Your business have a great product or service, and you dream big. You’re confident, working hard, and you’re enjoying some success. If only you could generate more from your efforts in sales and marketing, definitely your profit will soar. If this rings a bell, then learning this one thing will surely improve your sales: Strategic Outreach or Follow-Up.
Strategic outreach, whether by phone, email or text, is essential to establishing your brand’s credibility with prospects, staying top of mind, and encouraging a follow through from clients with the sale. But Strategic Outreach, by itself, doesn’t close deals.
If you’re reaching out to leads regularly, but still have trouble reaching your sales goals, you may be using the wrong Strategic Outreach methods.
If you’ll apply the following tips, not only will you close a lot more sales from your leads, but you’ll also do it in less time and your margins will be higher because you’ll be selling your product or service from a position of respected authority.
Tip #1: “Cherry picking” and Categories of Leads
In each marketing campaign, the leads you get can be divided into three categories:
- Hot Leads or leads that are ready now
- Warm Leads or leads that will be ready soon (these leads are critical to your success)
- Cold or Bad Leads may never be ready
The problem is, you can’t divide the leads into categories because you don’t know which leads go into which categories. Cherry-picking is the natural result here because:
- Sales reps are paid high commissions for a sale
- Sales reps can’t tell the difference between warm leads and bad leads until they reach them
- If your sales rep does reach the prospect and the timing isn’t right, the sales rep doesn’t have the time or patience to constantly follow up
Spending time with hot leads is not wrong. The only problem with cherry-picking comes when they neglect all those warm leads. Instead of working on, and following-up, sales people usually wait for a new batch of leads to come in. And those warm leads from the last batch get cold, and they’re soon forgotten. You need to get more out of your leads, and when you do, your profitability will soar.
Tip #2: Timing is everything
People buy when they’re ready to buy. This means you have to be there when that happens. Religiously, you have to follow up with them and do the following:
- You need to consistently and frequently follow up with warm and even cold-to-warm leads for an extended period of time
- Implement a system to engage follow-up and use the right tools to properly implement it
Tip #3: Integrate sales and marketing
The norm in most companies, is that the marketing’s job is to generate the leads and the sales people’s role is to call and engage on the leads and close the sale. But you need to recognize that you need to warm the leads that aren’t hot right now but will be hot down the road.
Look at the perspective that each company has their own lead generation department (marketing) and a lead closing department (sales), but they’re lacking a lead warming department. You need a lead warming department to bridge the gap between marketing and sales.
Here’s how you can engage the warm leads:
- Send relevant, valuable information to every prospect regularly and frequently
- Communicate with prospects efficiently
- Create a log of all communications to your prospect
- Be prepared with marketing communications and information that you can send to prospects on requests
- Track the progress of each lead through the sales pipeline
Tip #4: Education, repetition and variety
The communication of your follow-up system should have a combined approach that has these three elements:
- Education. Keep your prospects and customers informed about you. Remember that the information you provide should have value to them. If you’re presenting something with no value, then you’ll disconnect with them. Earn their trust by giving them the information they need.
- Repetition. Hearing the same thing over and over will make the message sink in to your target prospects and customers. Remember that your audience don’t know who you are and the value you provide the first time they hear your message. Don’t assume that your prospects understood what you’re saying the first time they heard it. Tell them again and again and again.
- Variety. Maximize your sales by utilizing all possible communication channels: direct mail, phone, email, fax, voice, and other media. Some prospects are always available through call, others to email or letters, and others to webinars and social media. Just be creative.
These 4 tips form into a working, powerful system that will not be just an incremental sales improvement to your business— but a revolutionary transformation that maximizes your sales.