Next Wave Marketing Strategies » sales process

Change Your Sales Approach in 2012

Troy Wilson — Thu, 12 Jan 2012 09:09:46 +0000

Increase 2012 Sales - NextWaveMarketingStrategies.com

The year 2011, with its uncertain economy, mortgage crises, and credit crunches left many salespeople feeling burned out. “Why should I even try?” they asked. “Nobody’s buying insurance these days.”

But that was 2011, and this is 2012. Start the New Year with a positive attitude as well as several ideas for turning prospects into valued customers.

Overhaul Your Sales Process

A lot of leads never become customers because they somehow slipped through the cracks and received little or no follow-up. Some never even received an initial contact from a member of the sales team. Starting today, find a way to keep track of all of your leads and the contacts you’ve had with them. Some people prefer to do this with pen and paper, others prefer CRM software. Whatever your approach, remember that it usually takes people at least seven contacts before they make a buying decision. Make sure your sales process provides that level of lead nurturing.

Set Action-Oriented Goals

Outcome-oriented goals such as, “I want to increase my sales by ten percent this year,” can be difficult to achieve because, although you can perfect your sales approach, you can’t force a client to buy from you. Instead of focusing on an outcome over which you have only limited control, set action-oriented productivity goals that are under your control. Examples include, “I will make 20 cold calls every day over the next month,” or “I will send emails to new prospects within an hour of receiving the referral.”

Renew Your Motivation

When conversions are slow, it’s easy to lose some of your motivation and enthusiasm. Renew your commitment by thinking about the ways in which the products and services you offer benefit your clients. It may also help to read testimonials of satisfied customers. Getting back in touch with the positive aspects of your job can help your productivity soar.

Know Your Products and Services Inside and Out

Learning about the wide range of products and services available to your customers can help you make a sale. For instance, when a customer complains that a product is out of his or her price range, you can think through the options and offer them a scaled-down package at a more affordable price. Rather than argue with the customers about their reasons for saying no, you can come up with a plan that makes them comfortable saying yes.

Ask for the Sale

This is a step many salespeople leave out because they are uncomfortable or don’t want to appear pushy; however, it’s important for you to take the lead, since your prospect has no idea what the next step in the process should be. There’s nothing wrong with saying something like, “Now that you’ve reviewed our proposal, I’d really like to get you enrolled in this plan as soon as possible. Would you like to start today?”

Like 2011, the year 2012 is bound to have its challenges and setbacks, but if you focus on making your sales process as strong as it can be, you can weather the storms and finish the year feeling proud of what you have accomplished.

How to Execute a Multi Touch Sales Process

Troy Wilson — Thu, 05 Jan 2012 09:09:17 +0000

It’s a common saying among salespeople that it takes up to seven contacts to make a sale. When the economy is sluggish, though, the number of required contacts can quickly climb to as high as 16.

That is why it makes sense to use a multi touch sales process. A multi touch sales process involves making contact with a prospect multiple times as well as using multiple methods of communication such as an e-mail campaign, follow up calls, direct mail, text messages, and voicemails. The multi touch process can be effective whether your sales staff is cold calling or warm calling.

Multi Touch Sales Process - Next Wave Marketing Strategies

Stage 1: Intro Call and E-Mail

If you are cold calling, your first contact with a prospect is likely to be a brief phone conversation. If the prospect sounds interested, send him or her a follow up e-mail highlighting the benefits of your insurance plans and providing your contact information so that the prospect can easily reach you with questions. This intro call and e-mail marks the beginning of your sales process.

Stage 2: Follow Up and Nurturing

Over the next several weeks, follow up with the prospect on a scheduled basis. An e-mail campaign is an efficient method of follow up, allowing you to easily send additional information about your programs. When you use e-mail, you can also gauge your prospect’s interest by checking to see whether he or she is opening the emails and clicking on the links provided.

In addition to sending a series of e-mails, you should also make follow up calls, leaving voicemails if necessary. Your goal, of course, is to attempt to engage the prospect directly so you can assess whether or not he or she remains interested in purchasing insurance from your organization.

In many cases, stage 2 ends with a sale.

Stage 3: Final Call and Voicemail

There are times when a prospect is simply not ready to make a purchase or, for whatever reason, does not want to make a purchase from your company. At some point, he or she may ask to be removed from your contact list. Alternatively, you may realize that you are making no progress and decide to move on to other, more promising leads.

Making a courteous final call and voicemail leaves the door open is the prospect becomes ready to buy from you in the future. In your final voicemail, thank the prospect for his or her time and remind the prospect that you and your organization are available to answer questions or to help in any other way.

