What makes a good Lead Status?

How do I define my Lead Statuses, Deal Stages, Case Statuses?

It is important when selecting statuses or stages that you think of them as place holders for your leads (not descriptions of) as they progress through your linear sales, processing and/or support processes. For example; a lead status of attempting contact makes sense because it is in a place holder where activities are taking place to establish contact. On the flip side; busy number is not a good status unless you treat busy phone numbers differently than you do any other un-contacted lead.

A simple example: New (never been dialed); Attempting Contact (receiving active contact attempts); Nurture (failed to contact and is now receiving passive contact attempts); Not Interested (spoke with the person and there is no interest); Bad Lead; Investigating (contacted and in the sales process); Closed Won; and Closed Lost.

If you want to track reasons why a lead was not interested, those should be tracked in a sub drop down list which can be accessed for reporting purposes.

These statuses or stages should also have detailed plans on how to progress them into the next status. If in “Attempting Contact”, we will use a power dialer to call 3X per day, send an email every 3 days, a fax every 10 days and leave a recorded voice message every 3 days. If we get a hold of the person, move it into either “Not Interested”, “Investigating” or “Nurture”. If we do not get a hold of it, move it into “Nurture” after 3 weeks.

So we can see Statuses do not describe the lead itself but the stage in which it is residing and the activities that are associated with it.

Sales Funnel or Sales Colander?

Which of these two items resemble your sales process? Frequently sales consultants, vice presidents and managers refer to their process as a “Sales Funnel” when in fact; it more closely resembles a colander. If 100% of your marketing efforts go in the top and only 10% of them come out the bottom, what is it? A “True Funnel” (it is called “True” per this definition of the word: “exactly or accurately shaped, formed, fitted, or placed, as a surface, instrument, or part of a mechanism.”) will capture all of your marketing generated leads, get them in a structured, strategic process (with solid walls and only two holes), focus efforts and increase the velocity with which they pass through the device. Any seepage will take place at the top of the funnel as overflow spills out.

One can’t simply patch the wholes in a colander and call it a funnel. Both are fundamentally different. Just imagine that you have both a colander and a funnel sitting in front of you with a bucket of water. Pour some water in the colander. The water will go straight through with quite a bit spilling through the side walls. Now pour some water in the funnel. You will quickly notice that the water starts to spin in the top of the funnel, gaining momentum and velocity as it enters the smaller neck area and eventually shoots out the bottom in a more refined stream of water. You should also notice that in order to get more water directly out of the bottom of the colander, you need to increase the amount of water that goes in at the top. Not so with the funnel. The funnel itself either needs to be expanded or the speed of the water needs to be increased in order to get more output.

Let’s look at a traditional sales funnel.

You will notice that the leads go in the top and new customers come out the bottom. That is the goal. It is the process of taking an input, interacting with it and getting a completely different output. Naturally there will be some waste in that process, right? The first step in creating our True Funnel is to think of it on a linear level. Define the natural progression from lead to customer. You may include some marketing steps in the process as well if you would like. The True Funnel should include demand generation and other marketing practices.

Now that you have that linear process mapped out, let’s apply some lessons which we have learned from industrialization. The first is specialization. Keep the Sales teams selling. Keep the Marketing teams marketing. How do you bridge the gap? Lead Generation and Lead Qualification teams. Let’s not kid ourselves, sales reps don’t want to become telemarketers. They don’t want to “Smile and Dial”. They don’t want to make more than 30-40 phone dials a day. Which means your leads are not being worked effectively enough. A Lead Gen. or Lead Qual. team can be used to contact new leads within an acceptable time frame and/or continue to attempt contact beyond the standard 3-4 attempts performed by a sales team. Once contacted, that team should simply perform a quick pre-qualification to make sure they are talking to the right person and there is some level of interest, at which point, the lead is sent on to the next station in the assembly line for further fabrication.

The second lesson to be learned is automation.

Look at the picture above. Notice the harmony of man and machine working together to build something wonderful. In an assembly line, machines are often used for repetitive simple tasks, complex precision task, quality assurance, and to report on the status of the line. Technology can be used in similar ways on a sales assembly line. Simple repetitive tasks which can be automated are dialing numbers, leaving voice messages, sending emails, logging activities, scheduling events, and setting reminders. Technology can also be used for precision tasks such as lead capture, lead routing, de-duping, neglected re-routing, immediate response, and campaign strategy.

At a minimum, you should employ some level of analytics for tracking your demand generation activities, a lead response management system for facilitating your response strategies and a customer relationship management solution for managing your pipeline and beyond. It is highly important to have these and other systems communicate or integrate one with another. A key benefit of using technology is oversight and reporting, and if your technologies don’t communicate well, you will lose many key metrics.

Finally we need to address the seepage. If you notice, in a funnel, water that is not ready to leave the bottom stays in a swirling pattern in the top end of the funnel. This is such a perfect metaphor because your leads shouldn’t fall out the sides of your funnel, they should swirl around in the top end until they are ready to slip through the selling end. This is accomplished by nurturing activities. Nurturing activities will take a lead, where its progress is halted, and reinforce it with marketing and educational material. Additional touches by a representative within your organization also help prepare the lead for progression. If these activities are completely automated then the only reason why a lead should ever leave the funnel is if it is disqualified and asked to be removed from any future correspondence at which point it spills out the top of the funnel and stops taking up space.

