If you are a sales or marketing manager, wouldn’t you just love to take the actual selling out of the equation but still bring in new business?
Of course you would. We all would. But this perfect world is no less a dream than a fisherman expecting to walk up to the shoreline, click his fingers, and watch fish willingly hop from the ocean into his transport buckets.
Often, a sales force goes through a lot of leads which are dead ends from the start. Often this leads to job discontent and high personnel turnover, so the cycle of unhappiness and poor results just fuels itself.
So, is there a way around it?
Yes.
Will this deliver a miracle?
Probably not. But it should make a very significant impact. The key is to minimise or take away entirely the most painful aspects of a salesperson’s duties.
In the modern, web-powered world of sales, here are five simple tips I believe will make for a happier, hence more productive, salesforce.
I have always been hard pressed to find a salesperson who loves cold calling. Apart from its time-consuming ills, cold calling can be a demoralising exercise silently slaughtering an individual. Thankfully, technology is chipping away at this unpopular task and as it stands, a properly equipped salesforce is acting on qualified leads rather than dead leads.
These are leads which in some way have been pre-qualified so that when that first phone call is made there is not just a familiarity between the two parties, a definite need for the product or service has already been identified. These are what we refer to as ‘rich leads’, as your potential customer is already a step or two down the buyer’s journey, rather than a random target.
Any salesforce of significant size would by now be managed by a software based platform. Problem is, many of these platforms require a little too much involvement from each of the sales staff.
The key today is to implement a solution that purely drives qualified leads without any upkeep from your sales team. Leave this job to your marketing people.
This is outdated. You wouldn’t have a fleet of company cars running on steam engines, so why go back in time by implementing an email-only marketing platform when search engines, keywords, thought leadership, social media, webinars, YouTube, Instagram, blogs, web communities etc now rule?
In so many homes around the world, cats and dogs live perfectly at ease with one another. So why persist believing that a salesforce and marketing team should be at war constantly? Some of the best sales success stories we have seen in Australia and Asia are in the toughest market of them all – industrial – and that is purely because their software platform gets the salesforce and marketing people working in unison, in one direction, rather than on opposite poles.