It’s a hard fact that you won’t convert every lead no matter what sales process you use, but Business Acceleration Strategies found that using the multi touch method can increase a company’s sales by more than 200%. The more chances you give customers to buy from you, the more likely it is they will take you up on one of those chances.

5 Top Apps Salespeople Need to Have

Troy Wilson — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 09:03:04 +0000

Top Mobile Apps for Sales Teams - NextWaveMarketingStrategies.com

When you send your sales agents out into the field, you want to be sure that they have all the equipment they need to do their jobs. While this kind of technology used to mean hauling a laptop everywhere, much of it is now accessible via smart phone. These five apps can help your agents when they are away from the office.

Touch Base with GoToMeeting

GoToMeeting allows your staff to conduct an entire meeting online or to join a live meeting in progress. State of the art technology allows them to watch presentations and view reports as if they were there…without the added expense of bringing them in from the field. GoToMeeting does not currently work with BlackBerry.

CamCard Lite.

During an evening of networking, business cards are annoyingly easy to misplace. Even if you hang onto them, by the time you get into the office the next morning, you’ve often forgotten why you thought that person was an important contact. CamCard Lite allows you to read cards immediately and save the contact information. It also allows you to group your different contacts in ways that will make it easy for you to follow up with them. The service costs $6.99, but there is a free trial available. It works with all smart phones including Android and BlackBerry.

DocScan

Do you need to get that signed contract to the office right away? Don’t drive miles out of your way. Instead, scan the document and email it to the person who needs it. If you use Googledocs or Dropbox, you can also upload them to these programs. DocScan is available to i-Phone and iPad users only.

Apple’s Keynote

This handy application allows you to bring sales presentations with you on your phone. You can view and edit presentations in both Keynote 09 and MS PowerPoint. When you’re ready to start your speech, simply plug your phone into a projector and HDTV and watch the images appear. As the name suggests, Apple’s Keynote works only with the i-Phone, iPad, and iPod Touch.

Customer Relationship Managements Apps

There are many different applications that can help you manage your relationships with customers. Most of them allow you to keep track of client contacts and follow up on leads while in the field. You can also communicate with sales staff in the office who can help you meet the needs of your customer right away.

Whether you have an Android, an i-Phone, or a BlackBerry, there are several applications that you can use to help you keep track of meetings, important documents, potentially valuable contacts, and client information. Use the technology available today to stay a step ahead of your competitors.

5 Reasons You Need Aged Auto Leads Before the New Year

Troy Wilson — Tue, 06 Dec 2011 14:05:02 +0000

Aged Auto Insurance Leads - NextWaveMarketingStrategies.com

If you mention buying aged leads, especially auto insurance leads, many sales agents will look at you as if you’ve just grown another couple of heads. Be smart and ignore their skeptical responses. The truth is that aged auto insurance leads can play a significant role in increasing your sales and breaking in new employees as the year draws to a close.

There are at least five reasons to pursue aged leads.

1. Aged Car Insurance Leads Cost Less.

You can usually purchase older leads for under $1 dollar lead. If you buy the leads in bulk, you can often get them for much less. In other words, even if you don’t make a single sale from a given lead order, you haven’t risked a significant amount of money and its just a matter of time before aged leads empower you to start winning the numbers game.

2. Aged Car Insurance Leads Must Make a Decision at Some Time

Unlike many people who risk going without health insurance or life insurance, anyone who drives a car is required to carry at least liability insurance. If the car has not been paid off, the owner must carry collision insurance as well. This means that whether they are dealing with renewals on an old policy or looking for a completely new carrier, they must at some point reach a decision. If yours is the only insurance company calling them, they are likely to select you.

3. Aged Leads Require Less Hand-Holding

Chances are excellent that most aged car insurance leads have been approached by insurance companies before. They’ve had a chance to look over the different packages and prices. By the time they reach you, after the other insurance companies have given up and backed off, these prospects are usually very knowledgeable about products, services, and reasonable prices.

4. Fresh Leads May Have Been too Overwhelmed to Make a Decision

When a person fills out a form requesting a free car insurance quote, that person may find him or herself inundated with calls from many different insurance companies. Because this whole process is so overwhelming, the auto insurance prospects simply decide by not deciding, even if they desperately need renewals on this policies. When the other agencies have backed off, and yours is the only one reaching out, the lead is likely to grasp onto you like a lifeline. If your prices are the least bit competitive, you can win a sale.

5. Aged Auto Leads Make Great Practice for New Agents

Your first contact with your aged auto lead will probably be by phone or email. You can train new agents how to respond promptly to leads who express an interest in your services.

As the year comes to an end and many people realize their auto policies require renewals, don’t back away from older leads. Instead, embrace them as a great source of training and income.

