Have you you considered each step of the lead journey process from prospect to client? How do you nurture your leads and keep track of the journey?
‘48% of businesses say most of their leads require “long cycle” nurturing with many influencers’. (Ascend2)
Have you got your lead journey clearly mapped out?
‘Companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales at a 33% lower cost’ (Forrester, 2014).
Click on the below to view this infographic that easily walks you through the entire lead journey process from prospect to client.
Content marketing is a softer way to get your product or service in front of your prospects and there is perhaps no easier way to do this than through a company blog.
A blog allows you to share your company story, news, insights and industry relevant opinion pieces. When done well, they can provide an informative platform & wealth of knowledge, that your prospects can dip into and learn from, when in the awareness stage of your sales pipeline and beyond. They allow you to position yourself as the expert who can be relied upon from a distance, this is beneficial as often prospects aren’t committed to having an initial in-depth conversation with you, they are still getting to know you, your business and your offering.
However, there are many traps that companies fall into when they first begin pushing out content. We’ve outlined a few below and given some hints and tips to avoiding making the same mistakes:
Your prospects have clicked onto your blog for information about your product or service and how it can help them. It is therefore essential that your blog doesn’t ramble off down multiple tangents but provides them with information that is valuable and informative. Prospects don’t want to sift through endless content to find the answers that they need, they should be able to click on a blog and know that it will be relevant to them. The rule of thumb? Whilst you may have insightful opinions about every aspect of life, unless it is directly beneficial to your prospects needs, it’s best to keep them to yourself.
The solution: create a monthly content schedule and align it to the benefits/attributes of your product or service, or new campaigns/products that you are rolling out. For example, if you own a B2B telemarketing company, focus on generating B2B leads one month and then build on this by following on the next month with a blog on Inside Sales to manage the leads generated.
When writing a blog post it is vital that some personality from your business shines through and, importantly, that this personality is one which is relevant to and appeals to your prospects and clients. By this we don’t mean that you should have a joke a minute to make them laugh, but that the language, form and style you use is reflective for your organisation and its goals and values. Is your brand quirky, funny, informative or formal, for example? Understanding this is key to ensuring your personality resonates with prospects and helps you to sell your product or service.
The solution: There is a two-pronged approach for ensuring that your blog reflects a personality that sells your business. Step one is to ensure that you understand your business. This may sound obvious, but many organisations end up finding that their team don’t have a cohesive idea of the goals and values of the company, in turn having to re-evaluate these further down the line. Step two is to fully understand your target audience – how do they want to be spoken to, what appeals to them and what will make them want to get in touch and find out more?
If a prospect is looking at your blog, it is more than likely they have a need for your service/product, e.g. they are a new manager who is looking for a performance management tool to improve the engagement of their staff. With this in mind, they probably don’t have much more than a high-level awareness of what it is they need and are looking for someone to help them understand. If you want your prospects to take your brand seriously and value what you have to offer them, it is vital that you demonstrate that you know your industry and position yourself as an expert – a guiding hand there to help them reach their goals.
The Solution: Do your research. Make sure that you know the ins and outs of your industry and can point them towards various surveys, results or articles that highlight the importance and success of your product or service. If you don’t have any research material of your own, align your blog to industry leaders, sourcing their statistics in your blogs to back up your offering and demonstrate its value.
One thing that has made a huge difference recently here at the Air Marketing Group, is the concerted effort for clients to actually ‘see’ our culture. To incentivise clients to come down to sunny Devon as early as we can in the sales process and experience our ‘difference’ for themselves.
You see, we are very proud of what we have created at Air Marketing Group, but there is only so much that you can say over the phone when trying to explain a culture and an ethos – seeing is believing. Adjectives like hyper-professional, driven, ambitious and cultured are all over-used, when sales people are promoting their services to prospective clients.
This, for example, was my first impression of Air Marketing Group when I started working here a few months ago:
“Think telesales, then destroy that mental image and re-engage, re-ignite and reconsider your sales team with Air Marketing Group – the most technologically advanced outsourced sales and Demand Generation partner in the UK.”
And it’s true, Team Air team have won many awards and are nominated as national finalists in both the ISM’s BESMA awards and the Amazon Growing Business Awards. My point though, is that anyone could say it, but not everyone is speaking the truth.
So, if anyone can make the same grand claims about their business, then how can you get differentiation if you consider your offering is actually ‘better?’ Well, we decided to go one step further and not only invite prospective clients to come and have a tour of our offices but give the client the chance to be left alone and have the run of the floor with our sales teams to quiz them, engage with them and get to know everyone in the office.
What we find is that clients have so many questions on how a campaign is run that, if left with those running and working on the campaigns, they relax and work out how our sales process can best be incorporated with their product or service. They are not being sold to at all, rather just being a fly on the wall and working out how it all works. They are often really surprised that we are confident enough in our team to leave an open invitation for them to talk to anyone and ask them anything they want. But why wouldn’t we be? We are proud of the culture that we have developed here and of the results that this culture gets for our clients in return. We treat our staff well and we look after everyone’s wellbeing – we have a great time, and we have nothing to hide.
You see, we are not ‘salesy’ to new clients, which is a bizarre thing to say about a company who averaged an ROI of £18 for every £1 spent by clients in 2018. But we know that clients aren’t actually aware of the technology that we leverage to get such results so, our initial meetings are more consultative and mature than a simple sales pitch. We actually just want to explain how calls are made, how we get our data and how we will look after their brand.
