What does “sales process” really mean anyway? It seems like everywhere you look, sales trainers and gurus are talking about sales process. At the same time, small businesses are struggling to manage sales people and meet revenue targets and they’re not even sure why they need a “sales process”.

I think that the sales training and consulting business has a huge opportunity to help small businesses if they communicate what the benefits of their methodologies and expertise more clearly.

I also think small businesses have tremendous opportunities to increase their top and bottom lines if they begin to think about their approach to selling as a process.

We just all need to get on the same page. In working with small businesses to implement web based CRM software, what I see is that business owners and sales leaders hope the CRM solution provides them insight into the behavior of their sales team, the ability to collaborate as a team easily and some visibility of future sales.

Unfortunately, many sales leaders expect the CRM solution to establish the process for them. Equally unfortunate is the fact that many CRM vendors are happy to pretend that their CRM software can provide that process. It just doesn’t work. One size does not fit all. In fact, even two competitors in the same market will follow very different approaches to marketing and selling and those differences are often their competitive strengths.

So what is a “sales process” anyway?

Well, at the risk of offending some of my more brainiac friends in the sales training world, I think the answer is pretty simple.

A sales process is a series of steps designed to accomplish two things –

First, match the company’s interaction with the prospect or potential buyer to the typical process that buyer follows in investigating and selecting solutions. Example: If you’re selling something that people buy all the time, then they want to know how your product or service is different from what they normally buy. You contrast your product to the popular competitors in your niche and ask for the order. However, if you’re selling business solutions that are purchased once in a lifetime or once every few years, then your first challenge is more to help the prospect determine if they really need your solution. That becomes a much more drawn out and educational series of activities.

Second, the sales process should be measurable. It’s a series of objective steps taken by the buyer and by the sales team that tell you how close you are to an order. It’s not different that establishing a manufacturing process. If you build homes, you don’t send the painting crew to the site while you’re still pouring the slab, even if the customer tells you he wants to see how the kitchen colors are going to look in the morning light. These steps should be designed to be followed in a certain order. The steps in the process are sequenced so as to ensure that time consuming and costly sales activities are reserved for the most qualified and high value prospects and to provide prospects and potential buyers with information about your products and services and the problems they address in a way that opens their mind to a new way of doing things.

I find that most companies shopping for web based CRM software are focused on analyzing and measuring what’s happening in their sales efforts but, they’re not really sure what the process is. They see sales as a sort of art that they often don’t understand. Many times they’re hesitant to tell their sales people how to do their jobs. The business founder may not have any selling experience and therefore feels it best to leave the method to the sales people.

On the other hand, most sales trainers and marketers are focused on creating a specific way of introducing and selling products and services based on the unique characteristics of the niche you’re going after.

So, we have the vast majority of small businesses trying to measure sales where there is no process which limits the measurement to vague and generic things like number of calls made, number of meetings held, number of proposals created, etc. These are all great things to measure for many businesses but, can encourage the wrong behavior and be extremely harmful to sales. If you begin to track the number and dollar volume of proposals sent by each sales person and even reward the “leaders” in this area, what you’ll get is sales people spending way too much time with prospects that are not likely to buy just so they can send them a proposal. There has to be some data about the prospect that qualifies the proposal as being worthwhile and the customer as being a likely buyer.

At the same time, the business owner wants to see this type of information before they invest in relatively expensive sales training and consulting.

So you see the quandary of small business selling… Business owners trying to measure a process that doesn’t exist by making a small investment in CRM solutions before spending larger amounts on sales consulting to define a sales process!

We’ve just released a simple guide to identifying your own sales process so it can be managed in a web based CRM here.

As mentioned before, I think that web based CRM providers are feeding this quandary by trying to give small businesses what they want – a process. They say “Don’t have your own process, well take mine!” That’s not likely to work out well.

I suggest that a more successful approach would be for the business to determine what process is in place today. There is one, even if leadership doesn’t know it. Ask the top producing sales people. They’ve worked it out for themselves. Start measuring that process. That way your measurement of the process is not likely to encourage any behaviors that they aren’t already focused on. The data you gather will provide insight into where the greatest opportunities for improvement are.

Clearly, you’ll need to select a web based CRM solution that allows you to easily create and measure your own process. There are some out there

We’ve released a very simple 10 step guide that allows non-sales guru business owners to determine what their sales process is and begin measuring it from the beginning. That way 2 or 3 months into implementing your web based CRM software, you’re not staring at useless reports of calls made knowing that many of the calls being counted weren’t even related to moving a sale forward. You’ll be looking at data that has meaning in your business.

The fringe benefit of this approach is to involve your sales team in the process from the outset. You’re starting with their process not yours. When you suggest areas of improvement, it will be based on hard data they entered into your web based CRM.

Check out our step by step guide to identifying your sales process so it can be managed in a web based CRM here.

Bookmark to:

But we’ve also seen those sales people and sometimes those companies that just seem to have a knack for making customers want to do business with them.  I’m talking about the way people sometimes see to go against all reasoning when deciding who to do business with.  They may not really have a need that can be quantified at all but, they still want to buy that product.  How do these companies do it?

The two videos below will open your eyes to that emotional effect that trumps all rational decision making.

The first is a presentation by Simon Sinek, author of “Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action”.  It’s a fascinating look at how the brain makes decisions and how companies like Apple become so cool.

