For all types of industries, converting potential customers (also known as leads) to sales is the engine that generates actual profit for the company. Unfortunately, many companies fail simply because they do not understand or apply the sales process. To ensure you have the best chance of converting leads to sales, it is important to master the different stages of the sales process, to address proper ways of qualifying, identifying, and understanding the sales cycle, and to maintain a contact database to continue expanding the business.
Marketing versus Sales
Many business people are confused about marketing and sales. Where does one stop and the other one start? It’s most useful to think of marketing as a lead generator and sales as a customer creator. Marketing keeps your message in front of your buying audience, characterizes your company and it offerings, and creates awareness and interest in your market. Sales receives the benefit of marketing’s success in the form of leads that can be taken through the sales process to a closed deal.
Marketing does not directly generate revenues like sales does. It does however, facilitate sales and can shorten the time it takes for leads to turn into customers.
Another distinction has a time component. Marketing is a long term proposition, with results measured over several months, quarters, or years. Sales results are measured in much smaller increments, and salespeople tend to be focused very much in the present.
This time difference may contribute to a mistake that many companies make: neglecting or under-utilizing marketing. Because marketing does not directly generate revenues and requires time to demonstrate results, many business owners don’t make sufficient investment in marketing activities. Instead, they focus almost exclusively on sales. This is a very short-sighted approach, and can make the sales process difficult to manage. Without the benefit of a consistent, ever-present marketing message accessible to the buying audience, sales has to work harder to get prospects’ attention and take more time to close a sale.
Consider marketing a service provider to sales; in other words, think of sales as marketing’s client. Marketing needs to understand what is needed to make the sales job easier, and implement programs and initiatives that “grease the wheels” for sales.The Sales Process
Understanding the sales process gives you an advantage over the competition because you can better focus activities to keep your sales funnel full.
Potential buyers fall into six main categories:
- Raw Leads – A raw lead a person or business that could be interested in purchasing your product and/or service. These leads could be generated through cold calling, word-of-mouth, networking, trade shows, advertising, etc. Raw leads are potential opportunities, not guaranteed customers.
- Qualified Leads – A qualified lead is a person or business who wants or needs the product or service you sell.
- Suspects – From leads, you create suspects through focused marketing activities that convey specific messages designed to identify the people/businesses that are most likely to purchase from you.
- Prospects – Suspects become prospects when a conversation begins. For example, a suspect subscribes to your newsletter while a prospect contact you to ask a question or request a quote. A prospect may even become “hot” when the likelihood of purchase becomes high.
- Inactive Leads – This type of lead is one that is not actively moving one way or another, meaning the potential for a customer relation is there but the lead is sitting idle for some reason (e.g., lead is not ready to buy).
- Dead Leads – If you have pursued a lead without success, it becomes dead at some point. In this case, the opportunity for a new customer is non-existent for one reason or another.
- Customer – This is the goal category—where you want to end up with a lead. If the prospect proceeds to buy from you, you have converted a lead to a customer and the sales process is complete. From this point, you may want to keep the customer through on-going customer service, or continue selling by offering other products or services.
Moving potential buyers from one category to the next, ideally to the customer level, is the goal of the sales process. This process is often characterized as a sales funnel because the number entering (raw leads) is far higher than the number exiting (customers). You want to keep a steady stream of raw leads flowing into the top of your funnel so that you will have a consistent and valuable flow of customers out the other end.
Qualifying Raw Leads
You do not want to waste time, effort, or money pursuing leads that never go anywhere. By qualifying your leads, you increase the potential for a solid sale.
Qualifying a raw lead requires a number of factors, including identifying product and/or service availability, funding availability, and the timeframe of the service and/or product needed. Once a lead has been qualified, a number of other functions may be necessary, such as conducting background research, analyzing the target market, gaining contact information, and so on. With this information in hand, you can move on to identify key decision makers (i.e., the individuals within the organization that have the buying authority for your products or services).
Decision Makers
Selling to someone without the authority to buy is potentially a waste of your time and resources. You want to identify the right contact information so you can make your way to the people who do have power to make buying decisions. Once a decision maker has been identified and contact made, you want to launch a conversation through the right communication avenue e.g., email, in-person meeting) so that you can demonstrate why your product or service is the right choice.
Sometimes, getting to the key decision maker is difficult, if not impossible. In this case, you have additional options. For instance, you could identify influencers who would speak on your behalf to the decision maker. Another way to get access to a key decision maker is to partner with a provider that is already working with the individual.
Finally, you could work with a qualified agent that has a connection with the lead. These professionals are trained and knowledgeable about the key steps required for securing a meeting with the top dog. Although these agents are not for everyone, they do provide a helpful service in some instances.
Understanding the Prospect
One of the biggest mistakes companies in their sales approach is ignoring the prospect’s viewpoint. Both large and small companies fall into the trap of keeping the focus on their own products and services rather than on how those products and services will improve the prospect’s life or job. They spend a lot of time and ink making brags and claims and very little time on what potential customers actually care about.
It is worth the time, energy, and effort to get a handle on your market. When you understand the prospect, you can talk about how your offerings are applicable to what they are dealing with and how you can benefit them. You will pull way out in front of your competition if you focus relentlessly on meeting the prospect’s needs and talking about your products and services in the prospect’s context.
