Make Your Salesforce More Effective

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Home Why Choose Us? Email Marketing Services Free Marketing E-Newsletter Contact Mark Vogel Site Map Privacy Policy		Make Your Salesforce More Effective Particularly in a challenging economy, your sales team must find more efficient ways to close more sales. This leaves less time for lead research and nurturing. In some industries, there is a widening gap between the time a lead begins considering a purchase and when a sale is closed -- placing an additional burden on sales to stay in contact with a lead all through the sales cycle. In order to bridge this gap, many companies are increasingly relying on marketing to be more rigorous and accurate in the qualification activities, and assume greater responsibilities in the nurturing process. This reduces the amount of time that sales spends on these activities, and increases their focus on getting involved at the stage when a highly-qualified lead is ready to make a purchase. There are several tactics you can employ to help reduce the cost-per-lead and help nurture a prospect through the sales cycle, including: Webinars: given the rising cost of travel, keep your sale team at home by hosting your presentations online. Buyers often like webinars, because they can learn about your product or service without dealing with salespeople. Webinar attendees are often in the early info-gathering stage, so you may not need to involve your sales team at this stage -- only after a series of polling questions highlights the hot leads. Consider outsourcing webinar activities -- it can be costly and time-consuming to do it in-house. E-Newsletters: a well-designed and carefully executed e-newsletter can help gain top-of-mind awareness among your key audiences, and satisfy their desire for useful information. They are easily customized to address the needs of various market segments, and are highly measurable. This will help you stay in front of a prospect through the buying cycle, and gives prospects an easy way to reach out to you when they.re ready to make some decisions. Outsourced follow-up: since 100% follow-up on all leads is crucial, compare the costs to outsource the early-stage inquiry-management functions to the costs for those activities performed by your sales team. If sales spends less time culling lists of students and competitors, they’ll spend more time working with a smaller database of pre-qualified leads. Grading system: as your marketing team pre-qualifies and nurtures leads in these early stages, be certain to create a grading system that is used throughout the organization. If it isn’t graded with a “hot” or similar grade, then it can remain in marketing for further nurturing (email, direct mail, telemarketing) until it moves up or is dropped from the database.
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Make Your Salesforce More Effective

Particularly in a challenging economy, your sales team must find more efficient ways to close more sales. This leaves less time for lead research and nurturing.

In some industries, there is a widening gap between the time a lead begins considering a purchase and when a sale is closed -- placing an additional burden on sales to stay in contact with a lead all through the sales cycle. In order to bridge this gap, many companies are increasingly relying on marketing to be more rigorous and accurate in the qualification activities, and assume greater responsibilities in the nurturing process. This reduces the amount of time that sales spends on these activities, and increases their focus on getting involved at the stage when a highly-qualified lead is ready to make a purchase.

There are several tactics you can employ to help reduce the cost-per-lead and help nurture a prospect through the sales cycle, including:

Webinars: given the rising cost of travel, keep your sale team at home by hosting your presentations online. Buyers often like webinars, because they can learn about your product or service without dealing with salespeople. Webinar attendees are often in the early info-gathering stage, so you may not need to involve your sales team at this stage -- only after a series of polling questions highlights the hot leads. Consider outsourcing webinar activities -- it can be costly and time-consuming to do it in-house.
E-Newsletters: a well-designed and carefully executed e-newsletter can help gain top-of-mind awareness among your key audiences, and satisfy their desire for useful information. They are easily customized to address the needs of various market segments, and are highly measurable. This will help you stay in front of a prospect through the buying cycle, and gives prospects an easy way to reach out to you when they.re ready to make some decisions.
Outsourced follow-up: since 100% follow-up on all leads is crucial, compare the costs to outsource the early-stage inquiry-management functions to the costs for those activities performed by your sales team. If sales spends less time culling lists of students and competitors, they’ll spend more time working with a smaller database of pre-qualified leads.
Grading system: as your marketing team pre-qualifies and nurtures leads in these early stages, be certain to create a grading system that is used throughout the organization. If it isn’t graded with a “hot” or similar grade, then it can remain in marketing for further nurturing (email, direct mail, telemarketing) until it moves up or is dropped from the database.