July 2013

How Do You Know You Need A New Appointment Setting Campaign?

July 16, 2013/in Appointment Setting /by Dara Lin

How do you know when to begin a new appointment setting campaign? This is the question that has left a lot of marketers scratching their heads.

In my 10 years of experience in sales, I know that appointment setting can open good opportunities for your business.

It provides quality prospects because you only get to speak with someone that are really interested in what you have to offer.
It allows you to get in front of your buyers when they are at the right stage of their buying process.

So it is important to must make sure your sales pipeline has a lot of warm prospects to nurture to for your sales team to convert into an actual business deal.

When my team experienced drought in our sales pipeline, we’ve decided to evaluate our marketing efforts. After a lot of brainstorming, we came to a decision to set a lead generation strategy. We’ve listed down the 5 key indicators that helped us decide to revamp our appointment setting campaign.

#1. Lack of prospects to nurture.

Whenever you look at your calendar, you notice large patches of empty days, where there are no potential B2B leads for your sales team to contact and nurture. When this occurs too often consecutively, it either means your current source of customers have dried up or your sales team has become slower. You better know The Four P’s Of Sales Leads Nurturing.

Even if you have a lot of leads in your sales pipeline, only 20-30% of it are converted into sales. tweet this!

How can you improve your numbers?

Never assume inbound leads can fill up your pipeline. Have your sales team scout for more leads through different channels. Ask someone to make calls or have someone send emails or attend business events, etc. Whatever your team decides to do, just make sure they reach out to your potential customers and avoid unqualified leads.

#2. You have no ready replacement for a lost client.

Bad service, poor quality of products, they found someone else with a lower price or there’s a need to change. Yes, it can be painful to lose a client, but it could be more painful if you do not have a replacement ready for the one you have lost. Regardless of the reason, It is a huge loss for your profits when a client leaves you, so you need to make sure that you have a sufficient buffer to deal with the loss, or you have to have a new source of income for your firm. How?

Have the sales team to separate their leads.

Sales-ready leads
Warm prospects
Not interested prospects

Here’s to Assess your Sales Leads: Is it Hot, Warm or Cold?

Encourage your team to nurture all prospects even those that are not interested as of the moment. They might need something later on and consider you.

#3. Your deals are getting stalled.

This is expected when nurturing B2B leads. You might want to take a closer look at your lead qualification process. Sometimes, being too strict on a certain opportunity can be more costly than taking it in and turning them into a business client.

What could you be doing wrong?

You’re sending the wrong message to the right people or vice versa.

TIP: Identify who is your ideal prospect and find out the following:

Needs
Interest
Problems
Concerns
You’re not hitting the right audience

TIP: Interact and communicate with your prospects on their preferred channel or social media site.

#4. You only have small deals.

If you want your business to grow fast, focus on bigger projects because larger projects bring more revenue for your business. However, they have higher expectations as well. As the saying goes, “don’t keep all of your eggs in one basket”, don’t underestimate what small clients can provide. They can help increase your revenue from a lost client.

These deals cost less and you will maximize your team’s effort because we can’t underestimate small deals from clients who will only buy 1 or 2 of our products. All right, we all know how profitable niche marketing can be, tapping into small clients to capture a greater share of the market, but there is a reason why bigger is better. So, you might want to take a second look over those small deals that look so tempting to close.

#5. The market is saturated with your business.

What if you’re more passionate in an industry that is already a saturated market? The fact that the industry is oversaturated means there are a lot of opportunities to grow your business. You just have to know where to look for it.

What can you do?

Don’t be afraid to be different. Improve your products. Offer something new that separates you from your competitors.

If you see any of these signs of your business, then it is time for you to do something about it and overhaul your appointment setting campaign.

