It’s often times easy to get very anxious about new business – the first thing you want to do is quickly pick up the phone and call a prospect – stop.
There’s a few steps you need to follow in order to ensure your call will actually be returned by a decision maker. First a foremost you must remember: Do not use your voicemail as a sales pitch.
Watch as Gateway partner, Jason Bahnak, explains the steps you must take in order to get a response from your voicemail.
If you’re not getting the amount of traffic you’d like to your website, the immediate solution isn’t always a website makeover.
Not getting enough web traffic? Before your company considers spending $15,000 on web design, evaluate your web traffic. If you aren’t receiving a substantial amount of web traffic, your first step will be to make people aware of your organization. How? Implement a social media strategy to Increase Search Engine Ranking, and Increase Brand/Company Awareness.
Watch as Gateway partner, Jason Bahnak, discusses how to increase visibility online without an immediate website overhaul.
A Dedicated Account Manager
In order to successfully connect with a prospect, you need one Account Manager dedicated to developing a business-to-business relationship with them.
Outsourcing your B2B lead generation to a firm that uses dedicated Account Managers will dramatically increase the effectiveness of the campaign by developing one-on-one relationships with prospects.
Using multiple sales representatives to contact the same prospect runs the risk of losing potential partnerships, as the prospect will get the impression they’re being passed around your organization with little concern about them personally.
Collaterals That Stand Out B2B decision makers aren’t always available by phone, and if they are they may not have time to speak with you.
It is imperative to consistently maintain contact with prospects. In cases where the decision maker is unavailable, you must have relevant collaterals on hand [such as videos, emails, and quality direct mail pieces] that can be delivered by a dedicated account manager through a variety of formats.
Prospects are receiving information from many of your competitors, which means your company’s collaterals must stand out to cut through the clutter. Standard html emails and voicemails can get buried amongst your competitor’s collaterals.
Effective Nurture Program Outsourcing to a firm with effective nurture programs is essential in advancing any area of B2B lead generation. It allows a continuous and structured flow of communication, but should vary based on a prospect’s disposition.
Historically, 85%-95% of outgoing phone calls will not result in a live connect, and those who are reached may not yet be in the market for new business-to-business relationships. No matter the situation, even if the prospect won’t be in the buying cycle for 6 months, the nurturing program must communicate to the prospect accordingly.
The Account Manager will be delivering messages to the prospect to maintain awareness over an extended period of time.Outsourcing to a firm who tailors each nurture program according to the prospect’s disposition ensures your company will be in the forefront of the prospect’s mind when they enter the buying cycle.
Sales success starts with finding the key decision maker at an organization you want to do business with. You have to be talking to the right person. Typically, that person is the one who has the authority to choose vendors or has the responsibility to evaluate and recommend vendors to use.
Having found the right person, you now need to establish a meaningful dialogue with them. If all you sales resources have is a list of names, it’s difficult to know where to begin. A good lead generation process should provide your sales resources with insights into a prospect and their organization.
There are many types of information that are critical:
Qualifying Information – Is a prospect a good fit? Your database should be designed to capture information that helps determine the fit of a prospective client and give your sales resource a starting point to understanding that prospect’s needs. How many employees to they have? What is their annual budget? Who is their current supplier? Etc… With this knowledge, a sales resource can tailor information to a prospect that better illustrates how your company can fill a specific need or overcome an issue the prospect is having.
Anecdotal Information – Is the prospect buried in their current workload? Are they trying to get through next year’s budget planning? Are they having issues with their current supplier? Good written notes, observations, or insights are invaluable in getting a better understanding of the current mindset of a prospect. With this, a good sales resource can make sure they are helping a prospect out and not contributing to their current set of issues. A good lead generation database will be structured to capture significant, relevant notes in an organized, concise fashion.
Voice Recordings – What better way to determine a prospect’s interest level or the severity of the issues their facing, then to hear it in his or her voice. Look for a lead generation service that can provide you with recordings of the calls between their operators and your prospects. Not only does it provide you with valuable insight into a prospect, but it also allows you to audit the quality of the lead generation service, and ensure that you company is being represented in a professional, high quality manner.
Having available the types of information referenced above can mean the difference between success and failure. The more insight your sales resource has into a prospect, the more likely they are to understand the issues or opportunities facing that prospect and be able to custom design the right solution for the right time.
What is the most effective use of your sales resources? Is it generating B2B leads, closing new prospects or working with existing customers?
Consider the following:
On average, salespeople spend about 20% of their time selling. The remaining 80% consists of prospecting, servicing existing clients and administrative duties. This means you’ve got a highly skilled and highly compensated individual spending 20% of their time doing what they do best.
To secure 1 new client, the average salesperson usually needs to pursue 100 suspects (potential, yet unqualified targets, a.k.a., cold leads).
A minimum of 6.7 “touches” are required to maintain “top of mind” awareness with potential customers.
Key decision makers are frequently unknown…someone must spend time/effort identifying & qualifying each target.
The answer is that your sales resources should focus their time and effort on CLOSING new business and working with existing customers, while a dedicated prospecting resource should focuson identifying, qualifying and verifying leads for your sales team. Having a dedicated prospecting resource, whether internal our outsourced, can have a dramatic impact on your filling your sales funnel with B2B leads and the amount of business your sales team closes.
Generating qualified B2B leads is a numbers game, as is closing them. If a salesperson must talk to 100 suspects to generate one new client, then it would follow that to generate 10 new clients, 1000 suspects must be contacted. Assuming it may take 2-5 calls to reach that prospect, you’re looking at thousands of calls to secure 10 new clients. That is a lot of activity. In fact, it can be a full time job.
A resource focused solely on prospecting can manage that number of prospects, if they have a structured process. Their time needs to be spent on 3 primary activities: Identifying/cleansing prospects, making an initial introduction, and nurturing qualified leads. Any time a prospect shows interest throughout this process, they can be passed to the sales team to follow up.
This division-of-duties will:
Increase the amount of leads in your sales funnel
Allow your salespeople to focus their skills on legitimate opportunities
Ensure leads that are a fit for your service, but not ready to talk, continue to receive communication until they enter the buying cycle.
Assuming your sales closing rate remains constant, calculate how many new opportunities your prospecting resource must generate to pay for themselves. If you have a process in place whereby your prospecting resource can achieve those numbers, you have the makings of a powerful new-business acquisition team.
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This blog was created to share our thoughts on B2B customer development in the hopes that this information will be useful for organizations working toward increasing new sales opportunities.