Other Ingredients
Other important factors associated with the sales cycle include:
- Go-to-Market – Your marketing plan should clearly state how you will take your product or service to market. There are a number of channels available, including direct to consumer, wholesale, joint venture, and distributors. Figure out which channels are best for you and your market, and work on getting them established.
- Competitive Analysis – Knowing your competition, as well as your potential customer’s competition is also a vital factor in sales. The internet is a great source of information about competitors; you can do something as simple as a search on key words that fit your own products and services to pull up a list of companies that claim to offer the same or similar things. This kind of search may also help you with create partner relationships.
- Product/Service Development and Portfolio – It is vital that your company maintain a strong product/service portfolio. Without this, you could be at risk of being passed by or made obsolete. Stay in touch with your market, pay attention to trends and forecasts that impact your business, and revisit your product/service portfolio periodically to ensure that they stay viable. Old offerings may need to be enhanced, modified, or changed out altogether. Services may need to be deleted, edited, or added to your existing portfolio. The goal here is to sell the right things while streamlining your portfolio.
- Pricing – Pricing is of course a huge factor in the decision making process, but you want to avoid competing solely on price. While you do want maintain some connection to your competition by setting your own fees and rates within an acceptable range, you also want to be able to demonstrate the advantages gained from paying more if your price point is higher than average.
- Market Segmentation – Segmenting your market allows you to understand and communicate appropriately to buying audiences with different wants and needs. It can also allow you to identify untapped niches in your market that you can take advantage of. By identifying and prioritizing the best parts of you market, you have the opportunity to launch sales and marketing programs that produce the highest return on investment.
- Product Positioning – Strive for a clean understanding of your competitor’s strengths, weaknesses, strategies, and how they relate to yours. If you can gauge customer perceptions of you and your competition, all the better. This knowledge gives you the opportunity to fine tune your offer and differentiate it from competitors. This positioning will help your market recognize you and understand how your product or service differs from their other choices.
- Product/Offering Design – To support your selling approach, design your products and services so you that you can present the strongest angle to each potential customer according to their need. This requires an analysis of the customer’s wants and needs, along with your competitive landscape. Depending on your analysis, you might or offer alternatives such as bundled solutions, alternative pricing strategies, or special discounts in order to get the business relationship off the ground.
- Long-Term Customer Value – What is the long term value of a customer? Each person or business that buys from you may buy again and again. What is the average revenue that a customer will bring in over the life of their relationship with you? Knowing long term customer value should influence your sales strategies and help you make better marketing decisions.
- Targeted Campaigns – One of the keys to converting a lead to a sale is getting the right message out to potential customers about your company, along with the product and/or service provided. It is vital that your sales and marketing communications are designed to meet a specific or targeted audience. Whether using white papers, brochures, presentations, search engines, or direct marketing, you must have a message that potential customers want to hear, spurring them to know more and to buy.
- Sales Channels – Marketing and sales should work together to create communication channels that support and shorten the sales cycle. This may include items such as presentations, demos, and brochures, as well as initiatives such as trade show programs and webinars. These channels will be part of your targeted campaigns and will serve as conduits for your marketing message.
- Customer Retention – While you need to keep bringing in new business, getting repeat business should be a key goal in your marketing efforts. To maintain focus on retaining current customers, find ways to track customer satisfaction and keep researching wants and needs of the people who have already purchased from you so that you can keep offering products and services that match your market.
- Reward Systems – Your company can get a step above the competition by developing integrated sales and marketing programs that focus on optimizing return on marketing investment. For instance, channel partners, direct sales, business and technology partners, e-commerce, etc are all multi-environments. Building a program that will maintain customer relationships while all of these channels are being supported moves your company and your customer’s company to greater success.
- Partner Relationships – Developing a partner program is a great way of building business across the board. Consider entering into one or more joint ventures to build your customer base. Analyze your products and services, and look for other businesses that complement them. Work out a mutually beneficial agreement with one or more of these that will increase both your sales and your customer list.
The Sales Conversation
Three of the most important elements associated with sales conversation are communication, product/service knowledge, and follow-up. You need a good contact database that allows you to maintain regular contact with potential customers and gives you information that will allow you to have personalized conversations with each. Make sure that the sales conversation continues to focus on the prospect—talk about things from their point of view.
There are a number of choices available today for maintaining a client database, from simple (but not very flexible) spreadsheets to fully relational databases built specifically for sales tracking. There are also web-based services that will host a contact database and provide other useful sales tools to help manage your process.
Conclusion
Keep in mind that while your company may begin with a specific product and/or service, you may need to be flexible, depending on market demand. Some companies will continue to sell the same thing year after year and do exceptionally well. However, in most cases, change somewhere down the road is required to keep up with competition. Making sure your sales team is equipped with the right resources, tools, training, and knowledge, there is no reason for failure.
Converting a lead to a firm sale requires time. The time involved and the sales process itself depends largely on the complexity of the potential customer and their needs. The thing to keep in mind that while you might be gearing your product and/or service toward a particular target, every customer is different. Keep relentlessly focusing on their wants and needs, and keep delivering based on what your market tells you, and you will maintain and grow a very healthy sales funnel.
A good sales process is composed of various tasks to reaching the final goal of closing a deal. This involves prospecting and qualifying leads, managing opportunities, as well as contacts and accounts, tracing the various stages toward closure, managing communication internally and externally, analyzing your company and potential customer’s competition, and maintaining a product portfolio. Taking all these factors together, you can move your company from start up to success.
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