Sales Prospecting Perspectives

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Damian Davila, Content Marketing Consultant at idaconcpts.com.

Back in May 2010, the Aberdeen Group released an important report on how to shrink the sales cycle and focus closers on sealing more deals. "We don't convert enough leads to sales," said 59% of respondents in the report. 27% claimed they had insufficient knowledge of prospects already in their sales funnel, and 26% indicated they lost efficiency when they recreated proposals or contracts.

While converting leads into sales is a skill that I could write a book about, I would like to take this opportunity to focus on taking 4 specific steps to shorten your sales cycle. You still have to convince your clients to close on the deal, but these 4 strategies will bring you to that point faster.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Adam Becker, Director of Sales at Tinderbox.

As a sales manager, I spend a great deal of time creating and implementing effective work practices in the sales process to make sure my team knows how to get organized, develop a call plan, and use tools to keep track of their notes and appointments. You can’t cater to the laggards in this business; as a colleague of mine from AG, Craig Ferrara, once said, “Bad oysters equate to lost time and money.” That’s why creating processes for the high performers to accentuate and try to replicate success is so important.

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Craig Wortmann, founder and CEO of Sales Engine.

“First we make our habits and then our habits make us.” – Anonymous

All of us have habits which lead to routines.  Once in awhile, it’s good to stop and recognize the routines that are running our lives. As professionals, salespeople are as susceptible as anyone to bad habits.  

Here are 5 things that we should all stop doing:

Sales Prospecting Perspectives is pleased to bring you a guest post from Michael Boyette, Chief Training Writer at the Rapid Learning Institute.

Your file of prior proposals to your existing customers may be an excellent source of new business.

I’ve been catching a lot of blogs and LinkedIn questions recently about sales process. What is the best process to use, should there be a corporate wide sales process, what’s the best method to close a deal, etc… While I think a sales process can be useful in guiding you along a certain path, I feel that too many sales people rely on their process to close the deal for them and in my opinion it simply isn’t the most effective way to do things.

As a sales rep, there is nothing worse than having worked through all the details of a deal only to have it sit on someone’s desk, unsigned for what seems to you to be no apparent reason. You’ve given the pitch, had the demo, run through the integration, put out the proposal (which they said looked great) and now you wait….and wait….and wait. For those of you not in sales, it is important to understand that we are emotionally fragile creatures during this time. When we reply to “hey you wanna go grab a coffee?” with “You know what, I hate you right now!” It is because we’re waiting to find out if we’re going to hit our number, get paid and for some, keep our jobs. The following steps below should help sales reps avoid some of the awful waiting periods and keep a few grey hairs from popping up.

Happy Friday Everyone! 

I hope you're all keeping cool in this insane heat!! We touched on some great topics this week that includes avoiding getting the "just send info" brush off, how to maintain lead momentum in the summer, and also a great piece written by our CEO Paul Alves! 

OK, you just got a great lead from your marketing team, now what?

Over the past 20+ years in sales, the number one complaint I have heard among sales people as well as sales managers is, “If I just had a few more leads I would be able to get to that next level.” While more and better qualified leads are always nice, if you or your team are not trained on how to best approach a fully qualified sales opportunity, the results will be only slightly be better than the way you are doing it today. With the amount of effort and investment necessary to build a best in class marketing and sales process, marginal improvement won’t cut it. The good news, it does not have to. You can dramatically improve your sales by simply paying close attention to not only the lead development process, but to the passing and transition process.

Aside from "using a competitor...", the "no budget" response is one of the topobjections that I had to deal with in my cold calling days. It's also one of the toughest to overcome. If someone tells you they are all set be cause they are using "xyz" instead...you most likely have ways to combat that by describing what differentiates your product. However, when it comes to no budget...how do you help them justify purchasing something when they claim the funds don't exist? The answer: you keep asking questions.