The second is “Does More Money Motivate Higher Performance?”, a lecture by Dan Pink.  It highlights how people are compelled to higher performance by emotional motivations, not money.

I think taken together, these videos provide a framework for every entrepreneur and every sales person to ask themselves what their “Why?” is.  As a business the answers to this question can be the foundation of breakthrough marketing.  As a sales person, asking yourself these questions can give you the ability to compel your customer to want to do business with you.  To establish a relationship of trust and respect with your customers right up front.

Its really about “putting it out there”.  Letting your customers know where you’re coming from.  I think the hard part is that we’re human and sometimes we’re not sure where we’re coming from ourselves.  Or at least its difficult to articulate in ways that would be compelling to customers.

For example, I’ve mulled these questions over many times myself since view the videos.  As a provider of web based CRM solutions, what’s my “Why?” both personally and for the business?

So far, I’ve been able to identify that I’ve always seen business ownership and entrepreneurship as a core component of personal freedom.  I always wanted to start my own business.  However, in my early career reality drove me into sales and I came to see that being a commissioned salesperson is the next best thing to business ownership in terms of self determination.

Now, with SalesNexus, I love spending time with business owners and sales people to help them find more customers and keep them.  I enjoy it because I appreciate their challenges and because I know that their success will mean financial and personal freedom for them.

SalesNexus is in the business of helping businesses and sales people become free treat their customers like human beings and not numbers.  Success breeds confidence and the luxury of time.  With those blessings, your relationship with your customers changes fundamentally from the desperation of trying to survive as a business or clawing to meet your quota as a sales person.

So, I think I know why I do what I do and why SalesNexus is successful at what it does.  I’m not so sure I’ve figured out how to communicate that clearly and concisely.

I’d love to hear how you communicate your Why?

Bookmark to:

Can we get real at this point? If you’re a race car driver, you need to know how fast your car can go and how far you can go on a set of tires. If you’re a farmer, you need to know how many bushels of wheat or beans or whatever an acre of crops are going to produce. Whatever your business, you certainly would measure the results of each effort so you can use that information to predict future results.

Why is it that most business owners don’t measure what’s happening in their sales and marketing efforts?

Really?! Can you really quote any hard data about your marketing and sales processes other than what you spend on ads and marketing, what your payroll is and how much you sell each month?

Sorry but, that is NOT going to cut it!

Think about this in the farmer example… If all you know is how much you spend on seeds and equipment and supplies during the year andthen how much you sell your produce for after the harvest then yes, you can figure out if you made money or not. But, you can’t do anything about it. Next year, you can say “I lost money on that wheat crop last year so, I’m switching to corn this year because the seeds are cheaper.” That’s no guarantee of better results. You need to know how many plants grew on an acre, how much water they got, how many plants died due to disease or bugs, etc. With that information you can adjust next year – plant closer together, bring in a watering system, etc. and get better results. You can also compare this crop with alternatives more clearly.

It just makes sense right? If you’ve got a sales team to manage, then you either measure the process or get used to firing sales people regularly and constantly training new ones that won’t last. The key to hiring and keeping sales people is making them successful. How can you help them if you don’t look under the hood?

After 7 years of working with business owners, sales executives and marketing gurus, I know that it’s just not easy to get the data that matters. Think about it like this… If you’re not doing it now because you can’t figure out how to, then your competition probably isn’t either. What if you figured out how to measure your marketing and sales processes so you can turn them into an Automatic Selling Machine?

Warning – most contact management, CRM and marketing analytics vendors are going to try and sell you more than you need, over complicate the challenge and expand the cost and cause you to fail to get what you really need – some real numbers you can use.

Sure, using a CRM solution, contact management system or marketing analytics solution can make measuring your process very easy but, only if you keep it simple.

That’s our objective here – to highlight the short list of things you need to measure so you can make it happen with or without software.

Really, you can use a piece of paper or a simple excel sheet to do this. My experience helping businesses implement CRM solutions tells me that you’re better off starting very simple and getting some data than spending 6 months trying to find and implement more complex marketing analytics and CRM systems.

The basic components of any marketing and sales funnel are Unqualified Leads, Qualified Leads, Value to your company, Won Sales and Referrals. That’s it. No reason you can’t start keeping that info in a spreadsheet right? In fact, if that’s all you have to have, setting up a contact management system to do it is easy too.

Again, the problem is that you’ll get dazzled by all the other things the various CRM solutions can do for you and things will get complicated fast.

#1 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Total number of leads coming in.

Simple right? Well, it is but, it means you need to know about all of them. All the referrals your sales people get that they never mention to you. All the call-ins that come in but, never get called back by a sales rep, etc.

#2 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Where does each lead comes from?

How did they hear about you? What ad did they respond to? Where did you meet them? Who referred them to you?

Again, simple stuff but, the key is to be sure you get this information for each and every lead you talk to. If you get 100 leads a month and fail to collect this information for 5 of them, it could really throw off any analysis you do.

#3 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
How qualified is each lead?

This one is tougher. The reason is that you have to decide on objective criteria that makes a lead qualified. Do they have a need for what you sell? Do they have the money for it? The answers don’t necessarily need to mean that are absolutely going to buy from you. Just that there is a basic fit between their needs and situation and your company. They’re worth your time. Choose the 4 or 5 questions you have to ask every new lead and start capturing the answers for each and every lead. I know, you won’t be able to get all that information for all of them. That’s OK. If you don’t get it all, they’re not qualified.

