The article on this sales blog describes some mistakes made by sales agents who called the author over a one week period. While the tone of the article is pretty confrontational, there are some interesting points. And it’s a good idea to evaluate any behavior that is considered poor salesmanship. Good because it enables us to guard against it. Lead Management Software at its best bolsters the most effective sales agents and helps them to excel. But it also provides tools that help prevent the least effective sales agents from dragging.

In other words, Lead Management Software is a solution that saves sales agents from their own worst tendencies. In the article referred to above, the author describes how he received 17 calls from a single sales person both at home and at his office. 17. Recent Research has shown that six calls is the optimal amount for trying to contact a lead. Beyond six attempts, the returns diminish to a point where they no longer justify attempting to contact the lead.

Another point made is that making sales is all about building trust. Lead Management Software equips users with a suite of tools that make lead follow up easy. Achieve consistent, varied communication that lets buyers know you are serious and can be counted on. Reporting features allow managers to make sure that leads are being contacted quickly and followed up on correctly. If you’re a sales manager and you’re looking for a tool that helps your best get better and the rest get with the program, Lead Management Software may be just the thing.

This article from the Harvard Business Review; “Competing on Talent Analytics” by Tom Davenport, author of Competing on Analytics, explores the importance of using analytics in HR and talent management. The article mostly describes acquiring actionable insights from employee data in areas other than sales, i.e. service. It delves into maximizing employee productivity, engagement, and retention by analyzing data. It’s a timely message. As more and more tools come available for employers to capture and analyze business intelligence of all kinds, it’s important to measure the ups and downs of employee performance in an effort to get the best results out of your employees, both for the benefit of the company and the benefit of the employee.

Actionable insights are harder to come by when assessing something as potentially nebulous as employee engagement. Even so, according to the article, Best Buy has been able to identify that a 0.1% increase in employee engagement has a value of more than $100,000.

Measuring employee effectiveness by measuring their engagement is one thing, but for employees whose core responsibility is to sell, there is much more data available to assess employee effectiveness; beginning with quotas. As long as people have been selling there have been quotas. Quotas are the godfather of sales metrics, but using the right tools, it is possible to make much more comprehensive assessments of how your sales agents are progressing with their leads before it boils down to that final number of closed deals and revenue brought in.

Lead Management Software collects a lot of data about sales agent activities. It’s easy to find out with a click or two how many calls has an agent made today? How many calls does he average per lead? How quickly does is he attempting to make contact with new leads that are assigned to him? For sales managers and business owners it’s never been easier to access information about how your top producers are achieving their results and where your less effective agents may be falling short. If you aren’t using Lead Management software that tracks performance metrics and user data, you’re operating in comparative darkness

The long cold winter of recession is ending. The economy is growing again and it is time for spring cleaning. Business owners and managers need to plug any holes in their sales processes. If they don’t, missed opportunities and lost revenue are about to climb. As business picks up, there will be a great opportunity to make more sales and capture a greater market share. Conversely, any company with a clumsy and inefficient sales process has an opportunity to lose more.

The opportunity costs of an inefficient sales process in a slow market are relatively smaller. But as the economy heats up, these opportunity costs will amount to more and more lost revenue. A recent Business Week article, which features Leads360 research, indicates that, while economic indicators are still somewhat mixed, it’s time to start gearing up for more business.

Maybe you are a company that struggled through the downturn. You made whatever sacrifices you had to make in order to survive. While others didn’t fare as well, you kept your footing and are now entering the other side of the recession. Or maybe you are starting a new company, hiring sales people and preparing to capitalize on the coming growth.

Whatever your situation, it’s important to make sure you are using the right tools to help you capture as much new business as possible. What kind of tool do you need? There is no better tool for getting more customers and growing your business than Lead Management Software. LMS helps you contact leads more quickly, and nurture those who aren’t ready to buy right away. It gives you real time data on which sales agents and lead sources are performing and which aren’t. CRM great for managing existing customer relationships, but it is not suited to converting leads into customers.

