Make your sales leads prospecting work harder with these three vital steps, advises Rahul Dhingra, senior consultant for North America at Global Intelligence Alliance
B2B companies are placing even greater emphasis on sales leads prospecting as a result of uncertainty over the global economy and evolving buyer behaviour. According to the recent Lead Generation and Nurturing Benchmarking Report 2012 by B2B Marketing, almost 70 per cent of marketers expect to increase investment in lead activity in the next 12 months. Over 50 per cent say that increasing quality of leads is their highest priority objective. Many, however, lack the resources they need inhouse, as well as sufficient insight on their target customers and competitors.
The overall prospecting-to-sales function involves administration, research and actual sales calls. But without professional intelligence research resources, a sales person’s time is divided among different tasks. Outsourcing sales leads prospecting to a third-party consultant can reap good payoffs, but any consultant you use must understand your business and be resourceful in getting the right and highly qualified information.
Here are some vital steps to take before working with external consultants in sales leads prospecting.
1. Identify goals strategically
It helps to first identify your top management priorities. Are they prioritising improved close ratios? Shorter sales cycles? A target number of customers or amount of revenue?
Next, find out what sales leads tactics have and haven’t worked for your sales team in the past. This will help you evaluate how to go about setting priorities. For instance, it is worthwhile checking if following up with previous lapsed customers has led to sales. Find out which regions tend to generate the most sales leads and if they are well covered by competitors.
Conduct win and loss analysis to identify your preferred client type or segment. This will make the identification of leads more precise and generate higher quality leads.
You can also analyse your sales cycle and map out groups of potential customers for different ‘seasons’, for example, do certain manufacturers buy more components just before Christmas?
Try identifying similar clients or client segments in different industries or geographical markets. Identifying completely new types of client segments can be equally important in expanding beyond the core base of clients. Growing the revenue contribution of clients outside a core base of customers can also reduce risk exposure, this is particularly the case during times of economic turmoil.
2. Create detailed profiles
Most companies know their top customers relatively well, but it also helps to investigate them and other prospects deeper. Besides knowing the basic demographics, have there been changes in what’s driving their purchase decisions? Who are their influencers? Do they belong to any associations?
It’s critical to identify the right people to target, meaning those that have the ability and authority to make a purchase, and assess the level of receptiveness to your products or services. That way, you can avoid spending time on those who have little or no influence over the purchase process. The purchasing organisation may favour low prices; the production manager may prefer state-of-the-art technology and the sales director may be attracted to low production costs per unit. In this case, you have three different needs at one client organisation.
Product attribute mapping analysis can help identify and weigh the importance of different product attributes for each stakeholder in the purchasing process. This goes beyond basic sales leads generation and is often very effective in helping to close deals.
3. Invest in research
With the need to understand your prospects thoroughly, it is necessary to invest in business research, or market intelligence as it is also commonly known.
But how much should you pay for the research? How do you know it will be a cost that is likely to pay off? One way to determine how much budget to allocate to professional research resources is to evaluate how much time your sales team spends on creating prospects lists on their own. Is it 30 per cent? If so, how much would 30 per cent of your company’s sales payroll add up to? That amount is a good one to start with. Allocating that 30 per cent to a market intelligence company to help research and develop a list of sales leads professionally could generate better returns on investment.
As a start, you could consider a pilot project. In briefing your consultant, tell them everything they need to know in order to understand where your business is today and where you would like it to go. This will help them identify the type of sales leads that are right for you.
The better equipped you are with the market intelligence to monitor and analyse your existing and potential markets, the better positioned you are to identify new potential markets and sales leads.
