Sales Intelligentsia

Sales Prospecting: A Geology Lesson

Before anyone becomes a customer they are a prospective customer or prospect in sales lingo. Depending on what it is that you sell, your prospects can range from almost anyone on the planet to a very few select individuals who have a specific need for your products. Selling something like food that everyone needs is very different than selling something very specialized like enterprise supply chain software. If you own a grocery store your prospects are so universal that you really don’t need to do any prospecting to find the ideal customer. Anyone on the street is a likely prospect.
It is almost a given that most salespeople have a much narrower potential market because it is in the nature of salespeople to be specialists. You must go prospecting to find those specific people who have a demonstrated need for your products and the ability to pay for them. Before you do any selling you need customers and the more targeted you are in seeking those customers the easier it will be to sell them.

Targeting

Target markets are groups of people who share a similar set of demographics, i.e. similar lifestyles, interests, income and education levels, backgrounds, etc. When you’re selling a very specific set of solutions (your product) you need to target your efforts at groups of people whose demographic profiles fit your market. Before this gets too confusing let’s look at it another way.
The original use of the word prospecting meant searching for valuable minerals or resources like gold or oil. Prospectors used everything from rumor to science to find likely spots before they started digging. Now, geologists use their knowledge of geological science to identify areas likely to produce riches. They look at local geology, rock formations and make-up, overall global geology including things like plate tectonics, that tell them where the mineralogical action is. Only after comparing hundreds of potential sites and doing exhaustive research will they recommend that the expense and massive effort of digging a mine be undertaken. Their preliminary research is designed to minimize risk and maximize return.
The amount of prospecting for likely customers that you do will have the same result. If you picked ten people at random from a crowd and gave them your sales pitch you would be lucky to sell even one of them, no matter what you were selling. If you put together a demographic profile of people likely to need your product and targeted a group of ten people with that profile including a proven need and the ability to pay, your closing ratio (or sales success rate) would be much higher, perhaps even 100%!
The importance of this aspect of the sales process cannot be underestimated. If you do an excellent job of prospecting to find an ideal customer group for your business, the sales process will become immensely easier and far less mysterious. You will spend less time explaining, little time cajoling and no time talking people into anything because they will already have a defined need for your products and a demonstrated desire to buy. If you are lucky you’ll become what many so-called ‘professional’ salespeople often deride: An order taker.

Order Takers

In the sales profession an order taker is a salesperson who sits and takes orders from anyone who walks in or calls needing their products. They don’t pitch, close or ‘hammer’ their customers, they simply take orders. Salespeople who must fight for every order and go out and constantly drum up new business put down order takers as unimaginative and unskilled clerical types. I see it a little differently.
As a salesperson you are not just a professional, you are a business owner. Your interest is in generating work, income and profits, not just sales. For many of us being order takers would be an almost ideal situation. We’d sit in our offices or shops and customers would come to us ready and willing to buy on the spot. It sounds pretty good doesn’t it?
The degree to which you are a salesperson vs. an order taker is determined by marketing and the type of business you’re in. Marketing is everything you do to bring customers to you prior to the sales process and everything you do afterwards to ensure their loyalty and generate future business. Sales is a part of the marketing process, the vital part where you turn prospects into customers. You have to learn your own science of prospecting geology and how to find the signs and formations that point you to the gold. With the right targeted profile you can reach out via marketing and work your way to becoming a very happy order taker.

Customer Profiling

I’m going to assume you already know something about your customers, even if you’re just starting out. That knowledge may not be accurate or even useful but it will serve to get us started creating a profile of a typical customer for your products. Start by listing any common attributes your current customers share. Some to consider include:
• Age
• Income Range
• Location
• Education including number of years and major interest
• Job Description
• Interest group membership including associations, industry or academic groups, hobbyist groups, etc.
• Sex, religious background, ethnic background, race, etc. Note: This information is gathered to help to find and sell to your prospects, not as exclusionary criteria. The more you know, the better equipped you are to serve their needs.
As you consider each likely or proven customer make notes of any attributes or interests that are common to the majority. These are pointers which can lead you to like-minded people who may share a need for your products. They also help you to create profiles of highly profitable customers so that you can go out into the marketplace and focus your sales efforts on similar prospects.

Analyzing your website from a Sales POV

Salespeople want one thing from their company website: qualified leads. They want incoming phone inquiries, email requests for information and filled out forms offering product info. They don’t care about much else. Or do they?

