When was the last time you looked at your B2B sales generation process? If you can’t remember, or if you’ve hit a slump, then assessing the way your team connects with prospects can help. If you see one or more of these signs, your B2B sales generation process could be ready for a tune-up.
Lots of Emails, Little Value
If your sales team seems to be in a never-ending cycle of “just checking in” with prospects and never forging a true connection, they may be sending too many futile emails or follow-ups. Sales reps who simply send form emails and repeatedly send empty and non-substantive follow-up emails to prospects may be turning off potential clients. If a prospect gets a steady stream of useless information from your team, they may tend to go silent.
Potential customers who want true value and information from a sales rep have to customize the experience for prospects, addressing specific bullet points from their discussions with those prospects. There are many ways to provide true information and value in a sales email. If every touch point you have with a prospect offers value, you improve your chances of converting them and triggering that first buying decision.
Hit and Run Selling
If your team stops paying attention to customers once that first sale is made, you’re missing out in several key ways. The cost of retaining a customer is far lower than the cost of courting and acquiring a new one; customers that reorder again and again provide a valuable revenue stream. Happy customers do more than just purchase multiple times, they are an excellent source of referrals as well; courting regular customers and giving them the same amount of attention paid to first-timers will pay off in a variety of ways. If your team is not focused on retention, you’re missing out on valuable opportunities and a pattern of one-time customers could indicate a broken link in your sales process.
You’re Still Relying on Cold Calling Alone
According to sales and marketing experts at HubSpot, the cold call is becoming less effective each year – recent figures put pure cold calling at just a 2% rate of effectiveness. It’s one of the reasons we pioneered a Multi-Touch Lead Nurturing methodology to incorporate various outbound marketing channels to uncover warm prospects. If you are having a dismal connection rate, opting for integration of other marketing efforts to warm up your target market could help. As prospects become more sales savvy and technology makes it easy to connect online first; forging a connection before making that cold call could result in a much higher connection rate.
No Warm Leads in Your B2B Sales Generation Process
If your team is cold calling because they are simply out of options, providing them with warm leads gives them a great head start. A prospect who has already shown interest in your product is actively searching for solutions or indicated they need more information is much more likely to be receptive to a rep visit. Warm up your leads with email prospecting activity, lead nurturing tracks, LinkedIn connecting, and other elements of outbound marketing. Providing qualified warm leads and a way to track them can help jumpstart a stalled sales process.
Give your team the tools they need to succeed by regularly evaluating the way you connect with prospects – and serving up innovative tools to help your reps forge a lasting relationship. Contact us to learn more about providing your team with the leads and tools they need to make a lasting connection with your target customers.
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