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Jennifer Foster Marketing

sales processes

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“I’ve got leads, now what?”

As you kick off your 2021 sales initiatives your prospecting activity probably looks a lot different than it did a year ago.

COVID sent us online for connection like never before. We attended classes, seminars, meetings and likely even a couple happy hours. A lot of sales professionals who had tremendous success with more traditional methods of meeting and even direct mail were forced into a new world of outreach because no one was meeting in person and very few were even in their office to receive the phone calls and mail.

  • Dedicated time can help you connect!

Enter Online Networking.

LinkedIn and other digital mediums became the main way to connect with sales prospects. And there are literally dozens of lead generation tools hitting the market every day. So you’ve got leads, you’ve made connections. Now what?

  1. Stop the social spiral but keep your consistency We all know social media is a time suck personally, so it seems logical that it can quickly become a time suck professionally. I suggest setting aside 30-45 mins per day to keep you within your limits. Set a timer, create your post, interact with your followers, comment on and share posts you follow, and when the timer goes off – you’re done for the day.
  2. Automate your marketing messages but only where it makes sense.
    Marketing automation allows you to communicate, evaluate and accelerate your leads through your sales funnel. Email and printed communications help reach your audiences with customized, relevant information, triggered by THEIR behaviors. As a general rule I do not suggest automating your social media, its just not authentic and more importantly the algorithms will generally deprioritize them.
  3. Qualify the connections and identify which are viable leads.
    You will have far more connections than will ever become worthwhile prospects. It’s the nature of the beast. So if you don’t qualify them you’re going to be out of the social spiral and into the outreach one. Bucket your leads by a few key criteria such as titles, region or whether or not you have spoken with them. The more you know about your leads, the more personalized your automated messaging and nurturing can be.
  4. Augment what you know about your lead.
    If you don’t have a lot of information about your qualified leads you can easily find more. An email address is the perfect place to start. You can then create additional content to get more information from them or simply reach out to them via email and start a conversation.

Finally, it will take both your patience and your persistence to effectively following-up with your new connections. It is a near certainty that it will take several calls and emails — research says up to 12! — at different times of the day to finally reach your prospect. A structured lead follow-up system will prepare and aid you to connect more effectively with those hard-to-reach leads that suddenly drop off the ether the moment they hit your sales funnel.

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When Your Marketing is Too Successful: Overcoming Bad Operational Processes

When starting to write this blog I thought about a couple different titles:

DRAFT TITLE 1: When good marketing goes bad!
But trying to get the scary music to coincide with you reading the title was too much trouble.

DRAFT TITLE 2: Admit it, your support processes suck.
Um, probably the most accurate, but probably a bit too blunt. Even for me.

One of my current clients is realizing this the hard way. And even worse correcting it is proving to be a brutal task for all of us.

It's okay to admit it if your support processes are costing you clients.
It’s okay to admit it if your support processes are costing you clients.

Here’s the situation: We overhauled their website and launched some social media and their sales process is working great. (Yes, I’m really good. I’m also humble.) They’ve added a couple of outbound call campaigns to highly targeted lists that are generating results. That’s what we all hope for right? Generating and qualifying leads is generally considered the crux of marketing and sales projects.

Here’s where things break down: without giving too much away (I’m good, but no one wants to work with a gabby marketing consultant) this is a high-touch category, so while they’re generating multiple leads, their operational processes simply aren’t built to pull the leads thru the closing and support pipeline, which will cost them on the retention end.

My client realizes that the hardest part isn’t finding and qualifying leads but delivering on the services promised during the sales process.

Shortsighted marketing efforts would call the lead generation a success, but truly agile marketing measures the process all the way through and builds in constant process improvement. Here are some common places where your processes may be failing:

  1. Getting leads but failing to close deals. There honestly could be several reasons for this, but we’ll focus on making sure that your leads get handed off cleanly. If you’ve got someone making initial contact, like my client, and someone else who actually presents and closes the deal you have to make sure this is seamless. It also is a good time to make sure you have the right marketing and communication materials to support whatever your process is. It’s not a one-size-fits-all approach.
  2. Closing deals but failing to retain customers. This one will go hand in hand with number 3 where I’ll talk about angry customers (which will quickly lead to number 4.) For this one, think about those customers that just quietly fade away. You may not even realize it for a year, or two, or more. Probably because they believe they didn’t matter to you and if you didn’t notice they were gone, they were probably right.
  3. Spending costly amounts of time addressing customer service issues. Angry customers cost you a lot of money. They take up your team’s valuable time on the phone ranting about how upset they are. To assuage them you give them something free which costs money or resources. Sure, you can’t make everyone happy, and I’m a firm believer in firing a customer if needed, but if you see trends in your customer service issues, there’s probably an underlying operational process that needs to be tightened up.
  4. Battling your reputation in the eyes of customers. When an upset customer leaves, they normally don’t do it quietly. Everyone I know can name at least three companies that they will never, ever, ever do business with again (SWA I’m looking at you.) They then proceed to tell anyone who will listen exactly why. Now instead of getting the valuable referral, you’ve lost a potential customer that you never even had contact with.

The way to fix this isn’t overly complicated, but it does require regular oversight and consistent process improvement. Put measurements in at every milestone. When customers fall out of the lead generation process, you should try to find out why. When they fail to renew or become repeat customers, you want to do what you can to either bring them back but to keep other customers from following them out the door.