#4 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
What’s the value of the sales opportunity?

Best case scenario, what can you sell them in the near term? What is this opportunity worth to your company? Pretty simple.

#5 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
What market segment do they fit in?

In every business, you have a few segments you have developed unique solutions for. It might be business vs. residential or small vs. large. You’ve got to know where they all fit.

#6 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Product you propose to them.

This could be a direct one to one relationship with the segment they fit in but, it’s usually not that simple. Some customers will request certain solutions even though it’s not what you’d recommend for them given the segment they’re in, etc. Again, you’ve got to track this for each lead.

#7 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Won or Lost

Did they buy or not? Simple right? What about if they just say “call me later”? (that’s a No if they don’t buy within a reasonable amount of time BTW)

#8 Metric You Must Know about Marketing and Sales
Did they give you a referral?

Why do you need to know this? Well, you need to know if they were asked for one thing. Also, this is a great measure of the satisfaction of that client. Let’s face it… You can value customers by how much they spend but, a customer that gives you referrals is much more valuable than one that spends the same and doesn’t give you any referrals.

That’s it. That’s all you really need to know!

With this information you can look at each and every source of leads, every advertising expense and determine its value to you.

Powerful Insight into Marketing Return

You’ll compute the cost of each dollar in sales based on the source of the lead and you’ll be amazed at how different it is from one marketing channel to another. Variances of 100% or more are common.

Really, just start putting each new lead in a spreadsheet with columns for each of the metrics above and keep it up to date.

In fact, if you don’t have a centralized contact management system or CRM solution in place today, creating this spreadsheet is a great way to start looking for a CRM system. You can share the sheet with potential vendors and they’ll be able to see what you need to measure.

Just get started tracking and measuring these things right away. Even if you’re not sure where this is leading, I promise you it will uncover valuable insights that will lead you to more profitable and sustainable growth.

Bookmark to:

When you are able to track advertising in this way, some very powerful things begin to happen. Your ability to objectively evaluate advertising options greatly improves. Your negotiating position with advertising and marketing vendors improves. Your ability to hold these vendors accountable to promises and expectations they set improves.

These things should enable you to have significant impact on the cost of and quality of leads. If you can reduce the average cost of each lead by 10% and increase the quality of each lead by 10%, that could be big for your business couldn’t it?

Well, that’s just scratching the surface! After all, getting the leads is not really the most challenging part of acquiring customers is it? It’s closing the deals. It’s hiring, training, motivating and managing all those sales people to take the leads your marketing generates and turn them into customers.

There is no question that the single most effective way to ensure the success of a sales person is to provide him or her with the highest quality leads. If 80% of your sales people are over quota this year instead of 20% like last year, what does that mean to your bottom line?

Download Free eBook

OK, hopefully I’ve got your attention now! So let’s get specific about how we can measure the results of your advertising and marketing, channel by channel, ad by ad, so you can maximize the most profitable and do away with the duds.

#1 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Create a system to track leads from first contact through to close.

Now, don’t lock up your checkbook so fast… I’m not proposing that you run out and spend thousands of dollars on expensive solutions. In fact, this is one area where things can and should be extremely simple. Heck, if you can draw up a one page “lead sheet” that your reps can use to quickly check off the results for each and every lead, great! You’ll need someone to sit down periodically and tabulate the information but, this type of low-tech approach might be the best place to start for many.

Regardless of what method or technology you choose, here’s what you need to know about each lead –

Where did it come from? Be specific here. If they found you on the web, you need to know exactly how. If they did a search first, then you’ve got to know what they searched for. If they saw an ad in a magazine, you need to know which one.

Are they qualified? In any business, there are 3 or 4 questions you can ask any lead and know if they’re likely to become of customer. You’ve got to be sure you ask these questions every time and record the answers. (See our recent eBook – Double Your Sales in 2010 – for more discussion of how to qualify leads)

What are they likely to buy, for how much and when? Ultimately, we want to project the total amount of sales that can be expected and the projected time frame for each and every advertising option you have. This info is clearly crucial.

Did they actually buy and if so, what and for how much?

A couple of other things that are important to find out –

What’s this person’s role in the purchase decision?

Are they currently working with a competitor?

Again, if you can come up with a low-tech way to capture this information consistently for every new lead, that’s great. After all, this is going to require some changes in your processes and methods for your customer facing team so, you should keep it as simple as possible. However, if there are more than one person in your organization dealing with each potential customer or if the volume of leads that anyone in your team is considerable, then writing it all down can get to be a problem. Remember, all your analysis will be skewed if this information isn’t gathered consistently.

So, investing in a good contact management solution or CRM can be wise. Keep in mind the purpose of this exercise… You’re going to reduce the average cost per lead, increase the average quality of each lead and ensure that your sales people beat their quotas and your company grows!

Basic requirements for your contact management system or CRM solution that will allow you to measure your advertising results effectively –

Allows you to document the above information quickly and easily for each and every lead

Allows you each person on your staff that will interact with the lead or prospect before purchase to update the same contact management or CRM database

Allows you to mine the information captured to see the number of leads from each advertising source and quantify the portion that buy, aren’t qualified and/or are still in process.

That’s it. Remember, simplicity is key to success here. This is a means to identify the most profitable advertising channels for your business, it’s not an end in itself. Don’t get enamored by CRM solutions that do everything anybody could ever want but, cost thousands per person and take months to implement. That could defeat the purpose.

