Sales cycle Archives - Air Marketing

‘Know your customer’ has become quite a cliché in marketing. There has never been a business that didn’t start out fulfilling unmet needs for a very specific group of people.

We suspect you probably know your customer fairly well, but let’s turn this question on its head and instead ask:

How well do you know your prospects?

Air Marketing Group know that a lack of qualified prospects moving through your sales process today, can mean trouble for your business tomorrow. We understand that a strong sales pipeline is critical to attain revenue goals 6 – 12 months from now.

So what steps should you take to build and sustain a healthy sales pipeline?

Start with enough leads

Sales is a numbers game and to develop a strong sales pipeline you must accumulate enough leads to drive through your marketing and sales engine. If you have a good understanding of the pipeline process you’ll know only a proportion of your targeted leads will become qualified, and a fraction will convert and be ready to buy at any given time.

Qualify every lead

Generating a list of qualifying questions to ask every interested lead will allow you to determine if there’s a real business opportunity or not.

Ask: Has your prospect got a realistic need you can fill?

What are their major challenges in this area?
Have they tried to solve these issues? If so, how?
How soon do they want to find a solution?

Ask: Is the prospect an appropriate lead for the value and price point of your offering?

What solutions would they consider?
What is the budget to address this solution?

Be careful of time wasters. If it appears there’s little budget for your solution, put this lead into your low-quality category and concentrate on higher priority prospects.

Use lead quality for targeted marketing

It’s important to use resulting lead quality data to develop more tailored campaigns. At Air Marketing all our campaigns use bespoke lead generation strategies and are tailored to meet individual business requirements. This strategy allows us to provide clients with quality sales leads that meet specified criteria.

Nurture qualified prospects

Not every qualified prospect will be ready to buy today. Once qualified leads have been identified you can leverage the use of content based email marketing, and follow up calls, to continue to nurture leads and identify interested prospects.

Create a next step for every interested lead. Base this on need, interest and timing:

Schedule a demo or follow up call to share additional insights.
Send a follow up email that needs a response within a requested time.
Send an industry-related article every month to stay in touch and keep educating them.

Remaining in front of interested, qualified prospects will mean you are at the front of their mind to assist when the time of their need arises.

CRM systems

A customer relationship management system (CRM) will improve your sales efficiencies, and allow you to track and report on sales opportunities, leads and prospects.

Remember a healthy sales pipeline will have the following attributes:

Many opportunities at every stage of the funnel.
New opportunities coming into the top of the funnel regularly.
New sales being converted at the bottom of the sales funnel regularly .

Here at Air Marketing Group, we pride ourselves on our ability to get under the skin of your business, speaking with your prospects and where possible and relevant warm the lead into a position where they can be converted into an opportunity. In addition to this, we provide a transparent reporting service, and the delivery of each call recording to ensure our clients that any leads we’ve secured will convert.

If knowing your prospect is still an area you would like help with get in touch today to find out how we can help on 03452413038 or get in touch.

So, you’ve started considering telemarketing? Or maybe you haven’t yet started to consider it but, you have heard competitors within your market are doing telemarketing and a couple of your business contacts have talked about it too. Perhaps you recognise that there may be some value in looking into this avenue as part of your sales and marketing activity but you’re wondering where it fits in your sales cycle and how you can justify it?

Naturally, when sales and marketing activity is executed together as an integrated process you are likely to see an increase in leads, especially the highly relevant leads which are easier to convert. There are now opportunities to integrate telemarketing within the whole sales funnel; starting from the awareness stage, right through to the evaluation stage.

But where does it fit?

The awareness stage

At the very start of a sales cycle we need to scope out the market, starting with data and market research so you and your target market can become aware of each other. Telemarketing can play an important role in data cleansing; checking your data lists are accurate, up to date and receptive to your offering. This process is extremely helpful in helping you shape your offering, your marketing campaigns and your approach to these leads. Without getting this process right, your lead generation can be far more time consuming and far less successful.

Adding value stage

During the sales cycle telemarketing compliments the nurturing marketing activity as a very effective touch point. It can be argued that telemarketing is one of the fastest lead generation tactics to identify and close leads. Having that human conversation to understand where someone is in the buying cycle, how you can help them and being able to easily answer their questions is something that will set you apart. As all these conversations are likely to be recorded (we record all of our calls), this is all extra data that can be documented to profile your customers, helping both your marketing and sales teams.

Follow-up stage

Follow up calls are a final important aspect of your sales cycle, that for many businesses are not conducted because they are delighted to have won the business and they are now running off to chase the next win. But if we truly complete the cycle, our new customer is perfectly placed to give us feedback on the process they have just experienced. This helps us not only shape this experience for future customers, but it also adds further value to your customers experience as they have a platform to discuss any concerns, or issues they may have.

So, if you’re considering if telemarketing could help your sales cycle in some way, the likely answer is yes. It can help in so many different aspects of the sales cycle, we’d be surprised if it didn’t compliment your current sales or marketing activity.

Tag: Sales cycle

How well do you know your customers?

Where does telemarketing fit into the sales cycle?

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