5 Huge Reasons You Need to Start Texting Your Target Audience

Troy Wilson — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 11:50:55 +0000

When technology is relatively new, it’s hard for marketers to know whether to jump on the band wagon or just keep doing what has always worked. Some new technologies really are just a fad – remember eight tracks, anyone? – but it looks like the cell phone, and more specifically, text messaging, is here to stay.

Moreover, if you wait too long to develop a text-messaging marketing program, you could see your sales plummet as your customers gravitate to a more technology-savvy competitor.

If you’re still reluctant to bring text message marketing into your workplace, consider these compelling reasons. The below statistics are from Boomtext.com, a company which specializes in mobile marketing.

1. Text-Messaging Marketing Gives You Unprecedented Market Penetration

Within the next few years, experts predict that over three billion mobile phones will be in use worldwide. That’s an awfully large group of prospects to pass up, especially when you remember that sending a text message is a quick, inexpensive way to communicate.

2. Text Messaging is Part of the Culture

Over 95% of the cell phones made today have texting capacity. Look for that number to climb to 100% in the near future. In the United States, 92.5 million consumers report that they use texting to communicate. Worldwide, over 350 billion text messages are exchanged monthly.

3. Other Marketers Are Starting to Catch the Wave

Of those 350 billion monthly messages exchanged, at least 15 percent fell into the classifications of commercial or marketing texts. As anyone in sales knows, it’s always better to be the first person to catch on to a trend than it is to be the last.

4. Customers as well as Marketers are Beginning to Embrace the New Technology

Jupiter research determined that 30% of consumers say that they want to have coupons cent directly to their mobile phones.

5. Texted Marketing Messages Have a Greater Chance of Being Read

Boomtext.com has determined that a whopping 90 percent of marketing text messages are read. By contrast, only eight percent of marketing emails are opened. Direct mail or print mail fares even worse – only two percent of marketing letters are opened.

Should You Be Texting Your Leads?

Troy Wilson — Thu, 13 Oct 2011 09:46:26 +0000

A few years ago, Internet leads were the hot thing in marketing. Now, using text messages as a means of mobile marketing is a method that has come into its own. Marketing experts predict that the number of companies that text their leads and customers is in for a massive growth spurt.

One study suggested that, by the year 2013, companies will be spending more than 24 billion dollars on text-based marketing.

Statistics for Lead Prospecting

When it’s time to plan your next big marketing campaign, think about these numbers:

*There are five billion cell phones in the United States as compared to only 1 billion computers.
*90% of the population of the United State owns a cell phone.
*52,083 text messages are sent and received every second.

Obviously, people in the United States have become very comfortable using text messages to communicate with friends, to conduct business, and to send and receive information.

Since texting is a form of lead prospecting done only if the client completes a brief opt-in form or text, marketers can be sure that they’re dealing with people who want to hear from them.

Uses for Mobile Marketing

Different types of businesses can use texts to suit their unique needs. A doctor’s office, for instance, might text a patient to remind him or her of an appointment date or of any instructions the patient needs to follow before a procedure. Churches, on the other hand, use texting for social purposes to keep the members of the congregation informed about upcoming events.

Retailers, of course have jumped on texting to announce contests, send coupons, or announce special offers and deals when they need to move inventory.

How Effective Is Texting Leads?

According to BoomText.com, which offers services that allow small and medium-sized businesses to use text-marketing technology, texting easily out-performs other types of client contacts. Whereas only 25% of Internet leads actually open the emails they receive, 95% of text messages are read.

Text messaging is also extremely cost-effective. It is easy to implement a text messaging campaign, and the results of that campaign are available for analysis within hours or days. If the marketing team finds that the texts are not working as well as they hoped, they can adjust the campaign mid-stream at no additional cost.

If your company hasn’t started texting customers yet, start doing so now. In the very near future, marketers who don’t text are likely to be left in the dust.

Top Phone Systems for a Successful Call Center

Troy Wilson — Fri, 07 Oct 2011 09:35:45 +0000

If you’re running one or more call centers, or if your marketing team does cold calling or works with real-time leads, it’s important to choose a phone system that suits your purposes and works well with your existing technology.

Ideally, your phone system should do four things for you. First, it should offer you increased opportunities for revenue. Second, it should help you contain costs. The best phone systems tailor their goods and services to the customer’s unique situation so that the customer does not end up paying for things he or she doesn’t need. Third, your phone system should help your staff be more productive. Finally, and perhaps the hardest thing, is that your phone system needs improve customer satisfaction. That means your call centers should opt for phone systems that are user-friendly. The last thing your reputation needs is a number of customers complaining about trying to call for help and getting stuck in “menu hell.”

Before you select a phone service, consider whether it will be used for incoming calls, outgoing calls, or both. Finally, make sure that the phone system you choose is compatible with your current technology.

