Call Reports & Sales People…the Reality!

Today we have a guest post from Russ Hill, Founder and CEO of Ultimate Lead Systems.

OK, let’s get real about sales people for a minute. Sales people want to make sales calls. They want to make calls on qualified leads and on profitable customers who can generate sales and compensation. They are like gunslingers interested in the “quick kill.” You hire them to sell and that’s where you want them to spend their time.

But they are also given business plans and projections to write and update. They also have prospecting and travel to schedule.  And they are frequently required to spend time on software training…you know the CRM program, Excel, quote building software, the ERP system and the other third-party programs and resources that are pushed out to them, so they can be “more productive.”

The days of sales people making sales calls and writing up “simple” call reports (primarily for their own benefit) are long gone. Besides making calls, today’s sales people need to master and manage a variety of tasks and complex software. The need for the fundamental call report stills exists and management would be wise to keep that in mind. That means that one of the most important things management can do to help their sales people be more productive is to reduce the sales person’s administrative and non-sales related tasks.

Meaningful Call Reports

Sales people need simple programs to keep track of their clients and calls. That is where CRM programs are supposed to help. But not all CRM programs are easy to use. With over 25 years of sales and CRM consulting experience with hundred of companies large and small, a few of things regarding sales people and call reports have proven to be true:

1. Sales people hate paperwork and equivalent computer work (Non sales related work)
2. They need and want simple call reports for tracking their sales calls that include:
   a. Who they called on
   b. When they called
   c. What they discussed
   d. Next steps.

Simple!  Anything else management might obtain is a bonus.

Sure, it is helpful if a sales person can see other communications a customer has been having with other in the company, and the status of orders. But a sales person is primarily concerned with knowing exactly where he stands with a given prospect or customer, what he or she last said or did, and what needs to be done next. And the faster and simpler means a sales person has to capture and track this information the happier he or she will be.

Today’s CRM programs are more complicated than ever before. Of course, they don’t need to be and there are ways to zero in on the truly important functions that can help make a sales persons’ job simpler and more productive. Managing contacts and account information is important. But the B2B sales person’s day typically revolves around call planning based on previous call reports, new sales calls and more call reports. How easy is it for your sales team to capture and track the information most important to them? Can it be improved? Simplified? Perhaps it is time to ask them, “How is our program for managing calls working? Not for us… but for you?”

Russ Hill is the founder and President of Ultimate Lead Systems, Inc., a company specializing in sales lead management, CRM and support services. See the post as it originally appeared.

B-to-B Marketers: Why it takes more than three calls to make a sale

By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter

We’re all focused on generating more leads these days, but I find it ironic that most companies don’t do much with them once they get them. Simply fulfilling a request is not the answer, but yet many companies do just that. According to a survey of people who have requested info suggests that 80% of all sales are made on or after the third contact. The survey polled over 700 respondents with only 8% buying after the first call.

David Frey, the senior content editor and author of several marketing books advises, “An educated prospect is your best prospect, and if they haven’t become a customer, it’s because you haven’t fully educated them on the value of your product and developed a relationship of trust.” Why do many businesses have a problem following up with their prospective customers? Mr. Frey explained, “The problem is not that small businesses don’t have the capacity to follow-up with prospects, it’s that they don’t have the systems in place to do it well.”

In his recent newsletter, “Follow-Up Marketing: How To Win More Sales With Less Effort,” Mr. Frey advised, “A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:

1. It should be systematic.
2. It should generate consistent, predictable results.
3. It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.

This leads to a more pressing issue and that is, what is the difference between sales lead management and a CRM tool? According to Russ Hill, President of Ultimate Lead Systems: Sales lead management is a sub-function within an overall CRM strategy. Traditional CRM programs like Salesforce.com, SalesLogix, ACT, Goldmine, Maximizer and others focus on the sales person entering and managing his own data and pushing it “up” to management.

Sales lead management starts with management generating and capturing leads from all sources, fulfilling information requests and delivering them to the sales channel and tracking follow-up and sales results to measure marketing return-on-investment.

Here are some other interesting facts:

INQUIRIES MEAN NEW BUSINESS!

• 67% of all inquiries are from legitimate prospects with real needs.
• 34% have current needs that must be satisfied within 6 months!
• 70% did not know the company made the product before seeing their ad … making them NEW PROSPECTS!