How To Make Productive Lead Generation Meetings

July 10, 2013/in Lead Generation /by admin

Meetings can be a bore, especially if all you talk about is business. But that is something you have to live with if you want to generate good B2B leads for your company. Come to think of it, meeting with business prospects, whether in person or on the phone, is an important step towards making a successful sale or business deal. The only challenge here, at this stage, is actually making your meeting interesting (and impressive) enough for them to sign up with you. With time very important for both parties, you want to make the most out of your lead generation meeting, right?

That is why you need to plan things first. For example:

1. Schedule during off-peak hours – we all know how important time is for us. Be it us in looking for B2B leads, or your prospects in their business operations for that matter, you need to make sure that your meeting will not affect everyone’s important activities. Try to be as flexible as possible for your prospects, and make sure you show up on time. Understand that everyone values their time highly. If they so much as think that you are wasting their time, then they would walk away.

2. Add some humor to the mix – of course, this advice will be dependent on whether the other party is receptive or not. Try testing the waters first, and if you find a willing audience, then subtly add some levity to your discussion. Just make sure that the jokes are tasteful, professional, and relevant to your appointment setting meeting.

3. Stand up – let us face it, meetings can be a bore, or it can downright slow our minds down. You could add life to your meetings by doing it standing up. Not only will it help you get your body moving, it will also compel you to hurry up your talk. This will shorten your time of discussions, and give you more time to do what matters.

4. Get everyone a chance at closing time – this is a very good tactic that you can use to help everyone be more involved in your meetings. Before you dismiss your meeting, have each participant say something about the discussion. In this way, you can be sure everyone is on the same page. At the same time, it will give everyone the opportunity to get out whatever their keeping in their chests.

Meetings will always be part of your business operations. It may be boring, it may be tough, and it may be outright a pain in the neck when things go rough. But we all have to face one at some point in our time. It is up to us to make it better, more interesting, or more rewarding. While this may just be a stage in our marketing process, almost no different to what telemarketing, social media, or email promotions is, it is how we use our creativity and resourcefulness that makes all the difference in our efforts.

The Four P’s Of Sales Leads Nurturing

July 2, 2013/in Lead Generation /by Dara Lin

For a business to successfully generate qualified sales leads, a little leads nurturing needs to be done. In lead generation, developing your relationship with your prospects on every stage of their buying journey is a slow process. However, if every B2B leads are nurtured well, they can be easily converted into a sale. Still, that is where the challenge is – how do you properly nurture leads? And I’m not just talking about some relationship-building activity that your company can do at times. This process includes walking through your buyers at every stage of your sales funnel.

Nurturing involves; identifying the needs of your prospects, providing information and offering a solution according to their needs. Going through your prospect’s buying journey takes time. In order to do it right, you need to take note of the four P’s of lead nurturing:

Permission

Gone are the days when you can just push your product to the face of your prospects. Building relationship with your prospect includes respect. Sending a bunch of introductory emails or any marketing collaterals makes people less likely to engage and make a purchase. Or worse, report your email campaign as spam.

Here are a few guides on email marketing:

Preferences

Understanding your prospect’s likes and dislikes about certain products, their issues, and concerns within their organization is important. This will affect how you handle each prospect and offer solutions to their problems depending on what they need. Get to know them better with customer segmentation.

Personalization

When marketing to individual business prospects, whether be it through an email, a call, social media or content, always make sure to customize your pitch or the information you provide. Every prospect is different. This means personalizing your message to fit the tastes of your recipients.

Pull

Before you start letting the world know about your products or services, you must first start with identifying your target audience. Know what they want and what they usually look in a product and use this information in crafting high-quality contents that are relevant and valuable to your readers.

Start creating your content with these guides:

This will compel the audience to follow you, basically ‘pulling’ them to your direction. Educate those who are not yet ready to buy by providing informative contents and lead them to the final stage of their buying journey.

Despite the benefits of lead nurturing, only a few marketers nurture their sales leads. Having an effective lead nurturing technique plays an important role in the success of your marketing strategy. Nurture your leads into opportunities with these four P’s, and see an increase in your close rates.