Lead Management Software is a solution that is built specifically to turn prospects into customers. Things are looking up. Get the right tools to make sure you are profiting from the improving economy and expanding markets.

This article, “Adding Education into the CRM Equation,” explores the importance of doing research before deciding on a CRM vendor. It’s important to be aware of your level of CRM education. If you don’t know enough, it’s important to face facts about what you know and what you don’t; important to educate yourself before getting into negotiations. In today’s business landscape using technology is essential to survival. When businesses that are not used to relying on technology begin to come to grips with its necessity, they often draw the conclusion that CRM is the solution for them.

When evaluating CRM solutions for the first time, some buyers end up buying the promise of all it can do. But the promise of CRM and the reality of its adoption can be worlds apart. This is why it’s critical to make use of the plentiful resources on the internet which can help buyers make an informed decision.

But imagine the strategic shopper whose business acumen equips him to approach buying a CRM by asking all the right questions. Instead of hearing what a given CRM solution can do, he has a clear picture of how his sales process works and searches for a solution to fit. A solution that fits the way his company does things and allows him to improve it.

For such a buyer, making an informed decision about CRM solutions can lead to an unexpected solution altogether. For a business that is looking to increase revenue and grow their business by contacting, qualifying, and closing more leads, Lead Management is usually a better fit than CRM. Lead Management Software is built to achieve these goals each in turn, allowing sales agents to contact leads more quickly, and stay in contact with them until they close.

To learn more about how LMS and CRM complement each other watch this Leads360 webinar called Where Good CRMs Go Bad.

It is sometimes said that there are two types of sales personalities, the hunter and the farmer. The hunter is the sales agent who is motivated by the thrill of the hunt. This is an individual who thrives on the quick turnover. It’s all or nothing, right now, close and move on. When a sales manager is building a team, individuals like this get offered spots on the team. But there is another type of producer: farmers. These are individuals who excel at building relationships, keeping in touch, nurturing leads. Many mangers build their teams by enlisting as many hunters as they can. But there is some evidence that a sales team can benefit from hiring farmers as well. Farmers are more suited to keeping in touch with leads who are slower to close and building interest in your company over time. Farmer type sales agents can tend to the crops over time, and harvest when the time is right.

Let’s say you already have some hunters and some farmers on your sales team. You are in a prime position to benefit from lead management software. You can make use of rules-based distribution to get the right leads to the right person. When a new lead comes in, let your hunter take a crack at it. If it is not a quick close, it’s no problem. It is easy to create a distribution program that re-distributes the leads that are not quick closers from the hunters to the farmers. Let the farmer nurture the lead, building the relationship and converting them when the time comes. Here’s some more information on how Leads360 lead distribution works.

On the other hand, let’s say that you’re not buying the hunter and farmer analogy. In your experience, the only producers are the hunters. You aren’t making space for the slower soft-selling farmers.  You can still benefit from lead management software. Using a lead management solution, it’s easy to nurture leads automatically by creating drip marketing campaigns. Additionally, Leads360 ongoing best practices research and analysis has revealed the optimal six call contact strategy. What these tools do is they give hunters an out of the box, easy to adopt nurture strategy that has been proven to close more deals. A hunter will never think like a farmer, but lead management software, with drip marketing emails and lead prioritization takes the thinking out of it. Prospects will be contacted strategically through automated emails and sales agents will be prompted to place periodic follow up calls at optimal intervals.

The two types of sales personalities, hunters and farmers, can both see increased conversion rates with the adoption of lead management software. And sales managers will have tools to respond to the strengths of his various sales agents to get the right lead to the right person at the right time.

All leads are not made the same.  Anyone working in sales knows that the value of each individual lead can vary wildly depending on a number of different factors from the time of day to dozens of different pieces of demographic data.  In the past, sales managers have been forced to effectively throw darts at a map in trying to get their sales staff to call the leads with the best chance of conversion.  Fortunately, Leads360 has developed a new Lead Prioritization Engine that has the solution to this unfortunately random process.  With the data driven automization of your sales process, Leads360 can help your sales team operate at peak efficiency, optimize lead prioritization, and maximize ROI.