Difference between Marketing and Sales

Recently I posted a question to several groups on Linked In. The question was simply; "When do you contact your web leads?" I am a member of two types of groups, Demand Generation/Marketing and Sales. The responses were night and day different between the two camps. In the Marketing and Demand Gen groups, the responders often said it was best to wait 24-48 hours. One even said that you should make a goal of calling every web lead within the first four days. On the otherside, the Sales responders all felt that a call should be made immediatly or as quickly as possible.

Here is a quesiton to get you thinking; why would there be a difference (and it was overwhelmingly obvious) between Marketings and Sales approach? I would have thought it would have been the opposite. Maybe Marketers are leaning more towards nurturing a lead and bringing it around slowly where as Sales has a quota and wants to exhaust all resources in the attempts to get the deal.

No real answer, just some points to ponder. Please comment with your thoughts.

New Marketing

I have read, and employed numerous marketing methods over the years for numerous types of business. The one that I have been most impressed with is Educational Marketing. For those of you who are not familiar with the term, Educational Marketing is the idea of providing educational material (such as a study, survey, white paper, etc...) as an industry expert with no strings attached. If you can educate your industry, you will be seen as a thought leader, you will gain the trust of prospects, you will have their attention even when they are not in the market for your product, and you will have a high level of influence when they are in the market for your product. This method is very effective, but it can take a long time to generate quality leads and deals for you and takes a lot of effort in developing rich content for your educational material.

Recently I have been turned on to a new way of marketing. I don't know how new it is but it warrants mentioning on my blog. It is Service Marketing. Service Marketing doesn't just provide information, but it provides a service. There are some key components when creating a service for your company that can act as a lead generator:

• It must relate to your product of service.
• It must be offered, in a limited manner, for free at first.
• It must have value in and of itself.
• It should be offered at a very low price to eliminate any barrier to the prospect doing business with you.

If done successfully, you could end up with a double opt-in buyer lead that has a relationship with your company.

Here is an example:

Call 1- Hi, We have performed an audit on your hold times for customer service. Are you interested in the results?

This is opt in #1

Send results

Call 2- Hi, we did a study on the importance of handling customer service calls in a timely manner. Would you be interested in a copy of that study? I will also attach information on the audit as a service we offer.

This is opt in #2

Send study and brochure talking about the service you provide. The cost should be a no brainer. Much less than what they can hire an $8 per hour high school student to sit on hold and report times back to them.

If they buy, they now have a relationship with you and are a double opt in buyer lead for your real products and services.

If you need some ideas on services you can offer, feel free to email me at troy.bingham@gmail.com.

One call close

Recently, I was asked to help put together a response strategy for a client of ours. This client produces an infomercial, among other marketing activities, to generate inbound callers looking to purchase a product where a portion of the proceeds go to a specific charity. Their goal was to figure out a way to stay in touch with the people that don't buy on that initial phone call.

This one was easy. In my mind there is only one primary reason why anyone would call a phone number off of an infomercial and not buy; the price. They have proven to be interested in the product and/or cause (otherwise they wouldn't have called in the first place). So, here is the strategy:

1. Take the inbound call
2. When the person says that they are not interested, request email address for additional information about the cause.
3. Email 1 (same day). "Thank you for your interest in the cause. I understand that situations are different for everyone and not everybody can participate at the level we were requesting. Periodically, we like to offer alternative methods of participation to a few select individuals. As a result of the interest you have shown thus far, I will assume that you are interested in being notified of these opportunities to make a difference unless you let me know otherwise. Again, thank you for your thoughts and prayers on behalf of ...."
   
4. A week later send an email announcement talking about the cause. DO NOT request anything from your prospect.
   
5. A couple weeks later do the same thing as step 4.
   
6. Three months and several email newsletters later send an email saying: " dear...., I appreciate your interest in.... and willingness to act. As I mentioned a few months ago, we occasionally have alternate opportunities to provide your support to.... Later this week, we will be contacting you with a pre-recorded message detailing the opportunity and requesting your help.
   
7. A couple of days later send a prerecorded message: “Occasionally, we here at .... Try different things to extend the opportunities to help, to those that otherwise can’t. Previously we offered (name the product) at a price of (name the price) with the proceeds being donated to (name charitable organization). For a limited time, we are allowing interested people in combining their efforts and contributing as a team. This is only being tested with a limited number of people. If you are interested in more information, press 1 and you will be put in touch with one of our representatives. If the timing is still not right for you, but you are still interested in helping in the future, press two and we will continue to keep you posted on news about...
   

When they press one, ask them if they are in a better position to contribute the full amount, if they say no, let them know that they can contribute 1/5 the amount and be a part of a group effort.

The whole point is to turn the lead, which was previously dead, into any amount of money. If they are still unable to participate, repeat the steps until they buy or tell you to stop.

Simple Strategy

Here is a simple strategy that could give you great success with a warm list.

Start off by creating an offer.

Day 1 - send email detailing offer
Day 2 - call leave voice message saying that you were wanting to make sure they got the email.
Day 3-5 continue to call but only leave a voice mail the first call inbetween emails.
Day 8 - send an email highlighting the limited nature of the offer with a cut off date.
Day 9- same as day 2
Day 10-13 same as days 3-5
Day 15 send final email (take away). Due to their lack of interest you will stop sending them informaiton on this limited/exclusive offer. Of course you will contineu to do so in the future, but they don't need to know that.

