The recession has focused the attention of Sales and Marketing on one thing: leads – generating them, nurturing them, converting them.
Before the economy hit the wall, companies often found themselves with more leads than capacity to service them; now the tables have dramatically turned and they are scrambling to ensure that no leads or sales opportunities fall through the cracks.
Unfit and unprepared
When market conditions are good, companies tend to allow sales processes and systems compliance to erode, in the belief that if customers are coming through the door, why bog staff down with undue process - there is also the genuine argument that it’s better to deal with one real new customer than ten potential “tyre kickers”.
However, when strong sales conditions evaporated last year, senior management wanted answers. They wanted to see the sales pipeline, prospect numbers, segmentation reports, individual sales performance, marketing campaign performance and so on. They wanted to know what happened to all those leads they were told were in their database.
But, the damage had already been done; you can’t reclaim all the lead data that was not entered or chase prospects who have long gone elsewhere…or nowhere.
Problems are usually opportunities in disguise
Recessions are good for something! There is a powerful case right now to direct resources and investment into the sales and marketing systems and process that will ensure every lead gets captured and acted on now, as well as build the foundation for greater growth when the economy returns to positive.
Here are a few database strategies we’re recommending to help our clients generate, nurture and convert leads to sales:
1. Every lead is sacred
You can’t afford to lose one single lead through the cracks.
Dust off the sales process you all agreed to follow at last year’s sales conference and enforce it now. Drill your staff on the importance of it and place KPI’s on its compliance. When the economy turns, you’ll have a robust system that can generate and handle greater sales volumes.
2. Fix the quality of your lead database
Many database-driven lead generation initiatives don’t work because of dud data.
You might have thousands of names, but are they really prospects now or into the future? Well, now’s the time to find out.
For less than $3 per prospect - cost of calling them via outsourcing, or in-house if you have some downtime - you can easily re-qualify them. We find that prospects don’t mind the call if you are in fact genuinely enquiring about their needs to determine interest or to be removed from the prospect list.
What prospects hate is when you keep communicating with them – via mail or email - about offers they are no longer in the market for.
Reducing duplicate records is typically a mixture of systematic identification and manual interpretation. Get the database professionally de-duplicated and take advantage of staff downtime to fix duplication the automated process can’t resolve.
The downtime is also a perfect opportunity to fix data input problems such as webforms and the processes involved in following them up. You’d be shocked at how many organisations still allow duplicated records to be automatically inserted into the live database and then take days to follow-up enquiries!
3. Find the right prospect engagement model
Once you have effectively qualified each lead opportunity, you need to develop engagement strategies (process/communication) that are appropriate to unlocking each prospect segment’s potential. Every company, and the way it categorises its prospect segments, is different, but putting the effort into creating the right engagement model for each segment is key to unlocking gold from the lead database.
4. Reporting – keep it simple stupid!
It’s easy to get carried away with developing a complex array of lead database reporting. Complex and fancy reports may look great in meetings to impress management, but really, there are only a few reports that really matter. Let’s assume your database has been re-qualified and is 90% plus accurate, we have learned from experience that there are three report categories you need to worry about.
Status – Which prospects are in what status segment in your sales pipeline?
Outcomes – What was the result from actions designed to move prospects through the pipeline towards a sale?
Compliance – How accurate and consistent have staff been in ensuring the quality and qualification of the leads within the Sales Pipeline?
As it stated at the beginning of this article, the recession has focused the attention of Sales and Marketing on one thing: leads – generating them, nurturing them, converting them. If you’d like to talk to us about strategies that lead to sales, please call on (03) 9861 3000 or click here.
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