Without a smart method of Lead Prioritization, it’s nearly impossible to get the best possible conversion rate on your leads.  Given that any sales team can only expect to make a limited number of calls in any given hour, day, or week,  it’s important that your sales people are contacting the leads with the highest chance of conversion before making more speculative calls to lower quality leads.  However, with the variety of different factors that contribute to quality lead prioritization it’s often times hard to really nail down an effective strategy for getting the ride leads to the right people at the right time.

Leads360’s revolutionary new Lead Prioritization Engine can be fine tuned by any sales team to find the algorithms that will correctly identify those leads that need to be contacted as soon as possible.  It will then automatically sort your call queue to reflect which leads are most likely to convert and ensure that those leads are getting moved to the front of the queue while simultaneously moving leads with a low chance to convert to the back of the line.  By doing this, your sales staff will always be making calls with the best chance of success.  Without this automation, you could easily be missing out on prime opportunities to convert because your sales team called other leads that should have been a low priority at that time.

But wait, there’s more.  The value of different leads will continually change over time and identifying the lead with the best chance of conversion requires constant and fluid reassessment.  When operating at the speed of business, making the right call at the right time is essential and knowing when a lead is in its ideal follow period is crucial.  Leads360’s new Lead Prioritization Engine is designed to make up to the second changes, working fluidly to keep moving leads that are in prime shape to convert to the front of the queue and shifting lower value leads back so that they can be contacted at a later time when they have a better chance of converting.  This keeps your team working with data in real time and always making contact with the right leads at the right time.

Leads360 has broken new ground with this Lead Prioritization Engine and created an invaluable tool for any sales team.  It creates a system of flowing lead prioritization that will allow your sales team to make sure every call they make counts.  Less time is wasted, more leads are converted, and your business will thrive.  Maximum ROI is more than possible and Leads360’s Lead Prioritization Engine is the best way to get there.

How important is sales messaging?

Clearly, what you say, when and how you say is important. Sending the right message to prospects enables them to differentiate you between your competitors.

Being able to connect with your prospects and turn them into customers depends in part on the specifics of your sales messaging; i.e., the way you define and communicate your unique value. This can be the difference between failing and succeeding.  Developing the messaging that is most effective on cold calls, calls with qualified leads, direct mail, emails, etc is a distinct and ongoing challenge.

Continuing to hone your messaging, adjusting it according to timely opportunities, is a challenge all its own. But a separate challenge is identifying the messaging that works, and enforcing it.

When your sales messaging is at its most persuasive, and you’ve developed some strategies about when and how often to reach out to your prospects, how do you enforce it? How do you know your agents are sending out the best message?

Messaging can be enforced to a large extent by using lead management software. When it comes time to nurture the lead, who is not the quick close, you can use lead management software to can set up drip marketing email campaigns that reach out to prospects at intervals you define.

And how can you find out if leads from different sources are responding to different messaging strategies? So you can create drip email campaigns with messaging that is tailored to the prospect. You can see data on which emails are contributing to closed deals and which aren’t getting responses.

Communicating strategically is an important part of a successful sales effort. Being able to measure relative effectiveness of your sales messaging is a critical part of putting forth your best possible effort. Get the most results from your time and money by using a lead management solution that allows you to find out which messaging strategy is working.

It is well known that Customer Relationship Management systems have become a popular tool of many companies who are looking for greater success. In the digital age, customers are savvier than ever and every company is working twice as hard to keep them. Yes, CRM systems can help you organize, automate, and integrate most of your business processes for current customers, however some others find themselves sinking a lot of money into a project that isn’t producing results.