Regardless of whether you choose a low-tech approach or a high-tech online contact management solution or web based CRM system, you’ve got to be able to learn this information about each lead. So where is that data going to come from?

#2 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Ask the prospect.

Again, we’re going for simple. Sure, you could invest in all sorts of technology, fancy survey emails or even telemarketing surveys to gather all this info but, how long is that going to take to put together? What will it cost? Believe it or not, many sales people will push back and resist asking the specific questions you need answered. You’ll need to help them understand how you’re going to use the information to provide them more leads that are higher quality.

It’s crucial that you follow through too. You can set your efforts back by months or years if you force this on your sales team and then fail to use the information.

Be clear – every person that has contact with the lead before they purchase is going to need to be consistent in asking the decided upon questions and recording the answers.

#3 Way to Measure Advertising and Marketing Return Easily
Make it automatic.

Hey, wouldn’t that be cool? If you’re completely ecommerce, then it may be possible. All this data can be gathered by your website and shopping cart. However, if your customers typically talk to a human being at your company as a part of their decision making process, then there is going to be some manual data entry. No matter how shiny and new and innovative your contact management or CRM solution is, it’s the information that your customer tells your sales person that is likely to be the most valuable to you in measuring the effectiveness of the advertising that drove him or her to your company.

So, you should focus on automating all the other steps along the way and making it as quick and easy as possible for the sales person to add their contribution.

For instance, you can easily have different 800 numbers that you publish in each ad so you’ll know how the lead found your company when you pick up the phone. If they’re visiting your website first, you can build tracking into your web forms that will capture what terms the lead searched for in Google to find you. Many online contact management systems and web based CRM solutions allow your web forms to post new sales leads directly into the database with tracking information embedded.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, then required that the sales rep fill out all the key data we’ve discussed when they create or update the lead’s record. Also, make sure it’s easy for the sales rep to see what key information has yet to be gathered on each lead so they can ask those questions.

I’m sure you’ve got the idea. In the end, we want to see a table something like this –

# of Leads Qualified Closed

Trade Journal Ad 100 50 20

Paid Search 200 50 10

Radio Spot 50 25 15

Add the costs for each of those ads and you can calculate which is most profitable. You’ll be amazed to find that what you think you know if wrong and how much opportunity is available when you redirect spending to the most profitable channels.

Remember, this is the 5th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Bookmark to:

Doyle Slayton had a great article on his SalesBlogcast – 8 Follow Up Strategies to Keep Your Prospect Engaged – with some awesome tips. I especially like his suggestion of giving your prospect a referral!

If you add up the average number of times you call a sales prospect without reaching them, multiply that by the 1 or 2 minutes it takes to make the call and leave the voice mail and then multiply that by the number of new prospects you pursue each month, it adds up to a LOT of time!

I believe it’s a key reason that sales people can get so frustrated and discouraged by cold calling. They’re not in control. They can’t even get to talk to their prospect. You can get a feeling of inadequacy because it feels like you’re dialing the phone a lot but, you’re not talking to anyone that can buy. Most sales people find themselves calling the same list of prospects that they called last week and wondering, how many times have I called this guy? How many more time will I have to call to get to talk to him? Will his secretary be inviting me to her birthday party after all the compliments I’ve thrown her way?

Well, there are many things you can do to improve your results. You can work on your “script” for talking to the gate keeper, your script for voice mails, as well as your emails. You can look at new sources of leads that you can connect with more easily. In all cases though, you need to have a prospecting plan that tells you what to do on each attempt to contact the sales prospect. On the first call, you take one approach – you might have an introductory script for the gate keeper, you might choose not to leave a voice mail or you could choose to leave one introducing yourself. On the second call you mix it up again, and so on…

Of course, this means you have to know how many times you’ve called each prospect. That means you’ll need a basic contact management system or CRM. Imagine if every day you could pull up a call list that told you who to call, how many times you’ve already called and what to do on this call! Believe it or not, that’s pretty basic stuff in most CRMs or contact management systems.

But here’s the payoff! You’ve got to “give up” on a prospect after some number of calls. You wouldn’t want your contact management or CRM system to remind you to call the same person every week for the next 12 months! So, when it’s time to give up, you get to Fire Them! That’s right! You, the salesperson, get to FIRE your prospect! I know, it sounds crazy and also fun doesn’t it?

The good news is that this is not just a way to get some “pay back” after a prospect has repeatedly ignored your messages. Done right, as soon as your fire a prospect, they will call you back post-haste.

How can that be? Well, your customers are used to being chased by sales people. They expect it. In fact, your aggressive pursuit of them relieves the sales prospect from the need to remember to stay in touch with you, even when they’re genuinely interested in your products and services. If they’re too busy to worry about it now, they can delete your message knowing that you’ll call again in a few days.

Well not anymore! Now your CRM or contact management system is going to tell you to call them 3 or 4 times, leaving various messages and then on the 5^th call, the CRM will say “5^th attempt – Fire Them” and you’re going to leave a message like this –

“Hi, this is Craig Klein, with SalesNexus online CRM. We help companies like yours grow sales by helping them market and sell more effectively. I’ve left a few voice mails and sent a couple of emails and haven’t heard back from you. At this point, I’m going to assume that this is just not a priority for you at this time and I’M GOING TO TAKE YOU OFF MY CALL LIST. If there is anything I can do for you, please feel free to contact me at 800.862.0134”

The key phrase is “I’m going to take you off my call list”. No one wants to be taken off the list. You’ve just told your prospect that you value your own time and won’t be calling again. Believe me. If they have any interest in your company, your product or your service, they will respond. At a minimum, they’ll shoot you a quick email saying “Sorry, I’ve been swamped. I do want to talk. Can you call me in 2 weeks?” or something to that effect.