With those issues in mind, a few phone systems have widespread reputations in the industry for providing quality products and services.

Three Phone Systems Companies with Excellent Reputations

ShoreTel. ShoreTel gets high marks because of its flexibility. You can use it to manage any kind of campaign from cold calling to addressing the needs of real-time leads. ShoreTel works with many large companies, but it doesn’t shut out the little guy, either. Its features can be scaled back to meet the needs of small business owners. Finally, ShoreTel is a popular phone system because it is easy to use. Your sales people actually get to spend their time making sales instead of struggling to understand the phone system.

Cisco. Cisco is the preferred phone system of many marketers because they offer a range of communication choices besides the telephone. The system is also a favorite of customers, because it is programmed to deliver each contact to an available and appropriate resource.

Avaya. Avaya places an emphasis on serving businesses which provide financial services, education, healthcare, and hospitality. It offers centralized control for the far-flung workplace. Additionally, it protects your sales staff from burning out because it prevents them from having to run at 100% “occupancy.” Avaya can handle a volume of up to 3000 calls, and also offers a wide variety of technologies.

If you are looking at putting a new phone system in place, take some time to consider which system will best meet the needs of your staff as well as your customers and leads.

Don’t Confuse Suspects with Leads

Troy Wilson — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:39:24 +0000

: Image via Wikipedia

There is a distinct difference between leads and a list of names. I call a list of names and numbers suspects. Data providers often mislead clients into believing that they are getting leads when they get these too good to be true prices on thousands of leads.

Make Sure You Have Leads

The fact is that a lead implies that the consumer has taken some intentional action on an offer. That may be calling an 800 number, requesting over phone to be transferred, making an email or contact form inquiry, or opting into an email campaign. Short of that you have a list of names.

Regardless of what type of lead data you are buying, you need to move each of them to a viable lead. Develop a sales process that assumes all your contacts are simply data until you make contact and convert them into “your” personal leads.

Turning Suspects into Leads

Here is the simple sales process I recommend:

Load all new data into a “suspect” email campaign
Power dial all new data with an intro message and phone number verification
Invalid emails and phone numbers are cleaned out of the suspect list
Positive responses to emails and phone calls get bumped up to leads

Now you can go into sales mode on these leads. All of the verified data now needs to make it’s way into your lead management software or CRM system.

Notice this initial process can easily be accomplished in-house or even outsourced–potentially keeping you focused on sales.

Turning Leads into Sales

With good clean leads in your database it is time to begin moving them towards a sale. I recommend again using a combination of email campaigns and regular calling.

Your emails should focus on education and market updates. These will give your customers confidence and build trust. It also allows for your calls to be more about touching base, checking for questions, building a relationship, and hopefully closing a deal.
If you liked this post please sign-up to the RSS feed or get them via email and avoid missing the next Aged Leads Strategies best practice.

Social CRM Vendors: Eating Their Own Dog Food? No. (bettercloser.com)
CRM: Bridging the Gap Between Research and Application (questionpro.com)

3 Steps to Help Your Sales Process Improvement

Troy Wilson — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 14:47:57 +0000

: Zig Ziglar via last.fm

Your sales process should be a living and breathing thing. You should be constantly looking for feedback and sources of inspiration. As a sales person you are faced with the negative everyday–rejections, hang-ups, the crushing weight of caring a sale quota.

Here are a few suggestions to make sure your sales process is improving, daily.

1. Measure it.

Few things are more important than making your sales process consistent and disciplined enough to measure it. You need to break your process down it to manageable points of measurement.

How many calls do you make?
How many did you try script A, B, or C on?
How many contacts did you make?
How many appointments did you make?
How many objections?
What were they?
Which did you overcome, which do you need to practice?
What is you close ratio?
What adjustments do you need to make?

2. Learn from others.

The Internet and bookstores are literally overflowing with great sales mentors. Spend at least 50% of you time learning. Here are a few that I spend time with on a regular basis:

3. Inspire it.

Inspiration can come from a lot of places. If you are athletic it might come from your heroes on the field and their stories of challenge and success. There might be business leaders that you aspire to rise to their level. Or it might be a philosophy like Ayn Rand’s Objectivism.

Find something or someone and then put that inspiration in front of you. Go get it!

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Sales 2.0 Conference in Chicago – September 10th

Troy Wilson — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 14:25:49 +0000

: Image by jkgreenstein12 via Flickr

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.

Effectively Following Up On Sales Leads (bettercloser.com)
Six steps to help create your universal lead definition (thecustomercollective.com)
7 Things I have learned about selling (retailsmart.com.au)
Make Yourself Uncomfortable (cathystucker.com)