You can’t call yourself a salesperson if you haven’t watched Glengarry Glen Ross. The gist of the movie is that salespeople will do anything for great leads. Over the past year, we‘ve worked with several great companies to help them get more leads. A key takeaway from this process is that many technology companies aren’t embracing simple best practices in digital marketing that will bring in more leads.
Are you making these mistakes?
Over the past year MPSToolbox has developed a process we call a digital audit. The idea of the audit is to help identify costly gaps in your sales and marketing processes. We do this not only for e-commerce revenue, but also contracted business. We compare dealers against companies that have implemented best practices and recommend changes that will drive leads and sales.
Lead Silos. Are Salespeople Keeping Leads to Themselves?
Your customer database is a living, breathing thing. If you’ve been in your local market for decades, you should expect that your sales team has combed the area and you know the target audience that you’d like to do business with. You should have emails and records for all customers and prospects.
Don't be afraid to create a client database. While salespeople have a tendency not to share leads, this can be disastrous for your business. It's okay to have sales reps own an opportunity, but that's different from owning a contact.
Along with creating a customer database, your company should also be asking:
- How many new quality leads is the sales team receiving each month?
- How many new contacts is each salesperson providing to the database each month?
- How is the quality of these leads being measured?
Knowing the answers to these questions will be crucial in the months to come. It will set the bar for your team while highlighting the pitfalls of your processes. You’ll see more clearly if your salespeople are meeting industry benchmarks. And maybe they’re not. If your salespeople can’t answer these questions, for example, then you’ve got a serious problem on your hands. Problems that could be solved with a digital audit and a strong digital presence.
Make sure that you then follow up with your customers regularly. And no, this shouldn’t be done by cold calling. Think digital! You should be contacting customers via your newsfeeds, through blogs, and emailing product offers. However your team manages opportunities should be the way they continue to produce leads to add to your database. Think CRM software like HubSpot.
HubSpot is a great tool for cultivating more customers and prospects. If used correctly, it can give you valuable information about your leads’ interests and how they’re responding to your emails and website.
“I’ll check back in three months…”
In my opinion, the best part about salespeople is that they think in blocks of months and quarters. But at the same time, it can also be the worst thing about salespeople. Their timing is not typically aligned with customers. What happens in between the last contact time and the three month check-in? Is the main contact still there? Has the prospect added or removed employees? Have they since explored adjacent technologies that your company might offer?
Our audits have frequently found:
- No one person is responsible for managing the contact database.
- There’s no automated process where leads and contacts are added to a database.
- There’s no segmentation of contacts by customer, prospect, vertical, and responsibility.
- Contacts aren’t communicated with regularly enough via email or social media.
- Contacts aren’t given a score that grades the quality of them as a lead in terms of engagement.
Why Should You Care?
Leads are your lifeblood. Mining your contact database for new opportunities will net you more leads of higher quality than leaving contacts in the hands of salespeople and hoping they turn into sales.
If you implement a better process to update your database and nurture contacts, you’ll see a significant increase in leads for your sales team.
Is Turnover an Issue?
Most of us are familiar with the Great Resignation. Covid has resulted in an unprecedented employee turnover, which has no doubt impacted you and your customers. The same goes for contacts leaving. If a contact leaves your database, you know as soon as you email them and get a response. If it’s not a current customer then that’s a massive opportunity, especially if you know about the change before the incumbent does.
Now think about what the Great Resignation means for your own company. If a salesperson leaves, how does that affect your customer/prospect relationship? An overreliance on your salespeople to communicate with customers and prospects will leave you vulnerable. Whereas centrally managing your contacts can build trust and loyalty, helping you when these inevitable turnover situations happen.
Want More Leads? Here's How to Get Them:
To properly gain leads you need a sales team that's on the same page about everything. They need answers to the questions I asked earlier. Most importantly, they need to know how their results compare to the industry's benchmarks. But there's more to it than that. What you really need is a strong digital presence.
As they say in Glengarry Glen Ross, "Coffee is for closers." But it's up to you to make sure your sales team doesn't have to skip their morning coffee. You should be setting them up for success by recognizing where your business needs improvements.
Lucky for you, our digital audit does just that. It shows you what's wrong with your current processes and offers guidance on how to improve them. Pair this with some solid digital marketing and you might just have a team of coffee loving closers on your hands.
Interested in getting a digital audit? Let's talk!
