Establishing Relationships and Best Practices
January 23, 2021 – Establishing a relationship with a prospect depends on a lot of things going right. One way of looking at it is to say that it is the craft of the salesman; whatever methods are employed by the salesperson are fine as long as they work. A salesperson, working on commission, will naturally hone their own best practices and deliver results. This is a self monitoring way of operating that makes sense. But what sales manager hasn’t wished that some of the skills belonging to their most effective sales person couldn’t rub off on their least effective. After all, it is towards this end that sales people undergo training.
But the establishment and adoption of best practices doesn’t have to be relegated to showing a new guy the ropes and then depending on him relying on himself beyond that. Best practices can be enforced across an entire sales organization by adopting a lead management system. Lead management differs from CRM in that it is laser focused on the task of turning prospects into customers. This being the case, it has different core functionality that is based less on tracking a customer relationship and more based on contacting leads converting a sale for the first time.
One of the real strengths of lead management software is that it enables sales managers to adapt their best practices in response to the needs of their sales staff and changes in market conditions. Best practices can take shape in a number of ways. Examples include; the number, timing, and content of automatically sent marketing emails; automatic contact schedules for leads, i.e., when uncontacted leads become ripe for another contact attempt; and content of sales scripts. Intelligent lead assignment strategies can also be tweaked to ensure that the right leads are being assigned to the right sales agents.
Leaving the establishment of customer relationships to the various strategies of individual sales reps isn’t necessary. Using lead management software, it is possible to enforce proven sales strategies that ensure that no leads are ignored, and every lead benefits from a sound contact strategy.
