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Different selling situations and commercial propositions understandably require different selling approaches and so it makes sense that many sales people and companies are often confused about what sales lead generation approach to use and for what. This is one reason why we (Sales Accelerant) make a point about having experience selling solutions, services and products and not one or the other.Are the conflicting strands of advice, ideas and possibly your overall lack of understanding and/or confidence, concerning which sales approach to adopt and how to deliver it, holding you back from cold calling or other forms of lead generation? |
Let us break it down for you in fairly straight forward steps…
To start with, let’s think about new business prospecting/lead generation in a direct marketing context and in the format drummed into sales people like us with marketing knowledge gained during Chartered Institute of Marketing college days and through practical brand management etc.
AIDA…. For those not familiar with this acronym, it stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. Think of prospecting as the process of generating attention and interest, sufficient interest to win the opportunity to have a conversation with your prospect, during which they will feel motivated to listen and engage with you as you both explore your subject in more detail i.e. the solution, service or product you wish to promote, albeit on the back of an identified and discussed challenge/need to start with.
The goal of prospecting/lead generation activity is to generate awareness and interest, to convert that interest into conversation, then to generate a desire and ultimately action.
It should be noted here that it wasn’t said that the goal of prospecting is to find someone currently looking to purchase your particular solution, service or product. Why? For the majority of sales people, this is not the prime goal of prospecting, because it doesn’t work often enough.
When prospecting, you will often come across people who are already in the Desire phase (i.e. someone interested in and already committed to, solving a particular challenge or purchasing a particular type of solution, service or product) or Action phase (i.e. someone already in the process of searching for a solution to the problem), but if your prospecting/lead generation approach revolves around only looking for these people at these stages (i.e. Desire and/or Action), then the likelihood is that you are in for a number of rude awakenings and upsets.
Consider the following:
· Find someone who is already wishing to buy (i.e. Action stage) and they are likely to already have a front runner (supplier) in mind. It’s likely therefore that the front runner is not you, leaving you with little or no chance of winning the business.
· If you are not selling a commodity product or service, it’s quite likely that the purchaser isn’t considering buying what you offer since he/she is unlikely to know much (if anything) about what you are selling, let alone how it works and the benefits of buying it.
· However… find someone who has the Desire to solve a challenge and hasn’t yet begun looking into how to do it and bingo, you are in luck! But…. finding these people will be like finding a needle in a haystack. This means that if you want quick wins during a telesales/lead generation campaign, you are best combining website optimisation/Adword campaigns with direct marketing, advertising, PR and for the refined touch, specialist telemarketing. Each of these promotional channels have their own merits of course and direct marketing and telemarketing work very well when executed together as part of a joint campaign, especially when speed of results is a key factor.
If you are the one who can capture your prospect’s Attention and generate Interest and Desire, during a sales lead generation campaign, its highly likely that you will be the front runner, the main contender, you will be able to shape the prospect’s understanding of the importance of solving a particular challenge and you will then be in a strong position to be able to persuade them into Action.
The 6 keys to sales lead generation success are:
1. Targeting
The key foundation to sales prospecting success is the strength of your data list and the precision of your targeting. The importance of this key point cannot be stressed nearly enough! Too many sales people try calling the wrong people, start off by calling people too low in the organisation hierarchy and waste enormous amounts of time and therefore cost. What needs to be done is that calls need to be made to the higher end decision makers. This can be achieved through access to a high quality data list, which has recently been cleansed and validated with all the necessary CTPS stops applied (standard inclusions with any list acquired from a credible data broker), before starting any telesales/lead generation campaign. Fail to observe the above and your campaign could fail miserably.
2. Value at Every Opportunity
When you well, not everyone wants to hear your capability pitch (not to be confused with elevator pitch), your long history or your life story right at the start. What they are looking to find out about is how their lives can be improved through listening to you and ultimately working with you. When you think about providing value, its important you don’t just think about the value you may eventually deliver when your prospect works with you. It’s crucial to the success of your lead generation activity that your prospect gets value just from speaking with you. On the back of these positive experiences for your prospect you will be selling your company, your commercial proposition and in the process, yourself. Initially, you need to be continuously selling the idea that the prospect’s time will be well spent if they spend time speaking with you.
3. The Right Offer
Your ultimate commercial proposition (offer) might be a particular type of financial product, type of software, marketing solution, plan or other. The interim offers i.e. the offers you present to your prospects during your lead generation campaign and they accept, before they actually purchase from you, must be prepared bespoke to their highly specific needs and with great attention to detail to achieve maximum buy in.
4. No Tricks
Assuming you are calling enough of the right people, with the right product, at the right time and right price, using the correct methods and with very clear key marketing/sales messages packed with benefits (WIIFM – what’s in it for me type detail), lead generation campaign success is highly probable, especially when adopting a high-integrity approach. There is no need to use sly tricks, to tell lies or to cut corners in order to strike up initial dialogue with your prospects. Treat others as you would like to be treated yourself. It’s a little cliché but important to mention in the context of sales approaches.
5. Multiple Contact
· Top performers don’t give up easily
· Most sales professionals will contact a prospect 2-3 times
· Nearly half will follow up 4-5 times
· Only the top 10% will make the 6-10 contacts necessary to get the business
· These 10% have a good sense of who is likely to buy and who is a qualified prospect
· A brief email (or letter) or call is all you need to keep your name in front of the prospect
6. Multi-Channel Lead Generation Campaigns
Telemarketing (cold calling) works alone and is a great tool, not just for immediately identifying those prospects at Desire phase but particularly for leading your prospects through the stages from Awareness phase through to Action, building rapport along the way and gathering precious intelligence about the market, competitors, the prospect and much more. However…. cold calling, as part of a lead generation campaign, can work even better when executed alongside a direct marketing campaign, be that direct mail or email. You should use a number of promotional channels to reach out to your prospects to warm them up, making sure that each contact both adds value for the prospect and delivers value for you.
Finally….. if you take note of the above 6 keys to sales lead generation success and act on them you can feel confident that you will be developing strong inroads towards achieving prospecting success. At the very least, you will be leaps and bounds ahead of the many (40-50%) companies who will not execute any lead generation/prospecting activity at all today.
Here at Sales Accelerant we specialise in multi-channel sales lead generation and sales consultancy. We provide sales lead generation campaign services, strategic sales advice and planning services and we provide virtual sales and marketing team support to companies which have identified that there are significant benefits to be gleaned from outsourcing key business processes.
If you want to take your business to the next level call us now on: 0845 3058145
