In spite of using the best easy to use CRM software , do you feel that your sales team is endlessly spinning its wheels?
Clearly, something is definitely wrong, since a low conversion rate and exhausted sales reps is not a great combination for the growth of any business.
A part of this problem can lie in the fact, that your team may have too many leads.
Although you may assume that having a pile of leads is a good sign, nevertheless, sales can be counter-intuitive, since quality is far less important than quality when it comes to sales.
It is a common fact faced by many organizations, whereby a clogged sales pipeline in an easy to use CRM can be really demoralizing for your sales and marketing teams and can render a grim blow to any sales rep’s confidence working in your company’s payroll.
How Marketing Can Help You Focus on the Highest Quality Leads?
Although both sales and marketing teams have the same goal (to increase revenue), at times both teams are often at odds, which can cause tensions between the two.
The problem lies in the fact that while marketing may not provide your sales reps with adequate Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL), sales also many times may neglect the MQLs that marketing sends through to them.
Therefore, as an entrepreneur, you need to find a shared purpose for sales and marketing that will allow you to refine the sales pipeline in your easy to use CRM software, and focus more on best quality leads.
Per say, your marketing team’s content marketing program should provide a lot of heavy lifting for your sales, by answering frequently asked questions, reeling in leads, and identifying prospective leads who are ready to converse with your sales reps by observing the way those leads are interacting with your brand’s contents.
Below is a guideline for working with your marketing team to engender better quality leads and hit your sales targets over time:
1. Inform marketing what your prospects are asking at every stage of the sales pipeline
Marketing is always desperate for insights into the prospects requirements and your sales reps talk to those people every day, and know what prospects want.
Therefore, if your sales teams can provide a list of those frequently asked questions by the prospects to your marketing, they can create contents in form of blogs and FAQs that they and your sales reps can share with the prospects, and thereby do not have to waste time continually covering old grounds.
According to research conducted by Forrester:
"78 % of buyers were put off by the fact that salespeople do not offer them relevant content to help them research and understand your offering."
2. Ask marketing to share their buyer personas
While your marketing team puts in a lot of efforts into creating buyer personas (the profile of ideal customers for your brand), salespeople often lose deals since they do not know who their ideal customers are, or where to find them.
These ideal buyer personas include details like age, language, position in the company, pain points, their favorite traveling places, even their preferred TV shows, etc.
According to another research done by Forrester, it was found that:
"75 % of prospective leads feel the sales reps who contact them don’t understand their business, role at work, or even the problem they’re trying to solve."
Therefore, sharing buyers personas between marketing and sales or developing it in conjunction with sales and marketing teams, can help in growing your sale.
3. Explain marketing why leads sales are getting do not work
Instead of complaining or rushing into a meeting for evaluating why lead your sales reps are getting from marketing do not work, it is best to explain your marketing team, what a solid lead looks like for your salespersons based on the leads that have been converted in the past.
Marketing can also use this information in conjunction with sales to develop a lead scoring system that will work for both.
4. Know that the definition of MQL is always in a flux
As your sales teams keep working with marketing to refine the formula for Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL), your sales teams also need to keep an eye and measure the leads that convert and adjust the MQLs by working on the existing lead scoring points, so that new leads resemble your existing customers.
5. Refine the fields in your lead generation forms
If your sales team is not finding good leads from marketing it can be because of the fact that the lead generation forms on your business website’s landing pages don’t match your sales reps needs.
Therefore, suggest your marketing to create well-crafted lead generation forms in conjunction with the sales teams, having the right fields that can filter in right leads (isolate the bad ones) and drive them directly into your sales pipeline.
6. Keep the data in your CRM Database up to date
People change jobs, phone number, emails, and addresses. Things change over time. People leave their jobs. Businesses and companies move and get closed. So do not let the MQLs sit in your CRM Database forever.
Strike your deals while they are hot. Since solid and good MQLs can get decayed and becomes useless within a few months.
Review your CRM database every week, and evaluate all open deals as well as the lost ones from the previous weeks.
Understand the reasons for your wins and losing categories (on product features, price, requirements of specific industries, or others) and make this clear to your marketing teams.
Since, when your sales and marketing teams using the easy to use CRM fine-tune your selling tactics on a regular basis by learning from this knowledge, it ensures better and more sales down the line.
7. Let marketing team nurture fence-sitting leads
Create a process for your marketing team, whereby they can find prospects that are still not ready to purchase your offerings and can take them back from your sales teams.
Hence, if a qualified lead is passed on to the sales reps but is found that they are not ready to buy, you need to pass the prospect back to your marketing team and let them nurture it further, until the prospect is ready to buy.
This way, you can cut down on stuck leads in your easy to use CRM software platform’s sales pipeline.
8. Look past closing your deals
Even after you have made the sale, let your marketing team keep sending premium contents to your customers.
This will not only help you build the credibility of your contents with your customers but the next time that customer needs something that your organization can provide, you can convert their trust in your offerings into more revenue when the time is right.
Sell once, and keep the customer for life.
You can also encourage your customers to share your contents on their social media networks, and thereby make them act as unpaid brand ambassadors for your business.
9. One more bonus step you need to take
Talk to your marketing team on a regular basis.
Though it may seem obvious, in reality conducting regular meetings between marketing and sales teams are easier said than done.
According to a study published by DemandGenReport (an organization that caters to the Latest B2B marketing news and trends):
"49 % of marketing and sales leaders said that the major challenge for finding alignment between their teams is communication. Sales and marketing just aren’t talking."
Therefore if you want to instantly take one action after reading this article, advice your sales reps to make friends with marketing right now, since if you can make this happen, increasing conversion rates can temporarily wait.
This is because, for the growth of your business, sales and marketing team are going to need to come up with a set of unified goals.
SO WHY WAIT?
Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a software platform that can help you do that in 2019?
If so, ConvergeHub is for you!
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