When a sale is lost, unequivocally, irrevocably, lost; it’s time to move on. It’s not a happy occasion, so most sales reps are all too willing to put it behind them. And sales managers are keen to have their reps move on, too. What’s the point of beating a dead horse? But there may be a point to a little bit of dead horse beating; i.e., a lost sale post mortem.

There have been several posts on this blog that have addressed the topic of learning from leads that close and leads that don’t. The best way to do this is to leverage the reporting and analytic capabilities of lead management software to find out which of your lead sources, sales processes, and sales reps are performing and which aren’t. But there is more that lead management software can do to extract value from leads that didn’t close.

With lead management software you can create drip email campaigns that can be triggered when it becomes clear that the lead is not going to close.  A few emails and a phone call or two where the sales agent asks how he could have better served the lead can yield some pretty useful information. The lead record is usually thought of as containing information that will be needed to make a sale. But using lead management software to systematically capture this post-mortem data can help small business owners and sales managers collect information about lost sales that can be used to improve the sales process going forward.

Not every lead closes. When one doesn’t close, find out why. It can help you close more in the future.

If you’re doing email marketing to your prospects, congratulations. Just when email skeptics were starting to say that email is dead, the inbox has become a place of renewed possibilities. Not that the doomsayers were coming out of nowhere, it’s easy to see why the skeptics thought they saw the importance of email waning. With the rise of text messaging, Twitter, messaging on Facebook and other social networks gaining ground at the same time that email inboxes around the world were being increasingly choked with spam, it’s easy to draw the conclusion that email is becoming obsolete. But along came Groupon; A simple service that sends deals by email. Suddenly there was something in the inbox that could cause genuine excitement. Not to mention genuine revenue.

Judging by Google’s (rejected) $6 Billion offer to buy Groupon, it would appear that the email inboxes of the world are not a bad place to conduct business at all. So just as spam fatigue threatened to diminish the vitality of the inboxes everywhere, Groupon, and other services like it, have people looking at their email again as a place where great things can happen. (If you consider half off a meal at a good restaurant a great thing.)

So it may be a great time to redouble your efforts on smart email marketing. Sending professional emails at strategic intervals that provide engaging and useful content are more likely than ever to catch the eye of your prospects. And if you are using lead management software, there are some great tools you can use not only to send emails, but to find out which emails are getting responses. You can put links in emails that point to campaign-specific landing pages on your website. When a prospect submits an inquiry on a campaign-specific landing page, they are associated with the corresponding campaign. This helps you focus your efforts on the email campaigns that yield results. And email reporting helps you to see which emails are turning customers away.

The inbox is alive. Are your email marketing campaigns?

Are you spending too much time figuring out who to sell to and not enough time selling? I’m not talking about trying to figure out where your leads are coming from. I’m talking about of all the leads you have, you stall when trying to figure out who gets your attention right now. Who gets the next call? It’s difficult to keep in your mind exactly where you are in the sales cycle with all of your prospects. Someone is due for a call back today, and you aren’t calling, because for whatever reason, the lead just isn’t on your mind at the moment. A lead that isn’t contacted quickly is a missed opportunity.

It’s well known that leads need to be contacted quickly, that overwhelmingly customers choose to do business with the company who reaches them first. But what do you do when a customer can’t be reached quickly? Do you assume that they have been reached by another company and give up on them, or do you keep placing calls? Almost as important as contacting leads quickly is making a consistent effort to follow up on leads that are not reached quickly. Specifically, it’s important to make six call attempts to a lead before determining the opportunity does not warrant further effort. Why six? Read this Leads360 white paper on lead response to get the full story on lead follow up best practices. A lead that isn’t followed up on is a missed opportunity.

Lead management software comes with a feature called Lead Prioritization that allows sales managers or small business owners to create lead follow up rules. These lead follow up rules put all leads assigned to a sales rep into a single queue that is dynamically re-ordered based on the current ripeness of every opportunity in a sales reps pipeline. For example, your lead follow-up rules might dictate that a brand new lead requires three call attempts, each an hour after the last on the first day that it is assigned to a sales rep.  When the lead is assigned to the sales rep it will appear at the top of his queue, indicating that it is his highest priority. When the sales rep places a call to that lead, it will disappear from the queue and return to the top of the queue when an hour has passed and the rules indicate that another call attempt is required.

The benefits of using Lead Prioritization are that no lead falls through the cracks. Every lead is followed up on in accordance with company policy. Lead management software ships with pre-configured prioritization rules configured around the quick contact/consistent follow-up paradigm. Because of this, it is easy to adopt the proven system based on best practices even if you have no established company policy on lead follow-up.

Or you can keep trying to organize your lead follow up in your head, or with post-its, or outlook reminders. Even if that is working for you, it takes time; time that could be spent selling.

Everyone knows that a chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It is not possible to build a successful business when nine links in your chain are strong and one is weak. The weakness of one aspect of a business is the weakness of the business as a whole. Creating strength and ensuring success means making sure that weak links can be identified and fortified. Fortified when possible, replaced when not.

