So at this point we know that throwing money at advertising and marketing firms is not an option. We need a way to generate leads that doesn’t involve putting up huge sums with no way to know how and when it will come back to us. Ideally, we’d like a way to invest a relatively small amount, measure the results closely, make adjustments to increase the profitability and then ramp up the investment, the leads and the profits according to our needs.

Of course. And while we’re at it, let’s also say that we want our sales people to get involved only when we know we have a highly qualified lead.

Believe it or not, this is not as tall an order as it appears to be. The basic principle is to design a lead funnel, a series of steps that each lead can go through that will ensure that they want and need what you’re selling. At each step, you offer the lead something and their choice tells you if now is the time for your sales team to talk with them.

So how do you decide what these steps are? What do you offer to the leads at each step in your funnel?

The first one is the hardest so, try to get yourself in the head of your customers. Talk to them. Ask them what questions were going through their mind when they decided to start looking for a solution like yours. What is it that everyone in your audience or market needs or desires?

#1 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Offer something that every potential prospect for your product or service will be interested in.

Remember, this is a funnel or a series of steps. The first one should not be too exclusive. It should be highly attractive to people that need and want what you’re selling and people that likely will need or want what you sell in the future.

The first step is not a free trial or an appointment with a sales rep or a buyer’s guide. Those are things you offer later in the process. Up front you want to offer something that someone with a general interest in the subject will find interesting. We want their accepting the offer to tell you that they could be a prospect some day. If you sell an industrial pump, you might want to write a quick guide titled “Are you spending too much keeping old pump equipment running?”.

Responding to your first offer doesn’t indicate a readiness to buy. But, it indicates that this is someone who is within your market space. You want to establish trust and credibility with this person so that when they are looking for what you sell, they reach out to you. That’s why you’ve got to have a plan to nurture the relationship regularly.

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#2 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Nurture leads automatically

These are not hot leads. You’re going to be worrying about closing the hot deals in your pipeline every day. That’s why your lead nurturing efforts have to be automatic. You’ll put it off or forget about it if it requires you to stop what you’re doing.

Plus, there are email marketing systems, auto-responders, online CRMs or just simple contact management systems that are affordable, easy to set up and can do the job for you. At a minimum you need a contact management system or CRM that can keep track of which leads have accepted which offer and let you know when it’s time to make the next offer.

Mix it up. Some of the leads that accepted your first offer may actually be ready to buy. Give them that chance! Don’t force them to accept each offer in the sequence you determine. If the final step in the funnel is to attend a demo or schedule a 30 minute consultation, then there’s no harm in presenting that option to new, early stage leads.

#3 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Let the offers qualify leads for you

A buyer’s guide is a perfect qualifier. If a lead wants to learn how to buy what you sell, then they are much more qualified than the lead that’s only been willing to read your report on effective maintenance schedules.

Attending a webinar or demo is a good strong qualifier. Anything that involves the lead investing their own time or money. But give them options. If they’re not ready for the buyer’s guide, have something else with involving less commitment on their part as well.

#4 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Build your sales process to fit the offers the lead responds to

You’re sales person isn’t going to pick up the phone and call each lead that responds to the first offer. The idea is for them to invest their time only in leads that have responded to offers that really qualify them as near term buyers.

Be sure that your process makes it easy for your sales people to respond appropriately to each lead’s actions. If they responded to your first offer and then immediately requested the buyer’s guide, they just might be very hot. Don’t make that lead wait. Call within hours. However, if you’re going to call leads that respond to earlier offers, be sure the sales person is not going for the close immediately. In that situation, their objective is really to steer the lead toward the next offer in the funnel.

Again, a good contact management system or CRM will help. With a CRM that tells the sales rep which offers each lead has responded to, they’ll know how to handle each one. Many CRMs can even allow the sales rep to change the email campaign that the lead will receive based on what they learn on the call.

#5 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Measure lead quality and close rates

A subtle change in the offers you make can have tremendous results. Some offers will attract the wrong sort of lead unexpectedly. Believe it or not, the worst thing you could do is generate too many leads of the wrong type. In that situation, your sales people are spending lots of time on leads that don’t buy.