This is a very simple way of turning some warm leads, that know who you are, into hot opportunities. Good luck and I will give more strategies in the near future.

Strategy 1 - Cold leads

Cold leads are a natural place to start talking about strategy. How do I turn a cold lead into a warm prospect? The key here is "impressions". Retailers have been doing it for years. You see ads on TV, billboards, direct mail, product placement, radio, clothing, ball caps, event sponsorships; the list goes on and on and on. Each individual impression, in and of itself, is nothing. How many times have you seen one of those Doritos commercials during the Super Bowl and felt inspired to leave your home, drive to the grocery store, and buy a bag of "Cool Ranch" Doritos during the forth quarter of the game? Of course you haven't. That is not the point. It's not top of mind awareness either. Just being last in doesn't mean you are first out.

The point of impressions is to establish a relationship. No, not like the one you have with friends or family, but how you relate things in your sub conscience. Think of the association game where someone says a word and you quickly say the first thing that pops into your mind. Let's play real quick...I will say a word and you say what comes to your mind.

Dog

Tree

Space

Chip

...if you said Yasmine Bleeth then you saw the same Doritos commercial that I did.


OK, let’s keep going.

Ocean

Key

Car

How many of you said “gas prices” or something related to the rise in gas prices. The reason is because you see gas prices everywhere you drive. Gas prices are on the news every day, talk radio, newspapers and online. Every automotive commercial is touching on "improved gas mileage" in all of their advertisements.

That is the relationship that we are after. You relate car with gas prices. Even if it is a negative relationship (as with the rise in gas prices) it is still a relationship. If you can accomplish this association (meaning when someone thinks of your product, service or industry, they naturally think of you) than you will gain their business more times than not when they walk into the chip isle at the grocery store.

So, how do you establish that connection? It depends on your market. For this strategy, I am going to assume you are a B2B company selling a product or service.

Some important things to be aware of when dealing with cold business leads:

• 97% are not currently in the market for your solution.
  They already have an association or relationship with a competitor that you will need to overcome.
• You will be moving against the solution current to get them to buy. A solution current is the process in which you get hot leads. Someone within the organization identifies a problem. Issues are discussed. Budget is determined. Assignments are made. Research is performed. Solution Providers are contacted and you know the rest.
• People hate salesmen, telemarketing and being interrupted.
• Your audience is busy.
  

Here comes the strategy (I am going to use one that I created for InsideSales.com). The strategy is to have so many, non-intrusive, impressions, over time that you become that positive association in your prospects’ mind when they are ready to buy. The tactics look something like this:

Start off by creating some educational material. Short essays on the 5 reasons why companies fail. Or, the 10 worst things you can do when looking for office furniture. The point of this is to establish thought leadership in your industry, give you a reason for contacting your prospects, providing them something that they are interested in regardless of where they are in their internal buying process, and finally build the association between you and your industry.

Week 1 - Send Direct Mail. I know that this is sometimes cost prohibitive, but if done right, it will lay a terrific ground work for what you will be doing in the following weeks. This direct mail component should include something that they will use (flash light, Rubik’s Cube, toe nail clippers,) and not throw away. The attached letter should be short, easy to read and funny. It is just an introduction. Not asking for them to do anything. Just an impression.

Week 2: phone call AE: Hi, _________, this is ____________ with InsideSales.com. As part of our marketing research, we have discovered some disturbing trends in a business’s response to web leads. Does your company currently generate web leads? We have created a series of webinars on the 5 fatal flaws facing today’s marketing and sales organizations. I understand that you are busy but I would like to send you a link to them via email so you can view them when you have a moment. I have ______@____.com is that correct. That email should be in your inbox right now. Thank you for your time. Good Bye.

Send email link to online registration.

Week 4: Call AE: Hi, _________, this is ___________ from InsideSales.com. We spoke a couple of weeks ago about our webinars covering negative trends in web lead response. I noticed that you hadn’t viewed any of our webinars yet and I wanted to make sure that you received my email. It has been known to get sent to the spam folder by some corporate email firewalls. Did you get the email? Great, since we last spoke I found an informative article discussing the handoff of leads between marketing and sales (or lead nurturing, pipeline management, cold calling, lead qualification, etc...) that you might be interested in. I will just send it over. Can I get your fax number? Thanks again for your time.

Send fax with part of the article and the rest on our site. Must register.

Week 5: CallAE: Hi ______________, this is __________ from InsideSales.com again. We have just finished a study looking at the average response time to leads for about 300 enterprise level companies in your industry and others. We are sharing this information with companies in your industry like (name some direct competitors) and thought that you might be interested in reviewing it. I am sending you a link to the survey right now. Thanks again for your time. Bye.

Week 6: send fax with partial whitepaper and link to register for the rest.

Week 7: send direct mail piece with a sleep blind fold and a note that says “losing sleep over neglected web leads and wasted marketing dollars?”

