By Craig Klein
Failure of your sales process doesn’t happen overnight. Instead, the insidious threat to your business sneaks up on you with declining sales leads conversion.
- Your first instinct is to believe your sales team is not doing their job.
- Careful examination of sales staff may cause you to lay off the poorer producers.
- Motivating salespeople becomes priority one…pressure intensifies.
- Salespeople complain about the poor quality of the sales leads.
- Analyze lead sources and make some changes to find what produces higher quality sales leads.
- Sometimes more money is spent on sales lead sources to find the elusive “good” sales leads.
- Conversions and sales continue to fall.
- The company is in jeopardy.
What’s going on???
The tragic scenario outlined above is rather common these days. Most of the sales leads from the internet-empowered consumer are simply not ready to have a conversation with a sales person. When salespeople try harder to convert these poor quality sales leads, the skeptic consumer shrinks away from the sales pitch and is often totally lost as a prospective buyer.
In a day when salespeople used sales tactics to close the uneducated prospect, it was all about closing techniques. While highly skilled sales reps still close the most transactions, a totally different set of skills is needed to bring in the closings.
Wasted money on sales leads.
The sales team is a very expensive part of your business. When you make the sales process as efficient as possible it strengthens every aspect of your company. Like we said earlier, pushing today’s buyers can easily push them away instead of converting them so you must change your tactics.
With an increasing number of buyers not ready for a sales conversation, companies benefit from marketing automation that target nurturing sales leads who are not yet ready. It is smart for salespeople to quickly disqualify the bulk of sales leads so they can focus on those ready to have a sales conversation. That way, the sales process becomes efficient and profitable.
Why nurture poor sales leads?
Buyers want to be fully educated and control the buying process. They will welcome emails from your company if your focus is on good information – not selling. While they only want you to educate them, with no commitment from them to ever purchase, you still benefit.
Sales-ready buyers come back.
Before the recent changes in buyer behavior, the old saying “Be backs never come back” was pretty accurate. In today’s sales environment it is no longer true. Sure, a certain percentage of sales leads will never purchase and some will purchase from competitors. The effort you put into setting up a lead nurturing campaign in your integrated CRM and email automation will certainly provide increased sales.
Lead nurturing enables the skeptic internet buyer to initiate contact with you when they become satisfied that they have enough information. When they do come back, you have an extremely well-qualified buyer. Your salespeople will easily close these educated and ready prospects.
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Craig Klein is the founder/CEO of SalesNexus.com which is a leading provider of CRM, email marketing, and lead generation solutions for business-2-business sales teams.