This really works! If you don’t trust me, then just try it 3 or 4 times this week. Print out this tip sheet I’ve prepared for you –

Download Printable Tip Sheet

You’ll be amazed how often genuinely qualified prospects respond to your firing them by calling you back straight away!

So put a couple of leads in your CRM or contact management system and set yourself reminders to call them 3 or 4 times and then a 5^th time to fire them.

It’s going to be fun and it’s going to work. Enjoy!

Bookmark to:

But you need to know right? You need to be able to direct your advertising and marketing dollars to things that work. Things that generate profitable results. But typically all you can do is look at sales results in aggregate and try to make judgments about many discrete marketing channels.

The big guys do it by spending even more money on research, surveys, etc. That’s great if you’ve got the time and money. In most small businesses, you find out how the marketing is working by asking your sales people. After all, they’re the ones in the organization that speaks to most of the respondents to your marketing. This seems perfectly logical but it’s not.

Part of this is obvious. Bonus and commission plans can incentivize sales people to paint a skewed picture of the situation.

This is not to disparage sales people. They’re just trying to increase their commissions by selling more. However, if your sales compensation structure and your business priorities are not aligned well, this can amplify their perception of the value of certain types of leads.

#1 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Sales people see volume as good.

You have to search long and hard to find a sales person that won’t tell you they can use more leads. More leads means more opportunity to them. More leads means more need for the services of a sales person. You may believe more leads is better also. If so, please see Reason #2 below!

You may sell into multiple markets or sell an assortment of different products or services which require marketing in different channels. So, you run an ad in a trade magazine for product A, attend trade shows to market product B and do “pay per click” search ads for product C. It’s very common for sales people to perceive leads from a trade show to be far more valuable than others. They’ll even “feel” like there are more of these leads than others when trade show leads are the lowest by volume.

I say “feel” because most sales people have no means of actually knowing how many leads they’re getting. Frankly, unless they’re paying you for the leads, they have little incentive to keep track.

Download Free eBook

Trade show leads “seem” important and valuable to sales people because of the amount of time spent on trade shows and because they actually have met these people already. Sales people are relationship oriented. When they’re looking at a stack of 50 business cards from the trade show that they spend 2 days on last week, all of whom they met personally, they’re going to see those as “warmer” leads than the 500 names of CFOs in an excel file that you just purchased for them to cold call. Also, if they are more experienced with a certain type of lead or product or company, they’ll perceive those as more valuable. So, when you ask your sales people about the leads, they’re going to over emphasize the ones that are warmer and most familiar to them.

This may seem like a minor point but, it can be huge in terms of dollars! If you spend $10,000 on a trade show plus 2 days of your sales person’s time and get 50 leads, you’ve got to close at least 20% of them or your average sale better be well over $2,000 or both or its just unprofitable after you take sales compensation and operational costs out. On the other hand, if you may be able to spend $5,000 to get 100 leads via your website and your sales person hasn’t invested a minute yet.

Which brings us to…

#2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG – Can’t measure sales results from leads any better than you can

It’s really all about the quality of the lead. If you’re not using contact management software or a CRM solution to track the leads by source and tie that to results, then you can bet your sales people aren’t either. Sure, you probably have one or two sales people on your team that tell you they use Outlook or contact management systems like ACT! or Goldmine to track the leads you give them but, the fact is that’s not really their job as you’ve defined it and so, it’s likely to get inconsistent attention at best.

Even if you are using an online CRM to capture contact information for all leads that come in, where it came from and which sales person it was given to and your sales people are adding in the actual results once they make contact with the lead, it’s probably not happening all the time. If a sales person is given 100 leads in a month and they forget to log in the results for 5 or 10 of them, it can skew the analysis of this information tremendously.

What you want to know is how many leads came in, tied to each marketing channel and whether they were qualified and if they made a purchase. Seems simple doesn’t it? It’s simple for your CRM system to give you a nice analysis of this information but, it’s another thing to get to the point where you have it all in one place so the analysis can begin. If you’re not using any kind of CRM today, just try and track the leads that come in next month. If you are using a CRM solution already, you know what I mean.

You may be able to capture and track all leads that come in via your website. You may even have the front office trained to track all the call ins that happen when your ad runs in the local business journal. But what about referrals or trade show leads? Those go straight into your sales people’s hands… Even once you’ve figured out how to capture all the leads, it’s getting a good read on the quality of those leads that’s key. And it’s the most difficult part of the equation.

After all, it has to be objective for it to be really useful. Just like your sales people will have a tendency to see volume as good for its own sake, they’ll also have vague “feelings” about the quality of leads from certain sources that have more to do with the difficulty of getting in touch with those leads and generating the first real conversation about need than anything else.

To make it work you have to boil down lead “quality” to a series of objective measurements. Are they in the right industry for you? How much are the currently spending on products or services like yours? Maybe for you it’s as simple as how many employees they have or what their annual revenue is or how much they spend on telecom each month. For many small businesses trying to carve out a niche for themselves, it has to be much more specific.