A six-year study* of nearly 60,000 inquiries conducted by Penton Media Company also found that:

• 43% of inquirers receive literature and information too late to be of use.
• 72% of inquirers are NEVER CONTACTED by a salesman.
• 25% of sales contacts are made at the inquirer’s request.
• 40% of inquirers purchase the advertised product, a competitive product or change their suppliers.
  * NED Reader Action Reports

The key is to get a lead management system in place that can help your CRM convert those leads into sales.

What’s Your Lead Nurturing Strategy?

In the B-to-B world, most sales are not immediate. The longer selling cycles for most industrial/contractor purchases involve more than one person and selling cycles can go from months to years.

So B-to-B marketers need to be patient. I believe Marketing should be the ones who nurture the leads through, and when ready, transition to sales to close the deal.

I think marketing, if the right processes are in place, is in a better position to move them through the process. Effective nurturing is a series of content-relevant info for each stage of the buying process.

Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.

B-to-B companies shouldn’t be worried about quantity but quality of leads. According to Albertson Performance Group, quality lead nurturing can lead to 70% more sales. According to them, nurturing will:

• decrease selling cycles
• increase profit margins
• lessen the competition
• decrease price pressure
• get more referrals

Nurturing is the right way to show ROI on marketing efforts.

How Does Your Marketing Department Hand Off Sales Leads?

I’ve been around this crazy business for over 35 years, and one of the biggest issues still today is handing off leads from marketing to sales. You would think that with all the technology today it would be easy, right? Not the case!

Several years ago, marketing would generate leads for various sources and pass them onto sales for follow-up. Then one day someone from the C suite asked how much new business are we getting from our promotional efforts? Marketing said we developed X amount of leads and Sales would say they were all crap. Obviously the finger-pointing wasn’t going to solve the question of how much new business are we getting.

Thus started the process of lead management, qualification, nurturing and at some point turning it over to sales with a little more history behind the leads than there were several years ago. Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process  that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.

A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:
1. It should be systematic.
2. It should generate consistent, predictable results.
3. It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.

What are you doing to ensure you’re getting the most out of your leads?

If you like this post, you might want to read:

Where Are Your New Business Prospects in the Selling Cycle?

How Many Calls Does it Take to Make a Sale?

Identify Website Users: Capture More Sales Opportunities

One of our strategic partners, Ultimate Leads, has come up with an intriguing service to help you identify who’s coming to your site by company. Russ Hill, the company president, explains how it works and has given our readers a free trial.

More than 95% of visitors to B2B websites leave sites without requesting additional information according to recent research. Visitors may click links to “Find a Distributor” or download a document without you knowing who they are. And if they arrived at your site via a “pay-per-click” banner ad, wouldn’t you like to know who they are?

Now you can! LEADADVANTAGE is a program that helps you identify companies that visit your website, their interest (pages viewed), and key contacts at that company and more. Great stuff for the B2B marketer interested in generating new leads and targeting new prospects. Visitors finding their way to B2B websites usually get there because they were seeking out information on particular products or services. (Do business people have the time to visit websites about things like lift trucks, hydraulic fittings, or industrial electronics for fun?) 

Who’s Looking at YOU?
Simple reverse IP address look-up technology has been around for a while. Website traffic counts, page views, cost-per-click and return visitor numbers are standard fare in Google Analytics, WebTrends and other sites. These counts are little more than the old method of counting raw “Bingo” card inquiries and trade show booth visitors by previous advertising generations. B2B marketers need more. LEADADVANTAGE pulls detailed company and contact information from sources like LinkedIn and Jigsaw. For B2B marketers, it’s not enough to just know how many are visiting your website, but who!

Identifying and capturing website visitors is an excellent way to develop “soft leads” of prospects and new sales opportunities. It’s also a good way to learn which of your existing customers are visiting your website in search of information. Remember, these are companies that sought you out. Don’t let these opportunities elude capture.

To learn more about how to gain the LEAD ADVANTAGE, call 800-323-0550 for a no obligation 10-Day Free Trial.

B-to-B Marketers: How Many Calls Does it Take to Make a Sale?

We’re all focused on generating more leads these days, but I find it ironic that most companies don’t do much with them once they get them. Simply fulfilling a request is not the answer, but yet many companies do just that. According to a recent survey of people who have requested info suggests that 80% of all sales are made on or after the third contact. The survey conducted by Marketing Best Practices, Inc. polled over 700 respondents with only 8% buying after the first call.

David Frey, the senior content editor of http://www.MarketingBestPractices.com and author of several marketing books advises, “An educated prospect is your best prospect, and if they haven’t become a customer it’s because you haven’t fully educated them on value of your product and developed a relationship of trust.”