Week 8 phone callAE: Hi ______________, this is __________ from InsideSales.com again. As I had mentioned in our previous conversation, we have created a new webinar series on the average response time to web leads for large companies in your industry such as (name some competitors) among others. In fact, the response has been so overwhelmingly positive that many attendees have requested that we perform a short audit of their own lead response times and efforts. Since you had mentioned before that you currently get web leads, would you be interested in a report of your lead response efforts? Great. I took the liberty to perform a survey over the last couple of weeks. I will send the results right over.

Here are the important things to pick up on in this strategy.

• Use multiple media types: Direct mail, call, email, call, fax, call, email, fax, call, direct mail, call.
• Each interaction was short and non-intrusive.
• The offerings were not product related but educational.
• Over time, the thought of lead response, nurturing, routing, lead management, or any other topic we choose to cover will be associated with InsideSales.com.
  

I will discuss some other strategies in future posts. The point of this is to encourage you to establish a strategy. Anything. Just have purpose to your activities, use multiple media types and have a goal in mind. It is difficult to get started so if you have questions please post a comment requesting a free consultation and I would love to help you start a strategy.

Lead Response Strategies Introduction

I spend a lot of time speaking with people that have limited or no strategy as to how they contact and qualify their leads. The popular strategy looks like this:

step 1. generate a lead
step 2. send out an email auto responder
step 3. hand it off to a sales rep (could be minutes or hours later)
step 4. sales rep attempts to call (again could be minutes or hours later, or in some cases more than a day)
step 5. call 3-5 more times over the next two weeks.
step 6. send a product oriented email once a month until the prospect tells them to stop.

Some marketing departments employ a nurturing strategy that takes over after the lead is disqualified or never contacted.

Here is the flaw: Most companies are following a lead qualifying and sales process that they created. This is rigidly adhered to and is not flexible based on the prospects buying process.

The solution is a strategy for every scenario you might run into for a prospects buying process and what stage they are at within that process.

The next few posts that I make will be discussing examples of these strategies.

New Age of Communications

My wife and I had a baby last Thursday. He is our third boy. Our oldest is five. As the blessed event took place something really jumped out to me. With our first child, we were on the phone for hours before hand, and hours afterwards. But not this time. This time, my wife updated everyone on her status using her blog before we left for the hospital. After the birth, we sent out a text to everyone in her contact list. We only made a few special calls, but that was it. Our market efforts (baby announcement) were complete with only a few written words. Later in the week, my wife updated the blog with photos and a more detailed description of the day's events. One of the comments on her blog was a cousin that stated she had been returning to her site often waiting for an update.

So how does this apply to Marketing or Lead Response Management? I had a couple of thoughts. First was the method in which we communicate now-a-days. Blogging, texting, podcasts, youtube and other methods are replacing the phone call. If you notice earlier, we only called those that were most important to us. Does that say something about the way your leads, prospects and customers feel. If you fill out a webform and only get an email autoresponder back, do you feel cheated somehow? Like you are not one of those people that are important.

I feel like a phone call (a timely phone call) communicates the value you place on each individual lead. Their efforts of seeking you out are rewarded with your immediate attention to their needs.

Quick Responses

Today, I have been looking for some whitepapers offering statistics on automation, crm successes and other smoking guns for the SAAS world. Naturally I looked for CRM companies that offer whitepapers and other resources. Each one that I found required me to fill out a webform to get the pdf. Of four websites, I have already been contacted by two of them. One of them happened within 5 minutes, the other came about 2.5 hours later.

The first company's approach was a follow up to me visiting the website and downloading a whitepaper. He just asked if there was anything more that I was looking for. Of course I said no. The second, however, approached as though I had already read the whitepaper and wanted to answer any questions about that specific whitepaper. Much more effective. I don't know if they delayed the call on purpose but I was able to engage in a more productive conversation with that second company.

If you are looking for more data on response times with web leads click here

Are you in Automotive Sales?

If you are in automotive sales you have got to see this report and case study. It will change your business.

click here to download

What is Lead Response Management (LRM)?

Definition: Lead Response Management is the discipline of responding to inquiries for information in timely, continual, and consistent fashion to optimize the contact and qualification rates of leads.
Lead Response Management is one of several critical subcategories that make up Lead Management.
Lead Management is the overal discipline that organizations and individuals use to contact and qualify leads that are generated by marketing efforts.
Lead Management has typically been under the responsibility of the sales departement, but more and more marketing organizations are taking over the functions of capturing, routing, responding, qualifying, tracking, and reporting on leads in an effort to ensure proper return on investment on their efforts that have gone into generating the lead in the first place.
Here is an overview of the typical flow of the lead to sales process with the all-important tracking of costs:

for the rest of the article visit: leadresponsemanagement.com

Lead Nurturing

Many companies have adopted a strategy of lead nurturing. This is a marketing activity that prepares a lead to hear your offer when they are ready to make a decision. A sample lead nurturing program would include an email going out once a month sharing press releases, case studies, offers, or relevant articles. There are several different software applications that can facilitate these activities that can be found simply by Googling the term.

When should you nurture leads? There are primarily two occasions to nurture leads. The first is when you purchase a list of leads that may or may not need your products or services. You can purchase a list, start sending them emails, faxes or direct mail before you attempt to qualify them as prospects. Once the lead has been in the nurturing process for a period of time, or has taken some sort of action as a result of your marketing, you can remove it from the nurturing and hand it off to your Lead Generation Team and/or Sales Team.

