Marketing InfographicsSales Enablement, Automation, and Performance
5 Tips to Successfully Convert Your Online Prospect into a Client
We shared about how incredible the Refresh app was yesterday. I found out about them when I received this infographic to share from them, How to Close a Sales Lead. The journey that they describe in the email basically starts after the lead is captured via marketing.
The 5 Tips to Close a Lead
- Use a CRM – Of course, you have to have somewhere to record the lead, capture additional information about them, prioritize them, and work to a close. Customer Relationship Management systems are designed for acquisition, retention and upsell activities by collecting data in a central repository about the customer. If your sales team is lucky, they’re utilizing a sales process management system in line with it. Salesvue are clients.
- Be Available and Knowledgeable – Reaction time matters and the majority of leads have already come to you after researching your products and services online. That means your sales team must be prepared to respond quickly and thoroughly to prospect questions – else you may lose the sale.
- Find a Common Ground – Research your prospect to help you personalize the sales process. The Refresh application is built specifically for this! As well, if you’ve got a great marketing automation solution that’s scoring and collecting information on your lead’s behavior – you can really give your sales people the intelligence they need to personalize and close the lead easier.
- Meet Face-To-Face – While large engagements often require this, I’m not so sold on it. We’ve closed a lot of very large business across the web and Face-to-Face meetings weren’t necessary with webinars and webmeetings. ReadyTalk is a client. It’s most likely easier to close face-to-face so that you can build trust easier, but still not necessary in the Internet age.
- Negotiate and Follow Up – There may be a missing step before this, and that’s identify the pain points of the client and determine the budget so that you can personalize a proposal. We don’t negotiate too much… we figure out what our client needs and determine whether or not we can accomplish it with their budget constraints. Then we set expectations on how successful we might be.
Sadly, the infographic points out that nearly half of all salespeople never follow up with a lead. That’s a tough pill to swallow for the marketing team as they’re working so hard to drive leads!
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