You’ve invested time and money getting leads into your sales funnel. You may even be doing well with sales. However, if you’re like most businesses you may be leaving a significant amount of money on the table because you have not maximized how you handle your leads.
Here are 5 elements to getting more customers from the same number of leads:
Element 1 – Speed – Ever had an interest in a product or service and filled out an online form or made a phone call to get more information from a potential supplier only to find they took days and sometimes weeks to get back to you – or even worse, they never got back to you?
- Do you know how fast you respond to sales inquiries?
- Are you tracking response rates?
- Have you set a standard for how quickly you respond to inquiries?
Respond faster and more consistently and you will turn more leads into sales. This is a simple but powerful idea.
Element 2 – Strengthen the Sales Process – Once you do connect with a prospect, how effective is your connection?
- Does the person connecting with the lead take the time to understand the prospect’s needs?
- Do they listen instead of just focusing on selling?
Element 3 – Handle Objections More Effectively – Years ago a classic sales book pointed out to the reader that “a sale begins when the prospect says no.” The point was that if you don’t understand why a prospect says no (instead of just not buying with no reason), you will lessen the chance of a sale. Once you get an objection, probe to make sure the objection is the real objection and have an approach already in place to handle the objection.
Element 4 – Follow Up and then Follow Up Again – Millions of dollars of potential sales are lost each day for one simple and easy to correct reason – failure to follow up. One interaction with a prospect is often unlikely to produce a sale for many reasons, including the prospect not being ready to buy now, or the prospect has contacted other suppliers, or the prospect is not yet convinced to buy from you.
Make it part of your sales process to follow up multiple times. This is important since research shows that many prospects don’t buy until the fifth or more interactions.
Element 5 – Avoid High Pressure – High pressure selling is a thing of the past. If you employ a hard close technique, a prospect’s “antenna will go up” and he will most likely resist buying from you. Today with more supplier choices than ever, a buyer is in more control than ever before. Many buyers don’t want to be sold but would rather feel that they have made the decision themselves.