Analyzing the effectiveness of your company website from a sales POV (point of view) is critical to achieving these important sales goals. All too often we see sites that focus too much on information delivery and brand building and not enough on the circumstances that brought a visitor to that specific site. Let’s take a look at some common site errors that impede rather support your sales team:

• Buried Contact Info. This is so common and so obvious. Would you run an ad that didn’t tell how to reach you or where to get the product or service? Of course not, but a very high percentage of sites do just that, burying their contact info on a single page somewhere on the site. Contact info including Email Us and toll-free Phone number should be on every page. Even that is not enough, IMHO. Eye-tracking studies show us that people scan websites in an F pattern, starting at top left, a place usually reserved for a brand graphic that looks like a banner ad. The same studies show us that people do not even see banner ads (its called banner blindness). So why not put your Contact info right in the sweet spot on every page? It will increase your inbound queries.
• Mission/brand statements are prominent. This is the opposite issue. Right in the center of a Home page or About The Company page we park these inane monuments to corporate egos and bad copywriting. If I am at your site and wish to buy something from you (as opposed to those who wish to sell you something, a very different visitor) I am already interested in a specific answer. The last thing I want is some stupid positioning statement about your corporate values or brand ‘meaning’. What I do want is a clear path to the answer I am seeking. Again, in our opinion, all your Home page should offer is clear top-level navigation to product and service pages and copy that directly addresses customer intent.
• Too many links on pages. Prospective customers coming to a site from search or a referral, have a specific need. Littering your site with dozens of links distracts and confuses. As noted above, pare down your navigation to the core elements that help the visitor find what they need. The key word is ‘help’. Your site is here to facilitate not impede the sales process.

Your brand marketing team is not going to like this but, to put it bluntly, brand value is secondary on your web site. People are there to complete a transaction, be it seeking information, making a purchase or talking to an expert. Sales is the art of completing transactions to the mutual benefit of the buyer and the seller. I suggest you have a focus group with your sales reps and your website developers. Make sure there is no punishment for saying what they think. I suspect you’ll hear some important input.

How Online Lead Generation Works and How To Optimize It

The union of sales and marketing is sometimes a tumultuous one. Marketing works to build brand awareness which, in turn, should make it easier to get in the door for the sales team. Marketing also does the first step in the sales cycle when they build an effective lead generation process, one that generates qualified, motivated leads. Unfortunately, all too often the hand-off of those leads from marketing to sales is bungled and the cost of that bungling is very high.

When we plan an online lead gen program for a client, it’s our preference to be compensated on a per lead basis. The typical situation has the client paying an initial upfront set-up fee which is reimbursed in the form of a number of leads that offset that cost. After the set-up fee is recouped, each lead is purchased by the client and that purchase price is their only financial exposure going forward. For this to work for both parties there are a number of issues to consider:

• Both parties must agree on exactly what constitutes a ‘qualified lead’. This is critical because you cannot in hindsight devalue a lead because of closing ratio, etc. There is a hard hand-off from the marketing group to the sales group and the criteria you agree on determines when that hand-off takes place. If we mutually determine that a lead is a fully-completed online form requesting literature (for example) then the client agrees to pay for that lead, regardless of their future success in closing it. That’s step one.
• The reason for step one is that I, as the marketer, have no control over what the sales group does with that lead. So step two is an understanding that before we start a lead gen program, the sales group is prepared to act upon those leads while they are fresh. This means a good functional CRM system for tracking the lead, a timing system that ensures it is acted upon ASAP because leads are perishable fruit, many declining in value by the minute, and real time feedback to the marketing team regarding which leads are good and which are not so they can fine-tune their processes.

Even if all of your marketing is done in-house, I’d recommend considering building a relationship between marketing and sales that works like the one described above. Sales should have a budget for ‘buying’ leads from marketing and marketing should set their ‘price’ for those leads based on what it costs them to generate the lead and how much a highly qualified lead is worth to sales. i.e., a market value. Why?

Let’s look at an example. A reverse mortgage company hires an ad agency to develop an advertising program designed to generate leads. They produce a video that is offered for free both online and on TV for anyone who completes a form or calls a number to request the video. A completed form or phone request is a lead. The agency, being traditionalists, don’t want to be comped per lead, they want their hourly production rate. This is bad because no one is forced to justify their costs on a per lead basis.

In this scenario, I come in and ask the client how much they are paying for the lead vs. what it is actually worth to them. The inefficiencies of the agency model mean the leads are costing $100/each (these are round numbers) because of very high production and media costs. The target price, based on ROI, should be closer to $40/each. If the marketers are being compensated based on performance they will have to choose the most efficient medium rather than that which they are comfortable with. In fairness to both sides, the true price of a good lead may be higher- testing is needed to determine that.

No matter how much you pay for a lead, if sales doesn’t have a very strong process for responding to that lead it quickly becomes worthless. My brother, when he owned a high-end kitchen business, told me that the number one reason he beat others in a competitive bidding situation was the speed of his response, not his price. Knowing this he made certain that every inquiry got addressed ASAP.

These days, customers expect a fast response, often in minutes. There is no excuse in a real time online world to not have someone in sales, even an admin, not make a call or send an email as soon as a lead appears. Very often this will mean an appointment on the spot, greatly enhancing the value of that lead.

If you’re interested in an analysis of your lead generation program or the creation of one, we can be reached via the Supernatural Agency corporate site.