Why do many businesses have a problem following up with their prospective customers? Mr. Frey explained, “The problem is not that small businesses don’t have the capacity to follow up with prospects, it’s that they don’t have the systems in place to do it well.” In his recent newsletter, “Follow-Up Marketing: How To Win More Sales With Less Effort,” Mr. Frey advised, “A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:
1. It should be systematic.
2. It should generate consistent, predictable results.
3. It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.

This leads to a more pressing issue and that is, what is the difference between sales lead management and a CRM tool? According to Russ Hill, President of Ultimate Lead Systems:

Sales lead management is a sub-function within an overall CRM strategy. Traditional CRM programs like Salesforce.com, SalesLogix, ACT, Goldmine, Maximizer and others focus on the sales person entering and managing his own data and pushing it “up” to management.

Sales lead management starts with management generating and capturing leads from all sources, fulfilling information requests and delivering them to the sales channel and tracking follow-up and sales results to measure marketing return-on-investment.

Here are some other interesting facts:

INQUIRIES MEAN NEW BUSINESS!
67% of all inquiries are from legitimate prospects with real needs.
34% have current needs that must be satisfied within 6 months!
70% did not know the company made the product before seeing their ad
. . . making them NEW PROSPECTS!

A six year study* of nearly 60,000 inquiries conducted by Penton Media Company also found that:
43% of inquirers receive literature and information too late to be of use.
72% of inquirers are NEVER CONTACTED by a salesman.
25% of sales contacts are made at the inquirer’s request.
40% of inquirers purchase the advertised product, a competitive product or change their suppliers.
* NED Reader Action Reports

The key is to get a lead management system in place that can help your CRM convert those leads into sales.

Increase Your Sales Revenue by 20% Using Your Existing Inquiries

Sales leads and what to do with them has been an age old problem. Today though, there are programs and processes available to help you monitor and mine those precious sales leads. I’ve been associated with Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads for over 20 years. He “gets” the closing the loop issue and I’m glad to share with you some of his thoughts.

According to the CMO Council/BPM Forum survey in Marketing Today, corporate officers who were polled in an online survey believe revenues at their companies could increase by more than 20 percent by improving their prospect cultivation and management techniques. Marketing and C-Level executives are dissatisfied with the way they generate new business, yet more than half lack formal process to correct the problem.

And my guess is that they are not alone. According to the Advertising Research Foundation, 67 percent of industrial product inquiries are from real prospects with real needs, yet 72 percent NEVER hear from a sales person.

Clearly these executives are onto something. Does this sound like your sales team?

Haley Marketing Group cites recent studies indicating that more than 50 percent of sales people stop working a prospect after the first call. The percentage grows to 65 percent after the second call and 80 percent after the third call.

A whopping 90 percent of sales people call it quits by the fourth call. Here is the troubling part – some 70 percent of prospects won’t make a decision until after the fifth call. Are these sales slipping through your fingers too?

To some degree these numbers are easy to understand. Most sales people are like gunfighters interested in the “quick kill.” The study suggests that while companies may be good at generating large volumes of business leads, most opportunities languish because sales people all too often focus on only closing the most promising and qualified short-term opportunities.

Marketing and C-level executives are dissatisfied with the way they generate new business, but still more than half lack a formal process to correct the matter.

Sales and Marketing teams often point fingers at each other as companies struggle with reaching their sales goals. Sale people complain about receiving too many or too few unqualified leads and marketing complains about poor follow-up, lack of feedback, and wasted dollars. In our 25-years-plus years of experience in sales lead management and CRM services, this lack of synergy can usually be traced back to three specific things:

1) A lack of training about each function’s role and challenges

2) Utilizing agreed upon methodology for generating, qualifying and following up on leads

3) Getting everyone to keep their “eye on the prize.”

If Marketing’s job is to identify target markets, communicate the “right” company message and generate viable sales opportunities, then it is Sales’ job to cultivate and sell those opportunities. Who qualifies a lead and when should it be handed off to sales is an important question. Sales and marketing need be in agreement to be successful. Failing to address this important issue can trap management in something I call “the Transition Zone.”

When marketing and sales management work together to establish mutually agreed upon processes and goals, then train their teams to continuously work to both improve practices and to work together, good things can happen – more business can be captured from existing opportunities, ROI improves…and that is good for everyone.

So, the next time you are considering where to look for new business, take a fresh look at your existing prospects and sales leads. Improving your opportunity management practices may be your first and best means of growing your business.