Focusing on sales and marketing. How are the different links in your chain performing? If each is performing well, then your end result is a tidy profit. But what if you feel that your profit is not what it should be, or what you want it to be? How do you go about finding out if you be working more efficiently and making more money by doing things differently?

When a small business owner or sales manager takes on the task of increasing profits, identifying weak and strong performers is the first and most important step. A big part of finding success is finding the things that work, and doing more of them, while finding the things that don’t, and doing less of them. This analysis is not groundbreaking. But like with many things in business, it’s not the idea, it’s the execution.

When you set out to execute this identification of weak and strong links, how do you do it? How transparent is your transparency? How accountable is your accountability? It’s critical to be able to indentify strengths and weakness in all aspects of your business practices; ranging from employee performance, branch performance, marketing efforts, lead provider, etc.

Lead management software ships with canned reports that make it easy to gain immediate insights into the performance of every link in your chain. And since no solution can ship with enough reports to yield performance data on every conceivable situation, the best lead management solutions have a custom reporting tool. Custom reporting enables the quick creation of ad hoc reports that return performance data based on any set of criteria you can think of.

A chain may only be as strong as its weakest link, but with the reporting capabilities of lead management software weak links can be identified a lot more quickly.

What’s the best way to get a lead from a lead provider to a sales agent? Quickly. Quickly and intelligently. It’s a well known fact that speed to contact is the single most important contributing factor to lead close rates. How important is speed? Close rates for leads that were contacted within one minute of submitting an online inquiry showed an improvement of 391%.

For a sales manager, getting leads to agents quickly requires a few necessary tools. The quickest way to get leads from lead providers to sales reps is with lead management software. The best lead management software solutions have multiple methods of distributing leads, i.e., Push distribution and Pull distribution. Leads360 uses both Push and Pull distribution programs. Each has their strength, and working together they ensure that every lead is connected to a sales rep as quickly as possible.

Push distribution programs push leads to sales reps who qualify for them.

Pull distribution queues up leads for sales reps to pull as they are ready.

Both Push and Pull distribution can be configured with lead and user filters. Adding filters to distribution programs enables sales managers to route leads intelligently according to any criteria they can conjure up. Get the biggest opportunity to the best sales rep; Make sure reps only receive leads that correspond to their areas of expertise and licensure. And with skills based lead routing, it’s possible to match leads with sales reps based on soft skills that maximized lead-rep compatibility. This debunks the claim made by it’s detractors that Push distribution assigns leads randomly.

This article demonstrates the process of setting up both Push and Pull distribution programs in Leads360.

When combined with Dial-IQ, Leads360’s intelligent lead dialer, these distribution methods deliver even more dramatic results. Dial-IQ’s Shotgun Connect feature rings the phone of every eligible sales rep and only the first rep to get the call wins the lead. This method of distribution is a hybrid of push and pull distribution. Demand Connect is the Dial-IQ feature that is pure pull distribution. With Demand Connect, the sales rep clicks a button and is connect to the best available lead.

Read this testimonial to see how Leads360’s pull distribution has resulted in an astounding improvement in this clients close rates.

Another erroneous belief about push distribution programs is that “In a push system, leads are simply put into queues and it is up to the individual sales agent as to how–or if–he or she follows up.”

One of the features of Leads360 is that leads that are distributed by either Push or Pull distribution can be recycled, or redistributed if they are not followed up on by the sales rep who received them. This ensures that leads get the attention that they need quickly.

Push and Pull distribution work together to ensure that leads are matched to reps as intelligently as possible and that the leads are contacted immediately.

Don’t you like to know what works and what doesn’t? Probably everyone does. People like to repeat successes and avoid failures. If that weren’t the case, there may not be two different words for it, We’d just call it all results. But we don’t. We all want success and none of us want failure. But what if these words, success and failure, are misleading. Perhaps having different words for successes and failures, while helping us to chart our course in the proper direction, actually has some deleterious side effects. Consider these lines from the Rudyard Kipling poem If.

If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster

And treat those two impostors just the same

Triumph and Disaster; Success and Failure, however you call it, it’s the same thing. Consider this idea, that these two ways of interpreting results are inaccurate, or imposters. The reason why this way of looking at results is inaccurate is because they are designed to either give you an opportunity to exalt yourself for winning or chastise yourself for losing. Neither of these activities is particularly useful when trying to hone a craft. When perfecting ones craft, be it arm wrestling or sales, it’s important not to get too carried away with the emotional peaks and valleys of winning and losing.

Looking back with open eyes and an honest desire to learn from ones experiences, positive and negative, is the way to learn from them. If a person learns from his success that he is better than his opponent, then he hasn’t learned anything. Because some other day he won’t win; his perceived supremacy was an illusion. There are many good things about all the technological tools available to help sales people do their jobs. But one of the best is that the work that a sales person does leaves a trail of data that can be easily analyzed. Lead Management software comes with built in reports that allow both sales reps and sales managers to look back at every stage of the sales cycle and see what works and what doesn’t.

It’s still ok to engage in some chest thumping when the big deal closes, but remember that there’s a trail of breadcrumbs that led to the close. The sales rep who spends too much time high-fiving and not enough looking at the causes of his success is leaving future earnings on the table.

