“We beat our lead goals by 10%!”
“These leads suck!”
“Our sales guys are lazy, cherry-pickers that don’t want to work for a sale.”
“Sales are down so we need to cut back.”
Sound familiar? For too many businesses, it’s a never-ending cycle that, thanks to the economy, has led to serious cutbacks, layoffs and closures. So how do you stop the madness?
Admit there is opportunity to improve.
What’s your conversion rate? Subtract that number from 100% – if the answer is anything other than 0, you have room to improve.
Early in my career, I came running into a meeting with a huge smile and announced that the latest direct mail campaign had generated a 5% response rate – and back then, a response was a sale. I got some applause from the group but the CEO sat there and waited. Once things quieted down, he said something that has stayed with me all these years.
“That means you failed to sell 95% of the time.”
There is room for improvement – get over it. Embrace it. Constantly search for it.
The Cure – TARGET
Activity does not always equal productivity or profitability.
Make quality your primary focus then, once you get that down, roll it out and drive quantity. But when you generate 5,000 leads that produces 100 sales, you are wasting human, financial and technological resources on 4,900 people.
What is a qualified lead? What’s a ‘sales ready’ lead? What does the buyer need? Why? How does your product serve that need better than anything else in the market? What offer can you extend that is too good for this buyer to ignore? What’s the best way to place your message and offer in front of that buyer today?
If you have trouble answering these questions, make the time to solve that issue.
How You Can Help Sales Succeed
Once you agree to the definition of a ‘sales ready lead’ – and that agreement needs to come from sales – make sure all you give them is ‘sales ready leads’. Yes, there will be concern over a decrease in volume – but as conversion rates increase you will see sales smiling more often and saying things like “You know, the quality of leads sure has gotten better!”
Help sales do their job and remove those obstacles.
Morale will improve. Employee retention will increase – and you will enjoy lower recruitment and training costs. Plus, experienced sales people will close more sales and more effectively set and manage customer expectations so customer satisfaction, retention, referrals and repeat business will increase.
How to get the right answers?
I am going to use the “R” word -research. No, I will take that back. I am going to suggest that you get out from behind your desk, cancel the afternoon meetings in the conference room, and go talk with your customers.
Ask them how they first learned of your company and products. Ask them what their needs, wants, perceptions, and motivations are – and ask them why they believe you offer them the best solution possible.
Then ask them if they would recommend your business and products to others. Then make sure it happens because referrals are inexpensive when compared to your lead generation activities.
Find out where they go to learn about solutions to their needs – and then be there with information. Go there to meet, greet, listen, learn and assist because most of these people are no SALES READY. (Hint: If they are sales ready, they will happily tell you – assuming you are doing the meet, greet, listen, learn and assist parts correctly.)
So what do you think? Could this work for your business? Let me know what you think – and if you have any better ideas, please share because I am always open to improvement!
