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Marketing Consultant Shares Insights blog

Feeling confident that your sales team has a process in place? If not, it might be time to examine your sales and pipeline process. Far too often we see businesses have great marketing and lead generation success, but end up with no real customers. Fortunately, we are going to examine what a proper sales process looks like and how it can feed your lead generation and lead conversion rates.
The Link Between Sales And Marketing

What does a good sales process look like? Well it can take many forms, but most of them have some common similarities. In particular, we will discuss 3 best practice sales process steps.

  1. The Sales Personnel

Small businesses tend to focus too heavily on attracting customers instead of making sure they are prepared to handle any prospect inquiries. The key personnel must be present to answer all questions prospects might have, as you guide them through to sale. There must be a written response to the most questions and concerns, so that everyone in the company is onboard.

It is important however, to not rely on a script. Scripts are only useful for cold calling, which is has and always will be an obsolete form of marketing. Use a fact sheet or power sell sheet to emphasize the key points, but rely on the personable side of your sales personnel to close the deal.

As you would imagine, having someone there to answer the phones and lead the prospects through the buying process is the most vital part of the company. All the marketing in the world is useless unless you have the personnel and processes in place to facilitate the prospect closing with you.

  1. How To Proceed

After you have established the personnel who is in charge of handling prospect inquiries, you must establish the ground rules for what actions are to be taken in different scenarios. Filtering out what is a strong lead versus a very soft lead will save your sales team and your business magnanimous amounts of time.

Being able to segment your inquiries into lists defined by cold, hot, qualified, or unqualified leads will give you clear vision as to what the next step would be after an interaction has taken place. All in all, cleaning up your sales process and your sales data will lead to higher conversion rates and less wasted time on unqualified leads.

  1. Touchbacks And Frequency

After you have developed segmented lists, you can create a cadence for touchbacks or follow ups with your prospect lists. Having a customized follow up process for each type of lead will ensure that you don’t annoy or exhaust your leads and push them away.

The length and extensiveness of your follow up process depends on what you are selling. However the steps and how you approach each prospect should suttle and direct, but not obnoxious. The worst thing a sales team can do is push your customers and prospective customers away by overloading them with calls and emails.

As I’ve stated before, the sales funnel and pathway to conversion must be firm, clear, and established by businesses before marketing is to drive traffic to them. Otherwise, the close rate will fall off the cliff and you will find yourself questioning the validity of the traffic, instead of the validity of the sales side interactions and processes.

Marketing Eye focuses on arming our clients and their sales teams with the collateral and sales tools needed to convert, follow up, and streamline the prospects and leads throughout the pipeline.
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Marketing Eye is disruptive by design, going into start-ups and existing businesses with change in mind. We use our 20 years’ of experience to reinvent your marketing potential, and take your business to a level not yet achieved.

 

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