Inside sales teams are at it every day, making thousands of calls to prospects, seeking an appointment or a sale. They are given scrubbed lists with contact names, job title, phone numbers and a good luck pat. On the back end, managers track calls, appointments and sales. The cycle continues when reps deplete their assigned leads and it starts over again. There are times when this well-oiled prospecting machine can under-deliver – and you may not be aware. But there are easy fixes. Here we explore three cases, and discuss how to overcome these challenges. TESTING NEW MARKETS: When looking at sales data, you may find strong traction among companies that don’t fit the best customer profile — or at least what the rep thinks is the best profile. This finding is usually uncovered by in-depth profiling, micro-segmentation or modeling analysis. These customers may not be among the largest customers, but you find that they purchased numerous units of products that fit specific needs. As an example, say you are selling technology products, and religious institutions are not known as leading technology buyers. But recently we came across a church buying hundreds of iPads for one of its programs. This is opportunistic entry into a market if other religious institutions have similar programs. What you can do: …Read More
Tag Archives: scoring
Customer Retention: It’s not too late to catch that pass
I was rooting for our hometown Chicago Bears team in the NFC championship game last Sunday night. Guess that didn’t work out so well. We learned the value of backups aka deep bench, but it wasn’t enough to save the game. I watched the game while working on a customer retention project, so I couldn’t help but see parallels between retaining a transactional customer and the wide receiver catching the ball on the deep passes. After a customer places an order, the customer is like the ball out of the QB’s hands as it soars above the field to its intended destination. But as the saying goes, “When you throw a ball, three things can happen and two of them are bad.” Here is where the customer correlation comes in. Just like the ball must come back to earth, the customer must buy again. On the bad side: your competition intercepts (gets the order at the right time) or you did not anticipate and get to the position at the right time or simply fumbled (did not make proactive calls or relevant upsell/cross-sell offers). Why? Other priorities can get in the way or there is poor communication between teams, systems or processes. The result is the ball gets dropped, literally and figuratively. …Read More
Great Fruit Salad or just Apples and Oranges? A recipe for managing customers and prospects
Sales organizations – particularly inside sales — choose between reps managing only customers, only prospecting, or having both in their portfolio mix. This happens for a lot of reasons, such as geography, industry and product specialization of the rep or even workload and efficiency considerations. While customers are often measured by trailing twelve month sales, prospects are all about future revenue. So which prospects does a rep focus on, and how can sales reps allocate time that yields the best future gains from both prospects and customers? There are several simple ways you can guide sales reps towards managing their time to call these diverse customers. Rotate based on value: Set up a pattern where the reps are calling out from low to high value, of course where the current low value customers are prioritized through scoring. For every hour, allocate 15 minutes for low value customers and prospects, 15 minutes for high value prospects and 30 minutes for high value customers. Something like this should help them work across the entire portfolio every 60 minutes: Standardize on future value only: Using modeling and predictive methods, create a future value index for both customers and prospects. You do not have to predict an exact number. Even …Read More