The second occasion to nurture leads is when you get real time leads that are routed to your Sales Team or Lead Generation Team only to find out that the prospect is not ready to make a decision but is in the preliminary stages of collecting information. You can then place them in a nurturing campaign that provides them with the information that is beneficial to companies seeking your services. You can take this opportunity to persuade them to choose you before they are planning on selecting a solution.

As you implement a nurturing strategy, you will see that there is a larger chasm between marketing and sales than you previously thought. Since the majority of CRM solutions do not track leads well, and lead nurturing systems don’t pretend to manage sales opportunities, you will need to decide who owns the lead as it is being nurtured.

Thus enters Lead Nurturing 2.0 – Lead Response Management – which is powered by tools that allow transparent reporting for Marketing and Sales through the entire process. Lead Response Management mixes marketing or nurturing activities with sales and lead gen. activities so they can happen simultaneously instead of one at a time. A sample Lead Response Management strategy triggers a phone call right when a lead presses submit on your web form, followed by a series of emails, faxes and phone calls that vary depending on the outcome of the previous activity. The calls are scheduled for optimal contact times and are triggered automatically without the Lead Generation Team making the conscious decisions to call. Since Lead Response Management can happen while other activities are taking place, you can employ a strategy for new leads, old leads, recycled leads, lost leads, pipeline opportunities, cold deals, lost opportunities, existing clients and clients approaching renewal of contracts.

Lead Management

Take a look at your customer base. How many of your customers came to you as a lead (just a name with a phone number and maybe a street address and/or email address). It doesn’t matter if they were a referral, a web lead, a call-in, a walk-in or a neighbor to an uncle’s friend’s cousin’s dog walker; they were at some point a lead.

Now look into your crystal ball. Do you foresee a change in the future, or do you think that all of you future customers will come from leads as well?

Now ask yourself, how many of your customers came from qualified leads. I would hope that it is all of them. If that is not the case, then I am sure you have had your fair share of unhappy customers.

No matter how you get customers, Lead Management is an integral part of your business. A Lead Management Strategy can be the difference from closing golden leads that drift along on the surface of your lead pool and being able to facilitate a journey of discovery that ultimately helps a lead to choose to become a qualified prospect of yours when the timing is right.

A Lead Management Strategy consists of when you contact your leads, how you contact your leads and who contacts your leads. The key to a good, nay a GREAT, Lead Management Strategy is knowing who your leads are. Here are some good questions that can help you develop your strategy.

· Is your lead typically ready to buy today?
· Is your product or service one that requires high level buy in?
· Is your lead actively looking for your product and/or service?
· Are there aspects of your service or product that disqualify certain leads?
· Do you currently have any brand name recognition within your industry?
· Do your leads need to be educated about your offering?
· How many leads do you get?
· Where do your leads come from?
· Do your leads come from lists, real time interest, referrals or other?

The Primary goal of these questions is to determine what your first interaction is going to be, either nurture them (Marketing Team), qualify them (Lead Qualification Team) or sell them (Sales Team).

This is the first step in a Lead Management Strategy. I will be following this article up with articles that discuss Nurturing Strategies, Qualification Strategies, Sales Strategies and ultimately how to create a Lead Response Management Strategy that bridges all three of the above options.

What is a Dynamic List Dialer?

In the world of dialers there are several types to choose from. They range from click-to-call to multi-lined predictive dialers. All vary in some ways but most have one thing in common. They call from a static list. A static list is a list created by a query, then sorted by some field found in the record, such as last name, area code, home value or rating. Once the list is created, it does not change until it is completed.

The problem with this type of list is what happens if a lead comes in that should supersede the rest of the leads in the list. Unless it is manually routed out, that new lead has to wait until the next time the query is run and the list is imported into the dialer. This brings us to a Power Dialer which utilizes a dynamic list builder or dialing initiative. With this type of dialer a set of rules is created as apposed to a query being run. In this rule set, the qualifications of the lead are first determined. One can choose lead source, age, rating, product interest or any other field within the record alone or a combination of qualifications. After the qualifications are set, the administrator then sets the priority level. Typically it is set to call through leads that have been attempted the fewest number of times, followed by the newest leads, then hottest rating and so forth.

The purpose of a dynamic dialing list is that a sales rep will always be calling on the most important lead possible. As a new lead enters the system via a web form, it is automatically scanned by the initiative, the qualifications are matched and it is added to the list at the appropriate place (usually at the top). Also, when the reps are done calling hot leads, the system automatically pulls older leads, that are less of a priority, so the rep always has something to be working on without having to think about it.

If you purchase real time leads for lead vendors or generate your own on your website, don’t settle for static lists any longer. Your leads need to be contacted based on your criteria, not a simple query and sort.

For more information on Power Dialing using a Dynamic List click here

The Power of a Web Form

For years now, web forms have served a very limited purpose, to allow a prospect to enter information in order to get something in return. Times have changed and so has the purpose of web forms. There are three areas that I would like to discuss:

1. Prospect data
2. Hidden data
3. Action triggers

Prospect data is the data that the individual fills out, such as name, phone, address, etc... The more data that you collect the more valuable that lead is, but, you need to make sure that the form itself does not become a deterrent to the prospect. Only require what is necessary for you to perform your activities. Obviously, if you need certain information to produce a quote then require that data but if it is not necessary do not force them to enter it. Also, make their job as easy as possible. Where ever you can, in the form, give them a drop down menu with choices or boxes to check. This will shorten the process and allow you to capture much more information that you would have otherwise.

