How to get to your most productive prospects before your competitors?
I posted Why most sales leads are useless. It is our view that simply following up on a contact list with no other information is useless. Calling a list of contacts as leads is delusional.

What do we call a lead?
A lead is a pointer that there is “something cooking” at a customer site. That “something cooking” is something that can lead to business.
A lead can come to you from many sources. It can be a customer herself who proactively shares her organization’s plans. Or, it can be a result of field sales work on the part of the sales executive who unearths some plan. Or, it could be as a result of marketing activities performed by the marketing department (sending mailers, organizing seminars..).

Too often though, with leads such as above, you are getting the lead only along with other vendors. When the customer is ready with his needs well enough to articulate it, it is often too late to pitch your own solutions. But, how do we unearth the need without it being verbalized?
How to get to your “true” prospects before your competitors do?
We found a simple solution; based on our belief that actions speak louder than words and a lead is a culmination of multiple signals the customer is sending us all the time.

So, we asked seasoned sales managers about the activities that they felt, coming from a customer, they think signal a future intent to purchase. Not all of the signals had the same “weight”; a request to send a quotation is almost always more “valuable” than attending a seminar or a tradeshow.
Salesgenie CRM++ captures all such “signals”, automatically and when the cumulative value of all such signals from an account (customer location) exceeds a certain threshold for a certain class of products, it flags a “lead”.
The benefits of such an approach are that, almost always, you are likely to get a trigger even before the customer has thought of approaching you, formally and since now, marketing and sales know that all leads are produced as a result of activities that any or all of them have done, they focus more on closing than on wondering whether they should focus on it at all.
For those interested in a deeper analytical treatment of this, please visit this link.

Postscript: The traditional qualification for a sales lead has always been done using the B.A.N.T. (Budget, Authority, Need and Time) process. It works very well, even now, for identified opportunities which the salespeople have sunk their teeth into- which is why, our “deals workflow”- for opportunities that sales people accept as “real” is modeled on BANT. , it is difficult to apply it to sales leads that come from marketing campaigns or simply out of the internet or trade-shows. I read this nice treatise on the Paul Writer website; it makes the same point. Worth a look.

Tags: Sales leads, Sales productivity

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 7th, 2010 at 1:59 pm and is filed under CRM Basics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.