We want to invite as many clients to meet our team as possible – we are called Air after all and we pride ourselves on our complete transparency. Like any industry, people have preconceptions based on past experiences and telesales still gets tarred with a broad brush. We are however proud to be one of the nicest and most productive. I know anyone could say that, but we are. If you don’t believe us come and see us, have the walk of the floor and experience the award-winning Air culture for yourself.
“I was absolutely blown away with how different the team were at Air Marketing Group compared to my own preconceptions of telesales. I am so glad that I went to see them, they are amazing!” CEO of an International Events PLC.
Opinion Piece – Simon Scott-Nelson, Sales Director
Lead Generation is a key focus for many of our clients when they begin working with us – at the end of the day, without sales how will your business grow?
In order to keep your business afloat, your pipeline needs to be stocked with a healthy pool of leads that you can reach out to and convert into sales. Whilst you may be tempted to target as many potential prospects as you can with your offering, it is more often than not better to tread lightly, carrying out market research and using buyer personas to sketch out exactly what the best lead looks like to you. It is essential that leads are of a good quality, in line with your target audience and meeting your criteria – for us, and you, there should always be a focus on quality over quantity.
So, how do we go about generating quality B2B leads for our clients?
As an outsourced sales and Demand Generation partner, we are lucky enough to be able to work hand in hand with our sister company, Roots to Market. Our combined specialisms allow us to provide fully integrated sales and marketing services to our clients, helping them to generate qualified B2B leads.
When it comes to generating leads, we understand that cold calling prospects alone is not always the right approach. More often than not, the most effective method is an integrated sales and marketing approach. This involves rolling out Demand Generation campaigns before launching any outsourced sales calls, where Roots will create pre-call emails to introduce the brand and warm prospects, social media campaigns to generate opportunities through data capture and nurture email campaigns to support B2B leads through the sales pipeline.
Working with Roots, and utilising their Demand Generation expertise, we are able to score B2B leads as they work their way through the marketing and sales process. This intelligent approach allows us to gauge when it would be a good time to reach out to prospects with a call, based on how they interact with our clients marketing collateral, such as blogs, whitepapers, emails and adverts.
When a prospect reaches a score that our clients deem high enough to warrant a call, it shouldn’t feel out of the blue, as they will have already engaged with our clients offering in a number of ways, through the marketing activity – whether that’s downloading a white paper or completing a form fill on a social advert.
Although our integrated approach allows us to reach prospects the more aware stage of the sales process, we understand the important role that a human voice still plays in what we do. In our digital world, it has never been more valuable and will ultimately be what closes the B2B lead into a sale.
Whilst prospects can find out much of what they need to know online, many B2B leads are looking for high value products or offerings that they need to discuss before making a purchase. In reaching out to the B2B leads generated with a call, our business development team are able to fully understand their needs or business pain points and discuss how our clients offering can help them to overcome these.
As opposed to chat bots or mass cold calls, our campaigns are based on personalised conversations which offer a consultative approach. When we call a prospect, we offer an ‘expert voice’ and we understand that these B2B leads may still not be ready to buy for a number of reasons – they may be tied into a contract with a competitor, for example.
When generating B2B leads, what is most important is that you get your product or service in front of prospects that have a genuine need or interest – which is why qualification criteria is so important. You need to qualify if they are right for you or whether to move on, as you may have thousands of leads but if they don’t 100% understand or have a need for the product, it isn’t worth spending the time talking to them when you could be closing sales with better qualified B2B leads.
Being a Sales Professional requires not just a certain skillset, attitude or level of experience but an entire lifestyle, sense of dedication and a driven mindset.
It may surprise you but being a Sales Professional is not actually all about selling. Top performers don’t just sell, we build relationships and problem solve for our prospects and clients. We dedicate ourselves to building businesses one customer at a time and leverage our experience to help solve any challenges that may be impacting the progress of the next. To us, a problem is an opportunity to provide a solution, not a dead end!
We always put ourselves out there, ensuring that we have a presence in our prospects day to day lives. In order to be successful and progress sales, we show ourselves as the expert, the “go to” for guidance, regardless of whether that results in an immediate sale or not.
This presence can be developed through social media, networking, podcasts, cold calling, blogging, thought leadership or a combination of them all. It may take 1, 5, or even 10 years to build a relationship, but you can guarantee that the person we helped with no immediate benefit to ourselves will come back or refer our next potential customer.
At the end of the day, strong Sales Professionals will have a genuine interest in what we can do for someone else, as well as what they can do for us. More importantly, we’re proactive in helping them.
We never wait for a change in the economy, industry fortune or the circumstances of an inbound lead. Top sales performers are almost fanatical about our craft and we are constantly in preparation, plan and pipeline building mode.
In the words of Grant Cardone, “be obsessed!” There is no shame in following up with a prospect more than once, in fact it’s argued that an average prospect will need 8 touchpoints to convert. At the end of the day, a lost opportunity is lost ROI for ourselves and our clients. We hold ourselves accountable and set ourselves goals – our ambitions are always even higher than those set for us to ensure we always hit target.
As top performers, we hunt down those next opportunities and never give up. In a book I read recently, Richard Forrest, explains how opportunities are like icebergs – whilst 20% of buyers are already online, in buying mode, 80% of buyers are those that we must go and hunt down under the water line, unaware they even have a problem or maybe didn’t know there was an answer for the one they do. In order to reach that 80%, we have to pick up our spear (our phone), our shield (our objection handling) and hunt down that next opportunity.
Don’t be fooled, success is a long hunt and results don’t always come quickly. Top Sales Professionals dig and keep digging until we fully understand what a prospect needs, uncovering all of the issues and gathering the information that we need to make our solution a no brainer.
Opinion Piece by Simon Murthwaite, Leading Sales Director, Air Marketing Group
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