If you’re using a contact management system or CRM solution, put fields in the system for your staff to enter the answer to these questions. If not, use a spreadsheet or even a printed “lead sheet” with blanks to input these answers. This way you’ll be able to measure leads based on each of these criteria and you’ll know which of your sales people just aren’t asking the right questions.

Remember, this is the 4th chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Bookmark to:

Advertising firms will be pleased to create a “campaign” for you. They’ll charge you for every minute of their time to produce “creative” and to make “media buys”. They’ll start to tell you about the old marketing axiom that says a person must see your ad three times before it really sinks in. They’ll start to use the word “brand” a lot.

No doubt, your brand is important. However, if you’re a small business and you’re not sitting on a huge pile of money that will allow you to completely saturate your marketplace with your company’s brand, then “branding” will not grow your business.

#1 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – All Marketing and Advertising Starts with Branding First

Wrong! Think about it… When you think of strong brands, who comes to mind? IBM, Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola? No question that those brands have real value. Those names have been beat into our heads since we were all children. They’ve also been very consistent. A Coke today is pretty darned close to a Coke 40 years ago. Heck, these companies names are part of our language.

Think about the last few Coca-Cola ads you’ve seen. They’re really not about the product at all. They’re about emotions – happy times, good friends, etc. The objective is to create a connection in your mind between the word Coke and these positive emotions. That’s great for Coke. They spend billions of dollars on this type of advertising because their product is already literally everywhere. As you go through your daily life, you are presented with the opportunity to purchase a Coke in the break room, at lunch, at the gas station, in the grocery store, etc. If you’ve got a warm and fuzzy feeling connected to their name, as you’re walking down the aisle it may cause you to stop and grab a six pack.

You don’t have that kind of money or time. You need to generate sales. Huge media buys (TV, Newspapers, Radio, Product Placements, etc.) are not an option. If you’ve just introduced a new caffeinated beverage, what are you going to do? How can you possibly chip away at the huge mountain of history and branding that is Coke?

Not by trying to beat them at their own game, that’s for sure!

Download Free eBook

#2 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – Small Businesses CAN Afford to Go Head to Head with the Big Guys

That’s right! We’re just not going to try and beat them at branding. That would be insane. You need to connect with customers who have a need for your product or service. If you’re selling to businesses, what are the problems you solve or the opportunities you allow customers to take advantage of? That’s how you’re going to “brand” yourself.

In B2B selling, it can be difficult to even get a list of specific people that want or need what you have to sell them. There is no magazine written specifically for refinery production supervisors with employees with problems following safety regulations, for instance. For many businesses, it comes down to this – you can’t afford to advertise in magazines, etc. that are read by your audience because they’re also read by thousands of people that aren’t going to be interested in your product AND your competition has run up the cost of that advertising.

In our last chapter, we talked about the new ways in which people buy. Internet searches are a key step in the buying process for most people now.

You can cut through the challenges we’ve discussed by positioning your company and your services at the point where the customer begins to look for solutions to the problem your service address – his Internet search. In a later chapter, we’re going to give you 6 simple steps to generate qualified sales leads you can afford. For now though, let’s focus on the how you get in front of the customer.

We know you can’t afford to broadcast yourself to the masses in hopes that those that actually need a product like you sell will see your ad three times and respond to it. We also know that those that do have a problem your company can solve will likely go to the Internet and start searching for solutions as one of their first steps.

Your challenge is to be there. Be at the top of the results when they do the right search. They type “how to fix a broken widget” into their search engine and up comes a link to your website. Think about how that changes your advertising and marketing challenges.

Instead of trying to “get in front of” the thousands or millions of people that could possibly one day need your products, you just need to jump out in front of the ones that have begun to look for solutions.

We’re not going to get into all the details of Search Engine Optimization, Pay per Click Advertising, etc. There is plenty already available for free on the Internet for you to read and I bet you’re not interested in editing HTML pages anyway. You can hire someone to do all that for you and it shouldn’t be too expensive.

Your job is to create something of value that you can give to your prospect for free. I know, we’re talking about growing your sales. Remember, someone who doesn’t know your company at all just did a search on the Internet and your company has come up in the results alongside several others. You know, by virtual of what they searched for, that they have a problem you can solve for them. What you need now is to help them see your company as a resource to solve their problem or conquer their opportunity.

So, you create a resource they can use to understand their challenge more clearly, analyze possible solutions and essentially become an informed buyer. A report on the Top 10 Reasons Companies Suffer From Whatever it Is That Your Customers All Suffer From. A Buyers Guide that tells them the key questions to ask themselves and vendors when buying the things you sell. A “Free Consultant” or Needs Assessment can even be an effective offer in many cases.

When someone takes advantage of these resources, you know they have a problem you can solve and that makes them a lead. You can create a marketing funnel that leads highly qualified leads directly to your sales team. They take advantage of your report on the Top 10 Reasons… and at the end you offer them a free consultation.

In addition to getting this sort of free offer in front of your market via search engines, you may be able to do this through direct mail, telemarketing and other means. In fact, that’s what’s so powerful about this approach. It works through all mediums. If you write a free report to hand out at the big industry trade show, you can also publish it on your website and you may be able to get it included in the trade association’s post trade show newsletter, etc.

