you need to know what to do with each contact based on the results of the call. GTD has a nice 5 choice process. Make your sales lead management process just as simple:

  1. Trash it
  2. Close it
  3. Transfer it (hand it up or down)
  4. Schedule it
  5. Nurture it


There is nothing else.

Organizing

When you organize your sales pipeline manage it in the same way as GTD. Set-up the right buckets and make sure your processing system gets the right contacts into the right buckets.

Here are the buckets I use:

  1. Attempted
  2. Contacted
  3. Proposal
  4. Closed
  5. Withdrawn
  6. Scheduled
  7. Bogus


The nice thing about creating buckets in your contact management software is you can use it to automate your contact flow, lead prioritization, and any lead nurturing campaigns you have. Manual or automated–organizing into predefined buckets makes sales happen faster.

Reviewing

No system is perfect. Review it. See what is working and what is not.

This is again where a good lead management database comes in handy. Look at your reports and do some quick analysis. Don’t get overwhelmed by the minutae–eyeball your reports for oddities.

I like to look for what I call–”slowing and heaping” in my reports.

What processes seem to be happening slower or less frequently than expected? Try something new to speed them up.

Where are leads piling up? Try something to process them out of the log jam.

Doing

Want to know the number one cause of most poor sales performance? Ssssssh, come close for the secret…NOT DOING ANYTHING!

That’s right. Just doing something even without a contact database, or a system, or a process, or organization will yield more than standing around organizing sheets of paper, counting your pencils, or labeling your folders.

As Nike says, “Just Do It!”

—

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 Tagged With: contact management software, gtd, sales pipeline, sales pipeline management, social selling

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!

Technorati Tags:
, kaleidico, , , , , , bill rice

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

about |  contact |  disclosure