Finding prospects you can turn into customers is a never-ending task. Whether you’re using technology to help or just good old-fashioned networking and research by a salesperson, the sales funnel goes dry without prospecting. These posts can help.
No salesperson is above call reluctance.
Why does it plague most salespeople at one time or another? So many things make prospecting difficult: Hours can pass with no success. People might be mean. It’s boring. Rejection hurts.
More than 40% of salespeople experience at least one bout of call reluctance, according to research from Baylor University and Behavioral
Sciences Research Press. Most will battle the issue many times in their careers.
You won’t get responses if your sales email looks like everyone else’s.
Unfortunately, it’s too easy to look like everyone else.
Email is more popular and convenient than sales calls, so buyers are buried under them every day. And most messages are filled with the same old phrases plugged in the same old templates.
To buyers, one email looks like the next, and the next reads like the one that follows.
Beware new salespeople: Prospecting can break you.
Now that we got the hard truth out of the way, let’s get down to why prospecting won’t break you.
Knowledge is power in sales. The more you know about prospecting, the more likely you will win!
Behold new salespeople (and any veteran who wants re-indoctrinated or reinvigorated). Your guide to prospecting includes:
Do you have enough leads?
“No!” says just about every B2B salesperson on the planet.
Some claim Marketing gives them bad leads. Others say good leads get mishandled. And many B2B salespeople say they don’t have time or resources to generate enough leads. (To be fair, many marketers complain salespeople don’t nurture their good leads.)
There’s plenty of conflicting research on the best B2B lead generator – one says it’s SEO, another says it’s email, and others say it’s all about content.
Oh, the potential of a sales lead!
It could become the best client. The multi-million-dollar sale. The most loyal customer. The ultimate referral.
Or it could be nothing more than a name on a list.
But knowledge is power, especially in the uncertain world of sales leads. The more you know, the more equipped you’ll be to find and manage quality sales leads.
So let’s take an in-depth look at the important research and data on sales leads.
I’ve got your back! That makes for great relationships.
And the sooner you can establish the I-got-your-back kind of trust with prospects, the more likely you’ll close the deal.
So how can you prove to prospects you truly have their back when all the other providers who claim the same?
Your prospect didn’t respond. Or a hot prospect went cold. You’ve followed up with email – and still nothing.
There’s a chance you didn’t get through to the people you needed to reach. But there’s a bigger chance you didn’t build enough intrigue in your first contact.
Don’t give up. Send another email. Send several follow-up e-mails.
All those leads – and so little chance of converting them.
It’s a frustrating reality for marketing and sales professionals: Only about 20% of leads convert to a sale, according to MarketingSherpa research.
But there’s promising news. Companies that handle leads well – through tactics such as scoring and nurturing – generate 50% more sales at a third of the cost, Forrester researchers found.
Bottom line: Companies that use lead scoring get more quality sales.
Lead scoring is just like it sounds. Leads get scored with numerical values you assign to different behaviors and activities. Then you decide if their total score is worthy of moving through your funnel.
“We just aren’t making a decision.”
Discouraging words from a prospect. But just the beginning of good things to come.
For sales professionals, a “no decision” isn’t a “no.”
In fact, when prospects say they aren’t ready to decide, they probably are a lot closer to a “yes” than you suspect. They give a lot of clues in what they otherwise do and say. And that’s when you want to shift strategies to get in line with where they are.
Here are 13 signs a prospect is close to a yes (despite claiming it’s a no):
You can – and probably do – grab new leads every day.
But do those leads really want what you have?
Without a demand generation plan, they may never realize they do. With an effective demand gen plan, they’ll pay attention, engage with you and – if you get it all right – become a customer.
A demand generation plan should be the perfect marriage (or as perfect as any marriage can be) between the marketing and sales funnels. Ideally, it’s a long marriage – bridging everything from the first interaction with prospects to the point a qualified lead becomes a customer.
Here are four components of a demand generation plan and in-depth tips and tools on making them effective.