Steve Martin, author of Heavy Hitter Sales Psychology and a contributor of Harvard Business Review recently wrote a very interesting article entitled, “Seven Personality Traits of Top Salespeople.” Having interviewed “thousands of top business-to-business salespeople who sell for some of the world’s leading companies,” Steve claims to have indentified what really makes successful salespeople tick.

By administering “personality tests” that measured five areas – “openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and negative emotionality” – Steve set out to truly analyze why some people just have that ability to not just sell, but sell well.

Here is the list of the seven traits:

1. Modesty

2. Conscientiousness

3. Achievement Orientation

4. Curiosity

5. Lack of Gregariousness

6. Lack of Discouragement

7. Lack of Self-Consciousness

Hmm…where is swagger, or confidence?

Click here to read the article and see a full explanation of the “Seven Traits.”

Let’s face it, new technology can be a scary concept.  Who can blame us though? After all, how many times in our lives have we been pitched on products or services that our supposed to make our business life better, but end up miserably failing and just making things worse? The answer for many people seems to be “too many times.”

Not all technology comes with a side of snake-oil however, especially technology used to help you convert more deals. In fact, the right technology can have tangible, positive consequences on your bottom line. The trick is to use technology that is based on proven best practices and sound sales research, which allow you to maximize the effort you are already putting into selling. Even if what you are currently doing seems to be working for your business, you may not realize what more can really be accomplished by putting some faith into all the amazing things current technology can offer.

When looking at technology, you should ask yourself if it helps you accomplish the following things:

1)     Does it help me get in touch with my prospects faster? It’s been proven that the first person to establish contact with an interested party greatly increases the chance for a sale, even if the lead doesn’t purchase immediately or decides to look elsewhere.

2)     Does it help me maintain a positive relationship with my prospects throughout the duration of the sales cycle? Many times, sales cycles are long processes. A way to send automated reminders or a sophisticated way to remember to follow up is an important tool in your arsenal.

3)     Does it help you stay organized? The ability to recall notes on conversations that happened yesterday, or a month ago, is the right way you should be doing business.

4)     Does it enforce accountability? Having logs and statistics easily available helps you ensure that your operation is running as efficiently as possible.

It’s time to embrace the right technology and take your selling power to new heights. You can do it!

Any sales manager will tell you about certain instances where specific members of their sales staff have seemed to “connect on a higher level” with a specific lead. The reason for the connection isn’t really something that can be readily explained, but the results of this connection are usually extremely favorable to converting a lead.

A recent study by Leads360 discusses an advanced distribution model called Skill Based Routing, or “SBR” that should revolutionize methods of lead routing to capitalize on these specific connections that can occur between a lead and a sales rep. The essential goal of SBR is quite simple: put leads in the hands of the salesperson most likely to close them.

There are a wide variety of different specialized “skills” that a salesperson can have that will help them sell more. Anything from being born in the same region as the lead to a specialized knowledge of specific products can give certain sales agents a predisposition to convert a certain type of lead. SBR takes the approach to lead routing that dictates that the most important aspect of the process is finding the right sales rep for each lead. SBR is reliant on data collected on every lead coming through your organization to isolate what “skills” your sales staff may have, then use the trends highlighted in this data to automatically route leads to the right sales person, maximizing your ROI and ensuring that every lead be given the best possible chance to close.

The benefits of SBR are immediately clear, particularly for those accustomed to more traditional methods of sales routing. There are different reasons for different methods of lead routing. Round Robin, where leads are evenly distributed amongst the reps in order to create equity in lead volume, is designed to balance the number of leads going to each rep. While Round Robin routing is excellent for promoting equality and fairness, it isn’t necessarily the best method for closing leads. Selective Routing addressing this by moving leads based on organizational structure and balance. It’s a method more suited to closing more leads by taking advantage of your team’s organizational structure, but it still doesn’t focus on routing leads based specifically on the characteristics that will contribute to closing the most leads. SBR, however, is a routing method with the specific and sole goal of ensuring that sales agents can convert more deals. SBR is driven purely by efforts to maximize ROI and ensure that every lead is given the best possible chance to close. In this way it’s superior to previous methods of lead routing when it comes to closing the most leads possible, and the data confirms this.

The newly released Leads360 research initiative reveals that, after the implementation of SBR, “skilled” reps saw a 111 percent increase in lead conversion over the previous year, and a 36 percent improvement over the previous 45 days. Quite interestingly, those reps that didn’t have a specific “skill” isolated also saw improvement in their numbers, with a 14 percent improvement over the previous year and a 17 percent increase over the previous 45 days. This means that, overall, sales staffs saw a 53 percent improvement over the previous year and a 37 percent improvement over the previous 45 days.

In summary, SBR benefits all of a team’s sales reps which translate to more conversions. Converting a high volume of leads isn’t easy, and sales reps need every advantage they can get to ensure that each and every lead is given its best chance to close possible. Implementing an SBR approach is an excellent tool for sales managers looking to find ways to squeeze that extra value out of their marketing buy.