Hidden data is the data that the form passes through to you that the individual is unaware of, such as website analytics, key words and referring sites. This data is extremely important as you develop and drive traffic to your website and can give you key information to the behavior and activities of your prospects.

Finally, as ASP and SAS become more and more popular and as they integrate more heavily with your website you can use hidden fields to trigger activities within many of the applications. For example, Insidesales.com uses data passed through to its CRM to trigger an immediate dialer call back of a live sales or support rep (during business hours) or a recorded message (after business hours) that puts the sales rep in touch with the prospect immediately after the submit button is pressed. Other triggers include routing leads, sending emails or faxes or scheduling tasks and events in an employee’s calendar and so on.

A business that I have recently worked with has a three step web form. The first is standard personal information, the second is information about health and the final is about spouse and children. The forms populate a quote for insurance at the end. Using web analytics, they were able to identify that 60% of everyone that started filling out the first portion of the form did not complete it. In order to increase conversion, they were able to trigger an automated phone call based on the completion of the first form that offered the support of a client services rep to help complete the form. The prospect need only press one and they would be speaking with someone that could walk them through the rest of the process.

Creative usage of web forms can ultimately deliver superior leads to your sales team as well as a superior experience to your prospects and customers.

Fatal Flaw #4 -Term Lead Response Strategy

The fourth fatal flaw involves how sales and marketing continue to pursue old or dead leads. Does your sales team just throw them away? Does your marketing resort to sending a monthly email as a part of a “nurturing” campaign?

Take the current closing rate of all qualified leads and subtract from one-hundred. This is your failure rate. The percentage of people that have expressed interest but didn’t buy. These are marketable leads that continue to dwell in your database.

A local company that we worked with struggled with throwing away leads. After two to four weeks of calling on their hot leads, they would be placed in a pile, which stacked up in one of their offices. When we walked in, there were stacks and stacks of paper leads collecting dust.

What are the reasons that qualified leads say no?
1. Lack of Budget
2. Competition
3. Wrong Timing

One thing remains constant...CHANGE. Circumstances change. Businesses change. Your competitors will undeniably fail keeping clients happy. Prospects return to the marketplace when they are ready to buy. Some businesses are successful and need a better solution, sooner rather than later.

When change happens, who gets the business?
One thing is for certain, if your leads are sitting in a back room, it’s not you.

Why should you care?
If you’ve found a way of growing your business without the help of money, then you should be presenting this seminar. Every lead that you generate that is not sold, adds to the cost of each one that is sold. Would you believe me if I told you that there are five deals sitting in that stack of paper in your office? Would you believe me that it will cost less to find those five deals than it would to go find five new deals?

How do you guarantee that you get the business?
You can hope you get it through the “top-of-mind” program of nurturing. The real problem with most nurturing programs is the content. Most monthly email correspondence is all about YOU. They already didn’t buy from you. Why would they care about your press release? Why would they care that you won a product of the year award? Why would they care about the addition to your board of directors? In short...they won’t. They care about themselves, not you.

In order to be truly successful, nurturing must meet three criteria.
1. It must be a collaborative effort between sales and marketing. Marketing has the message, sales has the relationship. Often, a marketing department will take the leads away from the sales team in order to nurture them. If that nurturing is not done on behalf of the individual within the company that has spoken with the prospect it will lose power. Whether that individual is a sales executive or a lead qualifier, he or she is a person and it is always easier to say yes to a person than it is a company. On the flip side, it is always harder to say no to a person as well.
2. The content and approach needs to be about the prospect and not about you. You must identify and create content that is desired. Content that will bring people back to you time and again even if they don’t currently have a need for your product. You can learn a lot by watching television. A television network’s product is its advertising. They sell Tide, Budweiser, Coke, McDonalds and Wal-Mart. Yet their content includes sports, talk shows, day time dramas, sitcoms, and news. I watch ESPN almost on a daily basis, not because I am in the mood to buy Doritos or a new car but because the content of the show is applicable to my interests. ESPN has earned the right to pitch me their products because they deliver content to me that I love. How do you develop this content? If you have a smoking gun, or a unique selling point then you have the basis for content. Your product or service solves real problems. Make your prospects aware of those problems in an education format. Have real concern for them and try to help them. One way of doing this is creating educational material around problems that exist in your prospect’s industry or personal lives that has nothing to do with your core product or service. If you provide quality content that keeps people coming back to you, you will earn the right to pitch them when they are in the proper mindset for buying.
3. It must be consistent, frequent and through multiple media types. I recently visited a website with a product that I might be interested in at some point in the future. As part of their registration form, they asked if I would like to receive a monthly newsletter from them. I agreed. I have been receiving this newsletter for just under a year now. How many of those newsletters do you think I’ve read? I don’t have any control when it comes. It interrupts me in the middle of my busy day and is usually deleted or put aside to refer to later. How often does later come? Now imagine if that same company sent me articles relevant to MY business, not theirs. Imagine if they sent over a fax every month with a tip that would make my life easier. What if they offered a free dinner if I performed a simple task such as register to view a webinar on a subject that I am already interested in? What if they sent me a little trinket attached to a flyer that uses humor to relay information that is for MY benefit. Can you see that I am now looking forward to correspondence from this company? I can’t wait to open the next email, or read the next fax. I’m still not going to buy right now, but when I am looking for the solution, who am I going to buy from? In fact, after so much time and relevant, interesting content, they would earn the right to pitch me on their product as many times as they want. And, since every piece of correspondence came directly from the person I spoke with 9 months ago, it is much harder for me to say no to him. How much did it cost, over the course of twelve months, to send me emails, faxes, direct mail and receive multiple phone calls and a gift certificate? These are just examples and I am sure that you can come up with free offers that are just as powerful. The consistency component applies to both your message and your delivery. If you are not automated, then you will undoubtedly lack in your follow up and miss excellent opportunities to build your relationship with your clients. This is why automation is the first fatal flaw of marketing and sales teams.