For these reasons, you’ve got to know the metrics of your funnel. For everyone that responded to step one, how many closed? And the same for each step. When your sales people talk to the leads, what is their judgment of quality?

These metrics will allow you to find the offers that are working and the ones that aren’t and adjust accordingly. Your CRM should make it easy to track these metrics and analyze them.

#6 Action Step to Get More Quality Leads and Close More Sales
Hold your team accountable to following the process

This is not selling 101. Most sales people have that “go for it” attitude. They’ll want to call all the leads. That may be a huge mistake from the stand point of time invested in unqualified leads. Make sure they understand when to get involved and what to do in each situation.

Make sure they document things properly as we’ve discussed above. Again, this is not throwing sales people at leads and hoping for the best. This is a finely tuned funnel. You can’t tune the funnel without data. The sales team is going to be a big part of gathering that data.

Communicate these concepts to the team and then make sure they’re held accountable. If they document the quality of leads only 80% of the time, that can completely skew your analysis.

If particular sales people are having trouble following the process – taking the right action at the right time or documenting results, you’ve got to know about it and you’ve got to address it.

I’ve always found that the best way to encourage participation and buy-in by the sales people is to take advantage of their natural competitiveness. Use your CRM to run a report of how many leads have been responded to by each sales person and how many had the results documented properly. Put that report in front of the entire team at sales meetings. None of them want to be on the bottom of this list.

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.

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Qualify Early and Often, Part 1 of Double Your Sales in 2009

• How not knowing the difference between a lead and a qualified prospect is costing you big bucks!
• Free up days and days for your sales team to focus on their best prospects and clients.
• Improve your bottom line immediately!

Your sales people’s time is valuable.  You’ve probably have hired sales assistants to take paper work and other stuff off your sales staff’s plate.  Because you want to help them focus their time on what?  Selling of course!  Working with customers, whether on the phone or in person, is where you want their time spent.

But its not that simple.  If you’re in the food service business and I gave you a list of Realtors to call on, would you want your sales reps spending their time on the phone and meeting with those Realtors?  Of course not.

To really super charge your sales performance, you have to take a close look at WHO your team is spending their time on.  Don’t worry, this is not a sales pitch for changing your lead generation.  This is much simpler than that.

The fact is that virtually every sales person spends too much time on leads that are not at all likely to purchase.  They just don’t know how to tell the difference.

Qualifying leads is not a new concept.  You’ve probably already spent a lot of time preaching to your team about it.  But can you say that your team is good at qualifying leads?  How many of your proposals go know where?  How many of the face to face presentations your team gives lead to a long series of put-offs and no sale?

Why does this matter?  Because just like you wouldn’t want your sales team wasting time with paper work and administrative tasks, you also don’t want to waste their valuable selling time on leads that aren’t going to buy!  The key is to know the difference – QUALIFYING.

If you qualify well, or better said, qualify accurately and do it up front, as a first step in your sales process, then you can minimize the time your team spends on leads that won’t buy and maximize the time they spend on leads that will.

So first let’s consider how big an impact better qualifying could have on your business first.  Here are a few questions you’ll need to know the answer to:

• What are the crucial steps in the sales process?  Examples – Set appointment, presentation, proposal, close
• How much time is typically spent on each step?
• How many new leads or prospects does each rep typically go through this process with in a given period (week, month, quarter..)?
• How many of them buy?

If you don’t have this information, ask your team to start making a list of every presentation, proposal, etc. that they do for about twice the length of your typical sales cycle.  Then just crunch the numbers.

Here’s an example: 
Let’s say a sales person typically works with 50 new leads each month and each decent lead typically gets a 30 minute phone call, a one hour presentation and a proposal that requires 30 minutes to create.  Add to that all the calls and emails that go into coordinating meeting times and following up, trying to close and you’re easily up to 3 hours per lead or 150 hours per month.  We’ll assume that you have a 20 % overall close rate so, that means 10 out of 50 leads buy.  So it takes 15 (150 divided by 10) hours of sales time to get a purchase.

