Before you can motivate and build a great sales team, you must be motivated yourself. That means you must have a great sales script, targeted Internet leads, and something of value that will actually generate sales. If you’re a small business entrepreneur it may take some time to fine tune your business model. This comes after long hours, learning from failures and building on success. It rarely ever will happen overnight instead it could take months.

The key to being a great manager or leader is finding the natural ability to motivate people. Most great CEOs can quickly read people adjusting their approach for optimal results in order to achieve their desired goals.

Hiring self motivated sales people is a great start towards ultimately building a successful team. But don’t expect these people to be whistling while they work every day. For example, cold calling sales leads can be brutal on a person’s self esteem as they encounter many hang-ups and rejections. It’s a numbers game knowing that X percentage will become a sale. Likewise, X percentage of the sales prospects you hire will actually succeed.

If you’re using a commission compensation package, the odds may be even less as the majority of these sales prospects will likely be unable to earn the necessary income. However, you will find those special sales people both men and women that are self motivated and eager to learn. These people are typically innovators likely to always seek out improvements.

As you fine tune your hiring process, you should devise tests and projects that uncover which people have that special sales touch. For example, measuring the progress of each person as they complete your inside training program is essential. Each level of progress should be carefully studied always with the goal of increasing sales. The personal satisfaction of each sales person making a career decision to come on-board should also be taken seriously.

Keep in mind, the quantity of sales people is not always the determining factor to success. A few highly skilled sales reps on your team strategically located geographically usually produces better results.

Make sure you communicate to your team the expectations and sales goals. Keep them informed through email, group meetings, and status reports. Run contests among the sales reps. Create an upbeat positive work environment but always give incentive to those that meet or beat their target goal.

Continuously train the sales team using both cost effective online multimedia and classroom presentations. Give your sales team the tools to beat any industry competition. Directly, outline clearly how your company products are superior to the competition. Perhaps, you beat the competition on pricing or maybe it’s a better quality more reliable product.

Lead your team by example; always display an innovative and positive attitude. Show enthusiasm and respect for the customers. Keep focused even during tough economic times. Keep plugging away. Don’t be afraid to experiment with new ideas and approaches designed to increase sales revenues.

During tough economic times it’s very challenging to keep your sales reps motivated. Like the old saying goes “smile and dial”. But work smart not simply hard. Employ every available technique that will not only increase sales but also improve the job satisfaction of your employees. Remember, no matter how great your CRM or Internet sales leads maybe it always comes down to the people you employ genuinely going after closing the sale. No auto dialer is going to close a sale for you in this highly competitive marketplace.

Customer prospects want personal interaction and someone they can trust calling them by name. Purchasing insurance and refinancing their home are some of the top decisions anyone will ever make in life. Be realistic, certainly they are not going to rely on an auto dialer to close such an important step. The auto dialer may be a great reminder tool but it comes down to whether your sales reps are motivated to personally dial the phone number and create a relationship with the prospect. If this critical function does not occur often enough do not expect to meet your monthly goals.

Unhappy sales reps are generally a ticket to disaster. Motivate your team with high quality sales tools armed with competitive information clearly on a flash card located in each of their office spaces. While on the phone, there’s nothing more frustrating than being unable to answer a prospect’s question. This fatal missing information could be the tipping point that lost a sale.

Supply a general talking points telephone script that highlights the key information, costs, features and methods to close any sales. Make it precise, clean and crisp. Instruct sales reps to ask you or find on their own answers to question that may require a follow-up call.

Measure the individual and team progress making adjustments on the fly while testing new methods. Don’t be afraid to make changes, companies that succeed never remain stagnant. They are always innovating new and better developments.

Listen to the customers to gain critical feedback from the field on market trends, new products, competitors, etc. Empower your sales reps to think independently – working in some cases like entrepreneurs running their own business.

For the most part sales is a numbers game plus quality assurance. Pricing is key to success. Remember every Internet sales lead you contact has Internet access that means instant ability to shop around for best pricing 24/7.

Use contests and bonus prize incentives to make the job more urgent. It’s a great tool to motivate sales reps keeping them dialing. If they know it’s a $50 bonus, restaurant gift certificate or new flat-screen TV – be sure the dialing becomes much easier for most sales reps.  You bet those eager sales reps will be dialing like there is no tomorrow. I often place the bonus prize on display to add excitement i.e. put the flat-screen in the middle of the team office space for all to see as they work.

Finally, recognize good work. Even those that are not the top three reps deserve recognition. Perhaps, take your sales team out for a cost effective lunch buffet. This is a great time to gain feedback and motivate your sales reps to keep dialing.

A lack of sales can usually be tracked to one of a few problem areas. Getting rid of these common sales problems is really easier (and cheaper) than you might think. A business strategy built around aged Internet lead and good lead management processes could be the solution to a banner year for your mortgage, debt, or insurance business.

1. Not Enough Sales Leads

This always seems to be a problem, right? We hit a good run and have a full sales pipeline and then it seems to winnow away–sending us into a marketing panic. Stop scrambling from month-to-month looking for where you are going to get new people to talk to and find an affordable marketing method that will keep your sales queue full.

