Sales Prospecting in Your CRM
Sales prospecting is vital to revenue growth. It requires a unique skill set that will challenge all of your unconscious fears and judgments. Having a CRM to support your team is critical.
Any CRM solution you use needs to support your prospecting efforts.
When I say sales prospecting, I mean using anything at the disposal of a sales rep to get an appointment to talk to somebody. This could be calling leads on a phone, emailing a list of prospects, or engaging with prospects on LinkedIn.
A Salesforce.com survey of their users found the Top 20% of sales reps identified the most critical action of the sales process as personal contact (face-to-face or phone).
For most businesses, if I'm not engaged in personal contact with a prospect on some level, not much is going to happen, this is about opening a possible sale.
If you cannot get in front of somebody, it doesn't matter how competent you are. How technical you are. How cool of a product you have. How amazing our presentation skills are. How good you are at proposal writing. It makes no difference.
If a tree falls in in the woods does it make a noise? If a sales person presents to an empty room do they drive any revenue?
Key elements a CRM needs to support sales prospecting
Easy visual scheduling for your prospecing
Visual tracking of your prospecting process
Sales ratio data from your prospecting process
Let's break down each of these elements.
Easy Visual Scheduling for your prospecting
If we agree that prospecting is on of the most vital activities of any sales professional we should also agree that there needs to be specific time set aside just for prospecting. It is just as important as a meeting, it's a meeting that you are scheduiling with your prospects, they just don't know about it!
You wouldn't schedule a meeting without putting it on your calendar, so you shouldn't have a prospecting process without also scheduling a specific block of time.
Block out time on your calender every day for prospecting. Mark yourself as busy. Put your phone and other communication channels on do not disturbe. Then, work your prospecting process, whatever it is.
You shouldn't have prospecting just booked out on your calendar. You should also have it built into your CRM.
Why?
This allows your CRM to see your prospecting process. What time of day are you doing it and how long are you do it. This will let you and the rest of your company understand the amount of effort being put into prospecting on a daily basis.
You may not be able to control the results, but you can control the amount of effor you put into prospecting. Your CRM should be able to report on those efforts.
Visual Tracking of Your Prospecting Process
Ever head the phrapse I am a visual thinker? It is extremely common. Most individuals think visually. 60-65% of the general population thinks visually at least in part. I (visually) think that it is even higher than that.
How much easier is it for you to understand something when you can see it drawn out?
Most people understand this when it comes to physical locations. The layout of a house. A map of your town. How your manufacturing line works. Even non-physical things can be better understood when thinking of them visually. Revenue projections, sales funnels, and company heiarchies all benefit from visusals.
Your prospecting process also benefits from visuals.
With a visual setup you can easily see where your prospecting efforts are making progress vs where they are stalling out.
Most businesses are familiar with a Kanban board. It is the most common way to visualize a marketing or sales funnel, track issues in a service system, or track manufacturing issues on a production floor.
Your sales CRM should have a similar setup. It will show you where in the process you are loosing the most amount of sales leads and what prospects have stalled out.
On average, it takes 8 to 12 interactions with a company to make first appointment. If your sales team is only reaching out to a company once or twice you will not reach those numbers. A visual CRM can help you see what team members are being persistent in their efforts and which are haveing problems. You can then help those team members with training and coaching to help them reach their potential.
Sales ratio data from your prospecting process
We have talked about sales ratios in depth. They are vital to understanding where the friction is in your sales process.
There is a reason we describe marketing and sales as a funnel. Not all website visitors are going to convert into leads and not all leads are going to convert into customers. However, you can optimize the process to maximize the efficency of our efforts. Also, understanding these ratios will give you the ability to make accurate revenue predicitons.
Key to optimizing the process is understanding what the conversion ratios are along varios stages of the marketing and sales process.
A good CRM will make this information obvious. It will show, at glance, how many visitiors become subscribers. How many subscribers become leads. Etc. However you build your funnel, you need to know these ratios.
Additioanlly, knowing what the average ratios are will let you see what sales peronnel are really good at converting at a certain part of the funnel vs what personnel need additional training or support.
Questions to Ask a CRM Representative
Here are some questions to ask when reviewing a CRM to ensure it is designed to support driving new customer acquisition:
Is it easy to see the number of leads actively being worked by rep and team?
Can you create a process for working those leads that involve consistent reach?
If you use marketing automation, does the CRM help me manage that lead generation?
Does the CRM give me ratio data; the number of touches to engage a lead?
Only after you understand if a CRM will support your sales prospecting should you consider adding it to your sales toolbox.
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