In my last post I gave you mistakes 1 – 3. In this post I’ll continue with mistakes 4 and 5.
Mistake #4: Treating everyone on your database the same. Bill Cosby allegedly said, “I don’t know the key to success, but the key to failure is trying to please everybody.” If you can’t identify your most important contacts, you can’t give them the special handling they deserve. Other than “customer” or “prospect,” “A-B-C” or “Hot-Warm-Cold,” most salespeople have no database segmentation system. (Read my 14 Ways To Segment Your Database.)
Mistake #5: Not investing in yourself. Knowledge actually doubles every 18 months (not surprisingly, that’s the product launch life cycle of a new laptop). A million websites are launched everyday. In fact, more information has been produced in the last 20 years than in the previous 2,000. To be a valuable go-to resource for customers, you must continually expand your knowledgebase. Develop a passion for learning, and schedule a recurring time on your calendar to do it. Here’s a few tips:
Reinvest 3%-5% of your income on books, workshops, seminars and coaching with the top mentors in your field
Subscribe to your own trade pubs as well as pubs from your top customers’ industries
Become a headline scanner. When you see something relevant, rip it out, put it in a pile, and discard the rest. Read the pile once a week or take it with you on your next flight.
Carry stamped envelopes at all times to kill 2 birds: When you discover an article or an idea that friends or clients might like to know, scribble a note on the article or a note, and mail it to them. Send thank you notes often.
Subscribe to Google Alerts using keywords of customer names, competitors, industry trends and ideas you want to explore. Google will send you relevant web postings regularly–for free
Time is money. Stop wasting time trying to remember or search for logins and passwords. Get RoboForm for under $40. I have almost 100 of my favorite member profiles stored and it’s 2 clicks to log in to any info I want to see now. It also has a form fill feature.
BONUS Mistake #6: Mike Elam, veteran sales professional, says, “The biggest mistake I see is when businesses jump into a marketing program and drop it before it has a chance to work. The #1 recommendation I make to clients is to find something to do consistently and stay with it.
What mistakes ring true in your world? Share a lesson learned with me.
I’m often asked about the technology I use to keep track of my busy day. Because I’m a Social CRM consultant (formerly known as a Database Marketing Consultant), I’m expected to be “up” on the latest hardware, sofware, gadget and widget silver-bullet du jour.
Actually, I’m an old-fashioned girl in this department. I believe “less is more.” On the “adopter” bell-shaped curve, I’m definitely a “Missouri Show-Me” late majority. There are too many time-suck temptations already. If I forget this lesson, all I have to do is look at my 16-year-old niece who hasn’t made eye contact with another human since acquiring her iPhone six months ago. But for those of us who manage a monthly sales quota and have jobs that require us to be social networkers, business is no longer sustainable without at least a database.
These are the 5 critical sales lead management mistakes I see most often:
Mistake #1: Not having a customer/prospect database. FastCompany says the average executive wastes 6 weeks a year looking for stuff. And what are we looking for most often? Phone numbers, papers and files, notes, checklists or items to put on our checklists. If your entire world–customers, prospects, vendors, friends, family–is stored in only one easily accessible database, then you never have to look in multiple places (or on more than one Post-It or spreadsheet) to find critical contact info. Window of opportunity met; search frustration eliminated.
Mistake #2: Not giving salespeople the right tools they need to do their #1 job: to sell. I’m always amazed when the sum total of a company’s sales process boils down to “make cold calls and send me your call report weekly.” Mandatory sales closing tools for salespeople are a) a customer/prospect database, b) a lead-generation marketing program and c) an automated follow-up drip-marketing program where leads that aren’t ready to buy now can be nurtured until they’re ready to be closed.
Why don’t more sales organizations subscribe to this sales automation methodology? First, they’re living in the past, when Willy Loman types could carry a bag door to door and, by virtue of “the numbers”, stumble over sales. That type of selling is at death’s door, if not DOA already. Customers are self-servicing the discovery, consideration, short list and negotiation phases of the sales cycle. We’re lucky to be called in at the end when a there’s a specific question or an RFP to respond to. Ugh. The RFP: a salesperson’s worst sales opportunity.
Second, companies believe they pay high salaries to salespeople to perform the entire lead-to-customer process. But all parts of the sales process are not created equal. Why match a 6-figure salesperson to the $10/hour job of cold calling–even cold-calling new inquiries that haven’t yet scored for emotional qualification? This is a sure-fire way to extend the sales cycle (and pay out even more in expensive salaries).
And let’s not even think about what happens to those expensive leads when the high-paid salesperson quits and nothing’s been documented. The Alexander Group found that only 38% of all sales teams met their annual sales quotas last year. Sure, we’re in a bad economy and “no one’s buying anything.” But could some of that failure to achieve be the mismatch of talent-to-job duties? If a company downsizes and the sales rep must now take on more admin duties in addition to selling, won’t that ultimately affect sales results?
Mistake #3: Trying to solve every problem with technology. This is as bad as trying to band-aid every problem with no technology. In every sales organization there are technology champions and anti-computer curmudgeons, and never the twain shall meet.
In my experience, many computer-phobes got that way because their companies’ systems changed so often that they were forced into “que sera” mode and created their own systems–one that allows them to do their job, regardless of how the company thought it should be done (solution du jour).
They’re deathly afraid to learn something new IN CASE it doesn’t work and they’ll still be held accountable. This is exactly the kind of passive-aggressive smart bomb that can tank an under-planned new technology initiative. I can’t count the number of times a sales manager or business owner has said to me, “We can’t automate our sales process; our people won’t use it.” While that’s a little like letting the inmates run the asylum, I’ve found it’s really more a matter of engineering in a higher benefit for the salespeople so that management isn’t the only piece of the company that wins with technology.