Aged Internet leads can be this cheap source of qualified leads.

2. Expensive Marketing

Most marketing is expensive. Add to this the uncertainty of getting the right kind of responses. Think about the traditional approached you have used in the past: Yellow pages, newspapers, magazines, local businesses or displays. I call this “hope marketing.” You are broadcasting your service and message–hoping the right people see it and call.

Aged Internet leads are a way that you can buy only those prospects that are truly qualified and opted-in for your call.

3. Unqualified Sales Leads

Mostly because of the marketing methods, but still a big problem is the amount of your marketing budget wasted on unqualified sales leads.

This is one of the big advantages of Internet marketing and aged leads in particular. These leads are qualified through a series of questions on the Web form that self-identifies the scenarios and conditions of their financial service needs. Allowing you to carefully filter out and buy only the customers that you can help.

4. Failure to Follow-up

So, we’ve solved all the marketing problems. If you’re still not making your sales numbers then chances are you have a lead management problem. And the number one lead management problem is a failure to follow-up.

Since most of us start our businesses small we are quite efficient at using our email inbox as a CRM. But, as you grow you will start to miss critical follow-ups. This is why designing a good lead management process is critical to buying large volumes of cheap aged Internet leads.

5. Sales Pipelines that Don’t Produce

Similar to failure to follow-up a sales pipeline that doesn’t produce is probably linked to how you manage your leads. Sales requires constant activity, follow-up, and pressure on your leads. If you abandon these people in your pipeline then they will drift away.

Make sure that you have a lead management process that keeps marketing to every lead in your pipeline–puttin you in a good position to be top of mind when that person is ready to buy.

I wish I could attend the Sales 2.0 Conference in Chicago this month. The conference is often full of good stuff on sales innovation and data to back the ideas. This event is going to cover topics like: improving the productivity on your sales pipeline, sales lead management 2.0, sales 2.0 driven sales process, and social networking in sales 2.0. All ideas and topics we have visited here from time to time.

At the last event, in Boston, there was a great study done on when the best time was to make cold calls, which Geoffrey James, of Sales Machine turned into a clever quiz.

You should take a few minutes and go through it. You will be shocked how many of your assumptions about cold calling are wrong.

You know I am a big proponent of lead management and social networking in your sales process. And although this seems to be more B2B focused I think there could be a lot to learn.

I would recommend attending, but if you have conflicts like I do you can go to Sales Machine and get live updates from the conference.

Are there any good mortgage or debt industry sales conferences? I would think there would be a great opportunity for something like this.

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Where did you put that last batch of 100 aged leads? Hopefully, they are not lost in a spreadsheet on some miscellaneous computer in the office. They may be just prospects to you–leads to be passed around–but, to the smart business owner they are clients.

Chances are a large percentage of the sales leads in your pipeline (some studies say as high as 75%) will become someone’s buying clients in 6-12 months. Why would you let them become anyone else’s clients?

Aged Leads are More Than Disposable Lists

Hopefully, that little statistic awakens the competitor in you. Aged leads, as cheap as they are, should not be looked at as disposable spreadsheets. They should be looked at as future clients. If not now–sometime in the next several months. In fact you should be measuring exactly that.

Where and when do these leads convert?

Get Your Leads in a CRM

The first step in measuring and increasing you chances of conversion is getting them into a system. Take all of the leads you have floating around the office and get them into a centralized database or CRM–today! This is a very cheap investment for how much revenue it will yield you.

Add Value to Your Prospects

Now that they are in a CRM, start building a relationship. Most of these systems allow you to build mail merged direct mail pieces or manage email campaigns. These are the tools needed for communicating and adding value.

With very little effort you can begin demonstrating how valuable it is for them to work with you. You can give them simple tips on managing their debt, refinancing their home, or changes in market conditions that may make it a great time to buy a home.

Get that value system dripping on each of these “list customers.”

Give Them Great Experiences

Unlike most of your competitors (who have lost lists in abandoned desks and hard drives) your communication and connectivity to these customers is creating an experience. Make sure you are reinforcing your desire to help them when they are ready. Give them great experiences when they engage you. Make sure they are telling others about it and referring friends to you.

The first step is reaching each of these potential future clients–get those aged leads into a CRM!

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Have you ever thought about who you are selling to? What makes them tick? What makes them different from others you sell to? What do they really need? Are there patterns?

If you want to increase your sales production you should begin to segment, identify, and train against personas–creating scenarios that match target customers.

Sales Tracking

Beginning to track your sales is the first step in identifying the various segments of your target customer. Tracking sales will tell you the difference between customers–contact rates, conversion rates, and sales processes.

Tracking each sales lead will build excellent information to guide your sales training.

Customer Segmenting

Sales tracking metrics and segmentation can then be categorized into various personas–prototypical customer profiles. Segmentation allows your sales training to be effectively prepared for the variety of people you will encounter throughout the average sales day.