In summary, there is money in your dead leads. That same company that had stacks of paper collecting dust is now pulling more than $250,000 per month in sales from those same leads. It just took a paradigm shift and a focused effort to collect money from marketing dollars that they had already spent. Have marketing develop your message but deliver it on behalf of an individual that can develop a relationship with the prospect. Send content that is relevant to your prospect. Send it frequently and send it from every angle possible.

Fatal Flaw #3 Response to Web Leads

Number three in this series addresses your response to web leads. More and more, companies are driving prospects to their website with the promise of a free trial, demo, webinar, whitepaper or other in order to capture contact information from the visitor. This is where productive marketing gives way to poor follow up. In a recent study, Insidesales.com visited five hundred of Alexa’s highest rated websites and filled out web forms. Eighty two percent of those companies failed to ever call us and forty eight percent failed to send a simple email. Of those that did call, the average first call came almost 24 hours after we visited their website.

What can happen in 24 hours? Think about what you do when looking for a new service provider. Do you look at one website then wait to be contacted or do you look at multiple sites, compare features and pricing then call the one that you think will be the right fit for you.

One of our clients works in an industry where there are several lead vendors that supply hot, real-time leads to their clients. A person fills out a webform and that information is immediately sent to four or five competitors. When asked about the importance of a timely response, he told me that 80 percent of sales in his industry went to the company that contacted the prospect first. I then asked, “If you were always the first to contact the lead, how much of the market would you own?”

As demonstrated in our study mentioned earlier, emails are used 250 percent more often than a phone call for a first contact. This does little more than suggest you have an email auto-responder. You get a few points if it contains valuable information (valuable to them, not you). But emails are used because they can be automated. A phone call takes work capturing the lead, routing it to the appropriate person checking to see if there is a duplicate in the database and then making sure your rep makes the call. One client of ours used to give a rep a seven day window to contact a web lead before it would be reassigned to someone else.

Why do you want to contact your leads first?
If the example mentioned earlier doesn’t persuade you, we recently conducted a study with the help of MIT and Northwestern Universities to see the effect early attempt has on the contact and qualification percentages of a web lead. The study suggests that the odds of converting a web lead are twenty-one times greater if you attempt to contact that lead within 5 minutes compared to 30 minutes. Without increasing your ability to close, your marketing budget or your product offering, if you could contact 210% more of your leads, what affect would that have on your bottom line?

How can you improve your time to contact?
There are three steps that you should follow:
1. Create a lead response strategy. Set the goals of when you should contact a lead by, who should contact them, how often should they try and what methods should be used.
2. Hold your sales reps accountable to meet these goals.
3. Automate the entire response strategy, including the lead capture, routing, email, fax, calling and rerouting (if lead is neglected).

To sum this up, most companies do not focus on early response to web leads but the studies indicate they should. A car salesperson does not allow the prospect off the car lot to go to the competitors before they attempt the initial contact. In order to decrease your time to contact you should create a lead response strategy, hold your sales reps accountable and automate the entire process. That company mentioned earlier with the leads going to four competitors at the same time they get them. Well, they tripled their contacts and qualifications within the first 45 days of following these steps. Can you business handle that kind of growth?

Fatal Flaw #2 Poor Dialing Practices

The second flaw is poor dialing practices. Poor dialing practices include: manually dialing, using the wrong type of automated dialer, calling through static dialing lists, lack of call reporting, lack of a response strategy, calling activities are not synced with other marketing activities and voice messages are seen as time wasters and are not left when the opportunity presents itself.

One of our clients was of the mindset that they didn’t have a need for automating any of their dialing activities. They simply didn’t get enough leads to justify high-volume calling. We challenged them to reducing their prospecting to a few time blocks throughout the day, employ a power dialer and let us know the results. The day that we asked for the results their best rep had only been on the phone for 35 minutes, he had placed 30 dials through the power dialer, contacted 6 decision makers and set up 2 appointments. They also said it wasn’t uncommon for their reps to make up to 100 calls in two to three hours of dialing; they had a hard time doing that in a full day before. Making your sales reps more efficient is not a negative. You may free up some of their time that can be used for building prospecting lists, contributing to marketing material, sharpening the saw or you can handle the same volume of leads with fewer reps on staff.