Many computer-phobes are trainable. If they’re not, and they’re big producers, having an admin take their paperwork and automate it still produces ROI in most cases. That’s because only 13% of the pipeline is ready to buy today. The rest need nurturing, and that top-producer is not going to waste his time on that low-level lead.
I’ll pick up with the last of my sales lead management mistakes in my next post. Please leave me your thoughts below.
This month “google,” the verb, (not Google, the company) was chosen as Word of the Decade by the American Dialect Society. Not surprising when you consider that more than 90% of all buyers start the process by “googling” their object of desire–even if they use Yahoo or Bing to search for it.
One of the final frontiers in search engine optimization (SEO) is local search. That’s how retailers, service businesses, local consultants and sales teams can level the playing field with everyone else on the planet who sells what they do by mastering local search, “even if they don’t have a website,” says Will Hanke. Will is a local SEO practitioner and founder of MarketSTL, a local conference designed specifically for teaching local businesses the fundamentals of managing their own SEO. [click to continue…]
Drip marketing is not something I just talk about, it’s the primary marketing strategy I’ve integrated into my business for the past 6 years. (I’ve actually relied on drip marketing for more than 20 years, but it’s only been recently that drip marketing automation software has scaled to desktop use for SMBs, small sales teams and consultants. Cost is no longer a barrier to entry; for under a few hundred dollars a month, any size company can compete digitally for more business with drip marketing automation.)
I’d like to share one of my personal drip marketing success stories with you. It’s a great example of why it’s so important to implement a drip marketing strategy sooner rather than later.
This is Part 2 of my article outlining a get-started drip-marketing checklist. You can read Part 1 here.
Like any complex, overwhelming task, launching your first drip marketing campaign is easier if you break down big concepts into discreet, do-able action items. Here’s the second half of the checklist. [click to continue…]
Most businesses don’t communicate with their customer base enough, and miss sales because of their inability to “clone” their salespeople. So it’s not hard to see the benefits of adding drip marketing to your marketing plan, which automates the follow-up process and identifies the *hot* prospects from the ones who are only “half-baked.”
The roadblock to implementing is the execution. Drip marketing is inherently overwhelming, with its multiple steps, if/then processes and prolific copywriting requirements. It can morph into a never-ending project.
In the late 80s, I was Regional Sales Manager for a national database company that sold business intelligence and mailing lists primarily through onsite seminars and inbound marketing (pre-Internet marketing!) The company invested more than $50,000 in a contact management system that was programmed to spit out follow-up drip marketing letters every 7 days once a prospect identified himself.
Every year the week before Thanksgiving, I call my mother to tell her I’m baking the pumpkin and apple pies for our Thanksgiving dessert. And every year she says, “Oh, you don’t have to do that. I’ll just pick up pies at the market.” [click to continue…]
Q - I just changed companies and have more than 100 Swiftpage email marketing templates with my old company info. Do I have to change them all manually to the updated info? [click to continue…]
Give a man a hammer, and everything looks like a nail. Email marketing campaign software often has the same effect on novice email marketers. They forget how much they hate advertising mail when they start sending it out themselves. Business email marketing can be a force for good or it can be a force for evil. You have the power. Use it wisely.
ACT! Contact Management Tip:
One of our ACT! users asked: How can I get a list of contacts that do not belong to a specific group? I can lookup a specific group, which I did for a mailing. Now I want to lookup all other contacts who don’t belong to a group in ACT! I can’t [...]
Ann Clarke cracked the code on maximizing IGAs (Income Generating Activities) when she discovered ACT! Sage Software.
As a long-time professional speaker plus acting chief cook and bottle washer on the business side of www.Gr8IdeasAtWork.com, Ann knew the importance of simplifying her business processes so she could book more speaking gigs and do what she loves [...]
This has been a tough year for salespeople in all industries–no doubt about it! But here’s another trend that’s gaining momentum: Customers who want something for nothing. It’s not just reality–it’s ACTUALITY!!
In a recent “Ask the Expert” column on www.btobonline.com, John Wechsler, president of FormSpring, asks this question: “What is the best way to connect e-mail marketing and data gathered in online forms?,” and then answers it by stating, “Your online form data should go directly to your email service provider (ESP).”
No, no, no John! I [...]
Are you an ACT! 6.0 die-hard fanatic who cries, “You’ll have to pull ACT! 6.0 from my cold, dead hands!”?
We feel your pain. We loved that version, too. It was “solid.” It was snappy when you went from screen to screen (ahh, the good old days of DBF files…before SQL turned everything into a website [...]
There’s gold in them thar rejected email addresses, and most businesses don’t mine for it.
List clean up is never fun, so it gets deferred to the bottom of the to-do list. But cleaning up your email list after each marketing email gives you additional insight into your customers and the kinds of information you should [...]
New customers represent risk and opportunity. Risk because they immediately go into “buyers remorse.” Opportunity because they could become long term evangelists for your business. This drip marketing sequence shows you how to maximize your opportunity. Feel free to download with my compliments and edit to suit your business.
I’m asked a lot more now by clients and meeting planners to speak on how social media fits into customer experience marketing
(NOTE: new buzzword alert!) In other words, now that customers are in control of the buying process instead of us, the sellers, what can we do to give them a better “user experience” [...]
It was one of those miracles that you thought could never happen to you. These things only happen to other people.
Like the motorist who stopped to help change a tire on a limo. Only to find out the limo belonged to Donald Trump who, in gratitude, paid off the guy’s mortgage. But, I swear, my [...]