So, 80% of the folks that your team spends all this time on don’t buy.  That’s 40 leads getting 3 hours each or 120 hours of sales time spent on leads for no return, every month.  What if you just started asking the right questions up front and decided not to go on appointments until you get the right answers or at least to hold off on the presentation and proposal?  Imagine that you could filter out 20% of the leads up front with a solid, simple series of questions that you use as the "bar" that leads have to get over before they "earn" your sales team’s expensive time?

Now, 20% of 50 leads is 10 leads x 3 hours amounts to 30 hours freed up each month!  That’s almost a week of each sales person’s time!  Obviously that’s significant.  It lowers the time spent per sale from 15 hours to 12 hours.  That can’t help but improve your bottom line!

We’ll focus on this specifically later in our "Double Your Sales in 2009" series but, clearly the real win is in what your sales team does with this freed up time.

But first, how can we teach your existing team to ask the right questions up front and refrain from delivering time consuming and expensive presentations and proposals to leads that don’t past the test?  The good news is that its not really that hard to do.  The hard part is being consistent.  Its easy to "fall in love" with a lead.  They have a way of telling you what you want to hear.  Its up to you to hold your team accountable.  When they fall in love with the wrong leads, it costs you and them money.

Here’s how we do it:
We decide upon a set of questions that must be asked of every lead and the answers that are "qualified answers".
Some are obvious like "Are you the decision maker?", etc.   In fact that is the most important and most often neglected question.  Its easy to excuse the sales team.  They’ll say "We can’t get in to see the CEO initially.  We have to start with someone else and earn their trust so that they’ll help us get the CEO’s attention.  Maybe so but, a staff engineer is not the decision maker.  If you haven’t spoken with the decision maker, then there are many things you should be very careful about delivering during the sales process.

One way to identify these questions is to look at your customers.  What do they have in common?  Maybe they’re in a certain industry or region.  Maybe they’re of a certain size.  Maybe they all shared a similar challenge when they purchased from your business.  When I talk to clients, I like to ask them "What are the 5 or 10 questions you ask every new lead?".

Once you’ve identified the questions, you’ll need to work on responding to the lead’s questions and requests when they aren’t giving you the answers you want.  Develop low cost, simple ways for your team to give the lead a data sheet or brochure or price list that answers most of their questions.  Most importantly, you’ll need to teach your sales team to say NO.  The lead thinks she’s qualified.  She’s going to ask "Can you send me a proposal?", "Can you come in for a demonstration?" and you’ll need to break some bad habits.  Most sales people see it as their role to please the customer.  Its tough for them to say no.

Of course, there are "softer" ways to say no.  The best thing you can say is something like "Before I waste your time on a presentation, I’d like to find out more about your needs to be sure we’re going to be able to help."  Most importantly, you’ll need a strategy to respond to these requests from leads that aren’t decision makers.  "Who will make the final decision on this purchase?", "Before I waste your time on a presentation, can we arrange to meet with the CEO to understand their needs?", etc.

There will be a period of trying things, learning and adjusting but, if you start trying, you’ll get better and better at it.  The absolute most important step is to hold everyone accountable.  Ask sales reps about the presentations and proposals they produced recently and ask them the qualifying questions.  When they don’t have the right answers, tell them so.  Keep a record of business trips, presentations, proposals, etc. done by each rep and sit down with them and decide which were really qualified and which weren’t.  Remember, we’re talking about freeing up 1/4, 1/3, maybe even 1/2 of their time to focus on closing the best prospects and finding more prospects like them.  This is in everyone’s best interest.

As I write this I realize it probably doesn’t sound simple or easy.  I think its like taking the training wheels off your bike when you were a kid, once you get the hang of it, you can’t believe you didn’t try it sooner.

Up next in our "Double Your Sales in 2009" series is "How to Time Your Sales Efforts So Leads and Prospects Get What They Need".  It’ll be available here on February 1.  Don’t forget to register to receive the entire "Double Your Sales in 2009" series as an e-Book here.

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