Another client called us as a last ditch effort. He was a week away from shutting down his business. He would send leads to reps working out of their homes and manually dialing. His only report was the number of leads that converted into sales. He had no idea if he was giving his reps too few leads or too many; the only thing he did know was that he wasn’t making enough money to stay in business. Within days of using a power dialer to call through leads he was able to pinpoint the problem. His sales reps were skimming the cream from the top and neglecting all other leads. This practice was driving his business into the grave. He decided to utilize a voice broadcast dialer to call all of the leads, generate interest and allow the prospect to connect with a sales rep. This forced the sales reps to talk with everyone that was remotely interested. Within the following month, the owner increased his number of sales reps from 12 to over 50 and was catapulting out of the hole he had found himself.

What can automated dialing do for you?
· Reporting
· Lead prioritization
· Rep accountability
· Increase productivity

As you start to look at automated dialers be aware that there are several types of dialers and you need to find the right type or it will do more harm then good. For example; someone calling businesses should not use a multi-line dialer, such as a predictive or a ratio dialer, due to the problem of delayed connection and abandonment issues. A qualified B2B lead is far too expensive to have a receptionist hang up after she says hello a couple of times.

Things to address when looking for a dialer:
· Hosted vs. premise
· Dynamic vs. static lists
· Responsive vs. non-responsive calling
· Single vs. multiple lines

As a summary, it doesn’t matter if you are calling a small list of referrals or a large database of leads, automating your dialing can have a tremendous impact on your productivity. Utilizing a hosted solution greatly reduces the cost to get started with a dialer and a power or preview dialer is a perfect fit for calling business to business. We have seen several companies double, if not triple, revenues, reduce employee turnover and reduce the expense of wasted leads by using the proper dialer.

Fatal Flaw #1 Lack of Automation in a Sales Organization

The first fatal flaw that I would like to address is a lack of automation. For years, businesses have been run on paper. It was common to see a spinning rolodex on every corporate desktop. Memos, announcements, invoices, contracts, leads, PO’s, and reports would pile up on desks, in filing cabinets and in storage boxes. Even though computers have been around for decades now and all processes can be replicated via software, there are still businesses that are trailing this trend. Just like the paper vs. paperless debate, there is a new movement towards automating Sales and Marketing activities with the same hesitation.

I compare automation to going paperless because of the similar transitional mindset. It is hard to justify new expenses when it isn’t clear on their impact to overall costs (or revenues). As with any change, organizational buy-in is also a hurdle that must be overcome. And finally, why fix what isn’t broken. So, companies ease their way into it, starting with email auto-responders, pre written email templates and CRM for sales management.

What types of activities can be automated?
I am sure everyone has seen different types of automation in practice, from an email auto-responder to a pre-recorded voice message. Automation has continued to progress as lead nurturing companies have begun to surface. They employ automation to send out correspondence on a daily, weekly or monthly basis, but automation can go much further. Automation can:
· Share data between systems
· Send notifications
· Schedule tasks and events
· Trigger phone calls
· Send emails, faxes, and direct mail
· Route leads
· Assign and reassign ownership
· Generate support responses
· Facilitate lead response strategy
· Leave messages

Activity: take a look at your interactions with your prospects. List 5 activities, which, in an ideal world, would happen automatically without you thinking about it, such as follow up to a demo, or the creation of a quote? What activities would you add to your current process if they were done automatically?

What are the benefits of automation?
· Consistent interaction and message with prospects and customers
· Reporting
· Manage timing of responses
· Eliminate liability of human error
· Focus employees on more productive activities

Why automate?
There are really two reasons to automate. The first reason is time. If you can streamline processes and automate workflow, you can perform what you are currently doing with fewer people or you can achieve more with the same number of people. If your sales reps have more time to prospect and cold call because they are not bogged down with manually dialing phone numbers, writing emails, sending faxes and creating quotes, you will undoubtedly generate more sales. If your sales managers don’t have to manually hand out leads only to track them down at the end of the week, they will have more time to focus on increasing the abilities of the sales team.

Take a look at this excerpt from the white paper The 15 Time Wasters of Typical Sales Departments:
“Up to 60% of all calls a sales rep makes can go to voicemail or an answering machine, either directly or when routed by a receptionist. If a lead generation rep makes 200 calls in a day and 60% of these calls go to voicemail, he or she could leave 120 voice messages that average about 1 minute long. A single rep could waste 2 hours leaving messages—and that doesn’t include the time spent dialing and being transferred to a decision-maker’s voicemail box!
Most reps don’t make that many calls and don’t bother leaving nearly that many messages, but what if they could? We have seen call-back ratios that range from less than 1% to as high as 22%.”

If you could automate the process of leaving a message in all mailboxes while speaking to all live answers, could that have a positive impact on your productivity?

The second reason is competition. In business today, you have to be continually progressing or else someone else is going to pass you by. One of our clients informed us that in their particular industry, 80% of all deals go to the company that contacts the prospect first. Companies are constantly trying to get a leg up on their competition in order to capture more of the market. By automating your processes, you can gain an advantage over your competition which can help capture new business, retain existing business and garner referrals.

In conclusion, automating tasks, activities and processes can positively impact your organization. It is important to stay on the cutting edge (but be wary of the bleeding edge technologies out there) to help increase revenues, reduce costs and keep a competitive advantage in your industry.