You have a lot of control over your sales team’s performance

We’re coming to the end of the financial year, how have your sales team fared hitting their target? If the answer anything other than “We’ve exceeded our new business target for this year”, then this article might help.

Here’s a rarely shared bit of advice;

“Sales people’s performance is actually very dependent on the quality of data you provide them with.”

That’s right, despite the fact a lot of salespeople openly brag about their sales prowess. That’s kind of a lame brag by the way.

Data ‘ages’ as you call it more and more, so you need a constant supply of new, good quality leads

You need to constantly provide your sales team with good leads to get the most out of them. We did a blog about this ages back. Is your sales pipeline like 4am in a nightclub?

Feel free to read it, it’s a running joke we have in our team. A sales pipeline with not many new leads is like 4am in a nightclub. Why?

• Because everyone that you wanted to chat to has already left
• Because the ones that haven’t left yet probably aren’t the ones you want to speak to anyway

Every sales pipeline has a handful of prospects who are always going to drive you down on price. They take a long time to decide, they continually need more information, never return your calls and continually drive down on price. They’re the time-wasters and aren’t very valuable to you.

“Sales is all about time management. In an ideal world, you want your sales team to spend all their time speaking to hot leads. They way they can quote, close and move on to the next.”

97% wasted time

Do you pay your salespeople an hourly rate? Think of a sales person’s time as a budget which gets spent, regardless of whether it will turn into new business for you.

For example, we recently quoted for a telemarketing campaign and I asked some pretty standard questions about the data they call. Specifically, I was trying to find out:

• Target Customer – Who they definitely wanted to speak to
• Quality of data – How much of the data they called was actually their Target Customer

He said that of all the data they call, about 3% of the time they actually are people we want to speak to. I clarified that to him saying that 97% of his sales team’s time is wasted. Even if they were interested, you wouldn’t be able to help them

I asked how much they pay their rep, £30,000 per year. We did the math;  £900 of that is spent productively, the remaining £29,100 is wasted time.

I went further to clarify that if he could only call the 3%, then he could make the same annual sales he does now by only spending £900 per year. Moreover, if he could pre-qualify the data to focus on the B2B sales qualified leads, he could potentially 30 TIMES the amount of sales than he currently does. 30x more sales!! That’s a win-win

Data pre-qualifying checklist

Sales people are a charming bunch, but they can’t work miracles. If they aren’t speaking to the right people, then you’re making it an uphill battle.

Here’s a quick checklist:

• Take them out – Are there any contacts in the data set that clearly aren’t going to be good for you? There’s no point in them being the list, take them out!
• Lost quotes & previous customers – Are there any of these that you can catch up with?
• Want to talk now – Are there any Prospects which are showing that they’d like to talk now e.g. downloads, clicks, page views, etc. These kind of B2B sales qualified leads are gold for your sales team
• Sources of sales? – Do a lot your sales seem to come from one or two sources? If so, what can you do to get more of those leads?

Web Chat Pay-Per-Lead B2B sales qualified leads

Hope this helps you make increase your sales by making better use of your sales team’s time. We have a lot of ways that we can help grow your company and only pay for the results we get you.

We design your campaign and we intentionally only focus on the leads that will be a high ROI for you. You only pay for the results we get you. Why not find out more here?