Segmenting into specific personas will give your sales people more tools to identify and effectively engage more customer scenarios.

Needs Assessment

Personas can be role-played and evaluated for specific needs and wants. These needs can then be played into a variety of sales training modules, allowing sales people to understand how to gather and react to a variety of different needs.

Objections

Objections also play a significant factor in building a training persona. Each objection you get can, more than likely, be categorized into a consistent persona. This will allow your training to understand the potential objections, which might be injected into a sales call very early in the engagement. Personas prepare you to be on your game–overcoming objections.

Success Monitoring

Ultimately your desire is to be more effective in selling to any and all personas. Monitoring how each approach is working and what will yield you the most success is the big yield of sales training with personas.

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Sales is not as easy as most would like to believe. There are few short cuts. Unfortunately, the Internet and your local book store are full of snake oil–top ten lists and short cuts. These short cuts are certain to short your sales results.

Unfortunately, you may not even realize you are taking a short-cut. Let’s take a look at a few indicators that you have been taking short-cuts:

1. Not calling ALL of your sales leads: So often we get overwhelmed by the number of leads to be called. This results in us “cherry-picking” a few juicy ones and attempting to get the easy deal and fill our quota. This behavior is supported by studies that show 50% of leads never get a follow-up.

2. Not following up completely: Making a couple of calls on a lead rarely gets the deal. Most deals require a fourth or fifth call, but you feel like it is dead. This behavior is supported by studies that show 80% of sales are made between the fifth to twelfth call.

3. Abbreviating your sales process: Sales take a very defined path in most cases. You need to build a relationship by building trust, filling promises, meeting expectations, and listening to what the customer wants. All of this takes time and multiple encounters. If you are trying to short cut that interaction with the customer you are probably going to lose the deal to a better sales person.

It is easy for short cuts to creep into your sales process, especially when you are struggling. However, remember that even all-stars have hitting slumps and the smart one know that the only solution is to slug his way out of it.

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One of the top questions I get from my aged mortgage and debt leads clients is: “Troy, how do I increase my sales conversion.” The answer is very simple–manage your sales leads.

If you want to get the most out of your aged leads, whether they be mortgage or debt is to manage them properly. Most of my clients are using some form of lead management system. I have given a few examples of some of the top ones in a previous post. So, in this post I will just review what are some of the most critical components.

Easy to Import Leads into the System

Hopefully you will be acquiring and importing thousands of sales ready leads. The last thing you need is for this importing process to be a pain. It should be simple and quick. Time wasted trying to get leads into the system are sales lost.

Check to see if your lead management system has support for Microsoft Excel or CSV imports. These are the most common lead file formats.

Efficient Way to Distribute Leads

Once your leads are in the system, you need to immediately get them into the hands of sales people. This should either happen automatically or be as simple as the click of a button.

Your software or system should be able to quickly slice and dice the lead data to segment. This segmentation should then be able to be quickly pushed or pulled into a sales person’s pipeline.

Good Queuing or Prioritization System

You want to have your sales teams working efficiently through their pipelines. You want follow-up to automatically queue, bubbling old leads back to the top for follow-up. Prioritization will also help ensure that your sales folks are working on the leads you deem as the most important.

Ability to Quickly Status and Note Leads

No lead, especially in the aged lead world, will close on the first contact. You need to document conversations you have with customers. These notes will help you seem familiar and focused on that client’s deal.

In addition to simple notes you need to have a way to status leads. These statuses will help you track and forecast future revenue opportunity.

Incorporates Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is a great way to multiply the effectiveness of your sales resources. This automation, especially on aged mortgage and debt leads will assist you in contacting more leads. It will place you at the top of thousands of customer minds without even touching the phone.

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Do you want to increase your revenue in 2009? Produce or buy a steady pipeline of sales leads. Too many sales organizations and sales processes ebb and flow their lead supply. This creates a loss of momentum as you dwindle and as you rebuild the pipeline. Sending your revenue production into a wild roller coaster ride.

This seems logical enough, but how do you really implement this?

1. Set Goals: This is of course the best way to make sure your pipeline is consistent. Simply work backwards–revenue target and conversion rate is all I need to know. Now, how many leads do I need in my pipeline to make it all work?

2. Measure Results: Of course, if you are not measuring you won’t know these numbers. Get a simple lead management system and start tracking your leads and conversion.

3. Be Ready: You need to constantly be ready with that 30 second, compelling response to: “What can you do for me?”

4. Prospect: Prospecting needs to be a scheduled, structured part of your sales day.

5. Get Referrals: Nothing has a better conversion rate, than a referral from a happy client. Build a system that creates a steady flow of these. Make it a part of every closing process.

6. Buy Leads: There is no better short-cut to maintaining a steady pipeline than buying leads. Aged mortgage and debt leads are also an economical way to fill in ebbs in sales pipelines. No matter how good your sales process is–you will still have slow patches. Use lead buying to fill the gaps.

If you build a sales program and lead management system that keeps sales pipelines full–you will have a very happy and productive sales team.

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