An important fact to remember is that no matter how perfectly designed a CRM system might seem, if it doesn’t interface and get adopted by the users at your company, it isn’t going to be much help. People struggle with changes and adapting to any new system, particularly one like a CRM, and if the transition isn’t handled correctly money will go to waste on underutilized technology. Too many CRM companies fail to help their customers develop real solutions to this problem, touting their technology and features without offering the sort of support that would truly be the most helpful.

Another issue with CRMs is the way companies fail to properly define success. Before pursuing anything as expensive and labor intensive as a CRM, a company should know and understand well the current status of its CRM efforts and have specific ideas about how it wants to change them for the future. Any company considering a CRM should take the time to figure out what they have and what they want. In many cases, there are more judicious, cost-effective methods, like a Lead Management System, that will be more effective in addressing your company’s needs.

CRMs are not a simple solution to a simple problem; they are a complicated solution that only makes sense for the largest companies with enough resources to make them work. Before any company can seriously expect a CRM to offer any solid results, they need to take stock of what they already have and what they really need. More often than not, you’ll find that CRM isn’t the most effective possible solution. If all you’re looking to do is automate and track your sales system, there’s a real chance that other less complicated solutions than CRM will help you find the results you need with a much smaller investment of money and manpower. Lead Management Systems can often give you the sales automation and lead tracking you need at a fraction of the cost and with none of the headaches.

If your company is seriously considering a CRM, it’s probably a good idea to stop and consider the alternatives as well. While CRM is clearly a strong solution for the right companies, it’s important to remember that for every functioning, successful one out there, there’s another company with a CRM that inefficient and hemorrhaging money. Before making a decision this big, take the time to seriously consider your options and determine whether a CRM is right for you.

There was a good post yesterday on Lead Critic called 3 Golden Rules of Lead Management. It starts with the realization that most lead buyers “do not always have the clearest idea as to what to do all the time.” He then explains his 3 golden rules of lead management. It is great to read posts like this that take a step back and look at the process of lead management from 30,000 feet view. It’s important to take this view occasionally; because when spending a lot of time looking at lead management from up close it’s possible to lose the forest for the trees. The Lead Critic 3 Golden Rules are:

Be Fast

Be Smart

Be Nurturing

The application of these rules is explored in the Lead Critic post (which is recommended reading). What’s more is that these rules and supporting techniques mesh very well three core principles around which Leads360 was built and around which Lead360 is continuously being refined.

Speed

Process

Persistence

According to Leads360’s analysis of 25 million data points, speed is the single most critical component to lead conversion. Conversion rates are 391% higher when the lead is called within a minute of their inquiry; 120% within two minutes; 98% in under three minutes; 62% in under 30 minutes; and 36% in under an hour.

Clearly, speed is important. But what about Process and Persistence? Leads360 research has revealed that lead quality is only a little better than half responsible for close rates. Lead conversion is determined 57% by lead quality and 43% by sales process. Who doesn’t love a one call close? But leads that don’t close quickly still have a high chance of closing and will be most likely to do so if a smart, strategic workflow is in place for working aging leads. A best practices workflow for your sales team is a great concept but it’s only a concept unless it’s enforceable, repeatable, and able to be refined. With Leads360 it is.

There are many examples of how following a strategic process results in higher close rates. Some elements of your process will be come from your own expertise. Other best practices are recommended Leads360: Developed from our research and analysis and programmed into the software for easy adoption. One such example is the Lead Prioritization feature. The rules that govern the prioritization of leads in Leads360 are based, among other things on Leads360’s six call strategy. 

The six call strategy comes from an analysis of call patterns that have resulted in successful sales. Calling leads six times is the best way to achieve the highest conversion rates. The six call strategy automates effective lead follow-up by insuring not only that leads are called six times, but that they are called at strategic intervals.

Whether you’ve got three golden rules, or the three principles of Leads360 it’s good to have a few core concepts to guide you when you have one of those moments of “What should I do next?” It’s good to have a few good core concepts and even better to have tools that were built to help you incorporate those concepts into your workflow.