It’s important to think about this process in terms of quantity. If you specialize in custom designed valves for processing plants that handle a certain type of material, you wouldn’t want to offer a free consultation to every processing plant you can find. That would leave your sales team spending a lot of time with prospects that may be highly interested in learning about the cool, innovative product you’ve come up with but, have no need to buy it because they don’t work with materials that require it.

#3 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – More leads is not always better

Your sales team is the engine of your business’ growth. Why would you want to pour bad fuel into the engine? What happens to an engine that runs on bad fuel? It deteriorates. Your sales people will get frustrated if they’re spending all their time on leads that don’t buy. You’ll have more problems with keeping them motivated and more importantly, your cost to close a real deal will go up.

The number one objective is to develop a marketing funnel that feeds your sales team with highly qualified leads. If they’ve read the free report, downloaded the buyer’s guide and requested a free consultation, they have essentially qualified themselves and educated themselves. They’ve basically turned themselves into a slam dunk for your sales team!

As you build your marketing funnel, you’ll have to experiment a bit. You may find you get a lot of response to one offer but, getting the prospect to take another step in the process is tougher. You’ll need to get analytical about managing your marketing funnel. Using a good contact management, lead management or CRM solution is crucial. You need to measure each step in the funnel and track where your sales people are spending their time and what’s working and what’s not. It’s a mistake to try and manage this process by listening to anecdotes from your sales team. ( more on that later ) You need hard data to make decisions confidently. A good CRM system can provide that information while also helping your sales team be more productive.

#4 Fallacy in Marketing and Selling that Causes You to Waste Money and Destroys Profits – Relationships are not about being face to face

Just as you can’t afford to blanket the marketplace with your “brand”, you can’t afford to have your sales people flying all over the world talking to every prospect that demonstrates curiosity in your products. That is a sure-fire profit killer.

Maybe an average deal for you is $100,000. That sort of sale can justify a lot of travel expense and sales time. However, if you’ve got to visit 10 customers 4 times each to get one order and still pay for building and delivering your product or service, the numbers don’t look as good anymore. It’s also about time. The amount of time your sales team spends on each lead defines the maximum number of sales you can make. Increasing the profitability of your sales effort means reducing the amount of time spent with leads and preserving their time to work with and filter a higher volume of leads and focus quality time only on highly qualified prospects.

Especially if you’re selling a big ticket item or a long term relationship, the tendency is to “get in front” of prospects and build relationships. There are lots of ways to build relationships that don’t involve a face to face visit.

In fact, relationships are really about trust, credibility and empathy. The marketing funnel process you’re going to build will create credibility for your company by offering your prospects bite sized pieces of your knowledge and expertise. Delivering the content can help build trust. But, most important is empathy. Asking the right questions of your prospect and listening to their unique answers shows that you’re both knowledgeable and appreciate the specific needs of each prospect.

Demos and presentations can be done over the Internet. A phone call that involves you asking open ended questions and listening a lot can build a much stronger relationship than an expensive trip where you roll in with your overhead projector and walk the prospect through 20 slides.

Remember, this is the 3rd chapter in our newest eBook, “Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine”. Register to receive each new chapter as its released and the entire eBook when complete, free here.

Bookmark to:

The research is all over the place. At least half of CRM implementations fail to meet expectations. (ZDNet). Yet, more and more money is spent on CRM every year… more than $10B spent each year and growing by 10 to 20% annually. (CRM Landmark)

Why?

There are countless articles out there written to tell you how to get your CRM project right. There are thousands of CRM consultantsavailable to help you plan, implement and manage your CRM system. And still businesses keep getting it wrong.

The most commonly cited reason for failure is lack of end user adoption. In most small and medium sized businesses, that means the sales people just never start using the new CRM regularly. Within most SMBs that have recently implemented a new CRM solution, you’ll find that a few of the sales people are using the CRM heavily and just as many hardly use it at all. And so the results are very inconsistent, even within a single company.

For small and medium sized businesses, the objective of the new CRM system is normally related to basic information sharing amongst the customer facing team, sales pipeline management and marketing automation. That means virtually all the information to be managed and analyzed must come from the sales team.

And therein lies the problem. We’ve all heard “garbage in – garbage out”. Well with CRM struggles, it’s more like random input = random output.

It’s pretty simple really. If you want your customer service team to have access to the details about a new customer and maybe even a copy of the proposal the sales person sent, then the sales people have to be sure they enter that information for all their customers. If you want to be able to send an email offer to all prospects in a certain industry, then your sales team has to click the box in the CRM that indicates which industry every customer is in.

Unfortunately, management and CRM vendors doom many projects from the outset. Management has their reasons for investing in CRM technology. In a small or medium sized business, the most common objectives of management for the CRM solution are:

· Sales Activity Measurement (how many calls are getting made by each sales rep?)

· Sales Pipeline Management (how many deals are we currently chasing?)

· Team Selling Enablement (what’s going on with the XYZ Inc. deal?)

· Marketing Automation (get my company’s message in front of people more often)

So, the VP of Sales or the Business Owner and the IT guy and maybe the Marketing Admin all get together and start looking at CRM vendors. They evaluate solutions from the perspective of the cool dashboards and reports that the CRM vendors show them for managing sales pipeline, etc. After all, the manager’s not planning to input much data. Marketing looks at how the CRM system will integrate with the web site and how the CRM technology enables email blasts, etc.

If a sales person is involved in the CRM solution evaluation process, it’s usually an exercise in “getting buy-in” from sales early on. That’s a good thing but, it misses the point. Sales people aren’t normally very analytical or process oriented and so their interest in the various CRM technologies is limited to looking at the cool bells and whistles that the CRM vendor has that are meaningful to sales people.

And that, my friends, is the #1 reason why CRMs fail. The CRM vendor is happy to let all parties believe they’re going to get everything they want. Generally, all CRM solutions have much more capability that will be used in a given business. So management sees that the CRM system can do a lot of great things for them. All the things they really want and are ready to spend money on and many things that just look cool and might be useful. And the same is true for marketing, sales, customer service, etc.

If 90% of the input into the CRM system is going to come from the sales team, then what marketing and management will be able to do with the system will be directly limited by the amount of consistent input by the sales team.

Shame on CRM Vendors! They know this. But none of the largest vendors in the SMB CRM market offer a process to ensure that new users of their CRM solution align management and marketing expectations and sales input requirements. In fact, Microsoft CRM, Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM, ACT!, Goldmine and most of the brand names in CRM offer generic training for managers, marketing and sales people separately, allowing this disconnect between what sales will be inputting and what management expects to get out of the system to persist even after the purchase. If you want someone to help you get this right, they’ll put you in touch with a reseller or consultant in your area. If you’re lucky, you get someone that will keep you on the right path but, there’s not guarantee.

The fact is that many business owners and sales executives are very hesitant to require much at all of their sales people. The sales people naturally push back on using the system and argue for lowering the bar and without realizing it, management has just ensured failure. Because they’re going to give the sales people flexibility in using the CRM solution, its assured that they won’t get the management metrics in any level of detail or consistency.

What to do to ensure your CRM system succeeds!

Most searches for CRM solutions get started sort of haphazardly. Maybe a new sales recruit or marketing manager joins the team andstarts twisting your arm about it. Or maybe there’s a real challenge or opportunity in your organization that CRM is the perfect answer for. The first thing most small and medium sized businesses do is to start looking around at options. It’s natural but, fatal. Since you’ve never bought or implemented a CRM system before, you’re not sure what you need. So, to get your head around your requirements, you start looking at what capabilities are offered at the price point you have in mind. That’s a classic “tail wagging the dog” scenario.

The first thing you should do is write down the business objectives you have without regard to the CRM technology that may or may not be available to you. Try to prioritize your objectives financially. Which have the greatest potential to impact your bottom line.

Then decide what the bare minimum is for you. Which of the business objectives for your new CRM system can you live without and which ones are must haves.

Now, think about the information that will have to be input into the CRM technology in order for you to be able to extract the metrics, analytics and reports you expect. Ask yourself if the sales team will be able to input that information in a timely and efficient way.

Essentially, you’re after a map of reports and metrics you want out of the system to input into the CRM technology.

With this, you can begin to investigate CRM vendors and technologies with two sets of requirements –

1) Which CRM solution does the best job of giving me the reporting, analytics and marketing capabilities we see as adding value to our business? And…

2) Which CRM solution will allow my sales team to input the corresponding information the most efficiently?

In the end, you’ll probably find that your requirements are driven less by cost and management needs than they are by what it’s reasonable to expect your sales team to enter into your new CRM all day every day.

Rest assured that you are going to have to tell your sales team exactly what they MUST do with this new CRM system. You must define the minimum level of data entry in the CRM in detail.

At this point you may be asking yourself why CRM vendors haven’t figured out how to make this process easy for you. Well, a few have. But, the truth is that need for growth drives most software, and certainly CRM, vendors to create sales compensation plans and reseller networks that are entirely volume oriented. The CRM vendor’s concern is not how much value you get out of the solution but only that you buy their CRM technology.

As I said, a few CRM vendors have built processes that lead new customer toward an integrated solution that balances business objectives, management expectations and sales input time. It’s rare though.

At SalesNexus, our small business orientation has led us create an implementation process that helps every new customer align expectations up front and adjust training plans and user requirements accordingly. In fact, our simple process for tailoring each new CRM solution to the individual customer’s needs has led to one of the CRM industry’s best customer retention rates. We’re very proud of that.

If you’d like to learn how we ensure our customers’ success with implementing CRM solutions that meet their unique needs, call us and ask your SalesNexus representative to explain what CRM implementation services are included in your subscription at no additional charge. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised.

Bookmark to:

Register for Free eBook

small and medium sized businesses face with limited resources for advertising and marketing when attempting to grow their sales. The eBook provides affordable and actionable steps any business can take to generate qualified sales leads without busting the budget.

“Build Your Own Automatic Selling Machine” will be released as a series of chapters (blog posts) here on our blog, one post per week. Then we’ll release the entire eBook in PDF format when complete in February. Register now and we’ll notify you via email as each chapter is released.

• 4 Reasons You’re Throwing Money Down the Drain When You Pay for Advertising and Marketing
• 3 Radical Changes in the Way People Buy Going On Today You Can Use to Increase Profits
• 4 Fallacies in Marketing and Selling that Cause You to Waste Money and Destroy Profits
• 2 Reasons What Your Sales People Tell You About Your Leads and Your Marketing is WRONG
• 3 Ways to Measure Your Advertising and Marketing Results Easily
• 6 Action Steps to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
• 8 Metrics You Must Know About Marketing

Bookmark to: