Ah, the dreaded lead generation cold call. Why is it that businesses and prospects alike cringe at hearing this phrase? For one reason or another, it is often perceived as a negative selling technique in lead generation that doesn’t seem to be a glamorous as other forms of selling. However, cold calling is very important in sales as many business relationships start this way.

Here are a few tips to make the most of your lead generation cold calling:

1. Know who you’re calling – Yes, part of the first lead generation call is to uncover interest and fact find. But sales professionals still need to do some research and preparation. Prospects know instantly if the caller on the other end is knowledgeable. Sellers do not want to start out asking questions where the answers can easily be found on the prospect website. Sales professionals will quickly lose credibility and decrease the chances of converting the prospect into a closed sale.
2. Be the expert – Know your products, the benefits they provide and the solutions they offer. Understand your prospect’s industry to talk about how your business offering can help solve the challenges they are facing. This leads to better lead generation phone conversations, as the prospect forgets that this was ever a cold call to begin with. Suddenly they start to think about what it is you are telling them and are open to hearing your business proposal.
3. Uncover Unmet Needs – When cold calling, sales professionals need to determine if the business offering matches the prospects needs. In order to do this, sales needs to research the prospects’ organization, become knowledgeable in the industry and uncover pain by asking probing questions. Doing so will not only help build trust and show credibility, but may also push prospects to start doing business with you.

So what does effective cold calling mean to your business? Utilizing these tips could result in a more effective use of time for your sales organization that can provide better sales results. How does your organization conduct lead generation cold calls? Any tips you can share?

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From prospecting, to lead nurturing and eventually to closed business, lead development is managing the prospect throughout the entire lead process. In telesales lead generation it starts at contacting a prospect database and talking to decision makers to uncover lead criteria to determine if a business need exists. It is also includes a database cleanse, meaning removing prospect information that is expired to provide clients with an accurate list of prospects.

From a lead nurturing standpoint, lead development is hand-holding the prospect, with regular and personalized communication, sending targeted information at just the right time during the buying cycle. This is done to discover if they have a pain, if we are able to provide a solution to that pain and staying with them until just the right time when they are ready to purchase.

Lead development is an integral part of running a successful business. Lead development helps to uncover new leads that will continually fill the sales pipeline. To learn more, check out What’s Involved in the Lead Development Process on Invenio’s Resources page.

In what ways do you keep in touch with prospects and customers? Many businesses use social media, telesales, trade shows and other events to execute “touch the customer” activities, but what about email marketing? Email marketing is a great way to conduct a lead nurturing campaign.

A big part of a successful marketing strategy is staying in front of your customers through constant communication. Leveraging email marketing for lead nurturing is a powerful tool to remind them of your value while also setting you apart from other providers in the marketplace. As well as other marketing tools, email marketing can help businesses drive repeat customers, boosting the success of any organization.

Lead nurturing through email marketing allows you to stay connected, not only can you target information to prospects at the right time of the buying cycle, you can communicate company promotions to existing customers.

Email marketing is a great way to build lasting relationships with prospects. Does your company currently run any email marketing campaigns? If so, which ones have worked well for your organization?

In our experience with lead generation, we’ve discovered that there are multiple reasons why businesses will make a buying decision. However, when we break this down, it seems people tend to purchase for only two reasons – sheer curiosity or having an admitted pain, where a solution is needed to resolve it.

Curiosity –People are curious by nature, so it is not uncommon in lead generation to find a prospect that wants to find out whether or not the purchase will provide a solution to a business problem. Will it increase the level of employee productivity or generate a level of greater job satisfaction?  Tailoring sales questions that address these issues will help convert a prospect into a closed sale.

Pain – The other reason, if not the most common reason a B2B prospect will decide to purchase is due to experiencing a problem without a solution. Prospects in this situation are more willing to listen to a sales pitch and consider the benefits if they are dissatisfied with what they have.

What do you normally hear from your sales team regarding the reasons why prospects decide to make a purchase? Do you agree that prospect curiosity and pain have a lot to do with it?

You’ll hear time and time again that in lead nurturing, marketing automation is key. Make no mistake, marketing automation and the companies that specialize in it make lead nurturing very easy on businesses. These tools can help you organize your contact information, manage the contact marketing campaigns and even handle scoring prospect behavior to help you determine which ones are valid leads. While marketing automation is great in managing the pipeline, it cannot be used as a sole marketing channel in building a prospect database.

The reason why marketing automation cannot be the only avenue to develop a database is due to a natural decay that happens with contact information. Overtime individuals move out of positions or leave companies forcing your sales team to reinitiate the sales conversation with a new contact. According to Hubspot, “In B2B marketing on average after 1 year, lists only retain 75% of their members due to overturn at companies. Marketing lists have a tendency to expire at a rate of 25% a year.”

To combat this issue, companies need to implement lead generation activities that will continue to find new business to take the spot of the expired contacts. Lead generation telesales activities that call to confirm valid contact information is a useful technique as telesales agents can cleanse the database and purge prospects that are invalid. This way businesses are making the most out of their marketing automation efforts by only contacting potential customers.

How does your organization keep your prospect information up to date? How have you used marketing automation in your lead nurturing efforts?

By: Kelley Robertson

I love face-to-face sales calls! Sure, they are stressful, unpredictable, and challenging but I enjoy the interaction with prospects and learning more about their business and/or an industry I’m not familiar with. However, that’s not why I really love face-to-face sales calls…I love the challenge each meeting with a new prospect presents.

Let’s face it, every sales call is completely different from the last one which give us the opportunity to learn, grow and improve our skills. And my favorite part of meeting with new prospects is being able to move the sales conversation forward and, eventually, capturing the deal.

Here are three ways you can ace your next sales call with a new prospect or existing customer.

1. Be prepared for the sales call.

The Boy Scout’s motto is particularly relevant in today’s sales environment. Before any sales call, meeting or appointment it is important to have a base understanding of your prospect’s critical business issues. If you’re not sure what these issues are, you need to prepare a few questions to uncover them.

You need to anticipate potential concerns or objections your prospect may voice during your meeting AND you need to be prepared to address them. The more preparation you do before a face-to-face sales call, the less likely you will be caught off-guard by something. It may sound like a fundamental concept but too many sales people are still under-prepared for their meetings which means you can stand out from your competition.

2. Be patient during the sales call.

Avoid the over-whelming urge to immediately launch into your sales pitch or presentation. Instead, ask your prospect a few questions to gain a deeper knowledge of their situation and to validate your understanding. An effective way to do this is simply say, “Mrs. Jones, before I tell you how we can solve your employee turnover issues, let me ask you a couple of questions.”

This approach sets you apart from competitors who fire up their fancy PowerPoint presentations and recite a memorized sales presentation

3. Tailor your sales presentation.

Now that you have more insight about your prospect’s situation, problem, pain point, etc., you can deliver your solution. However, if you really want to ace your meeting, it is critical that you tailor and adapt your presentation so that it addresses each key point. Avoid the common sales blunder of launching into a canned sales presentation or sales pitch; otherwise you end up sounding like every other sales person your prospect has met with.

Follow these three seemingly simple steps and you will make a powerful impact with your prospect; providing of course that your solution is relevant to their situation and that it will help them solve an existing problem.

To learn more about this and other great sales information, visit: http://fearless-selling.ca/blog/.

Okay so I admit that they aren’t closely held secrets; in fact you’ve probably heard these before. However it’s probably a good idea to keep them in mind if you are looking for tips for success during your sales career.

Preparation – Sales professionals should never “wing it”. Always come prepared to sales calls so that you will be taken seriously when you give your pitch. Trust us, your prospects will appreciate it and will not be under the impression that you are wasting their time.

Develop a pipeline – We aren’t talking about just another list of names and numbers. This is finding prospects where you’ve determined that your product or service would be a good fit through a process of lead generation.

Build rapport – I would hope that at this point in your sales career, you have witnessed the value in building rapport with prospects. You’ve got to get them to trust you and when they do, you’ll start to notice that they become more inclined to purchase from you.

Bring value – Listen to your customer when they discuss their needs and don’t automatically assume they need whatever it is you’re selling. If it doesn’t make good business sense for your client or prospect to purchase, don’t pressure them to do so. They will thank you for it later.

Network – Don’t stop communicating with clients once you’ve closed the sale. If you provide a great service, satisfy their needs and have an overall happy client, ask them for referrals. This is an easy way to develop your sales pipeline like we discussed above.

What successes have you seen from using these sales techniques? From your experience, what best practices can you share using other sales secrets?

In various lead generation circles, you may hear a lot about inquiry management and may even receive questions about how your business manages it. It is an aspect of sales that can overwhelm an organizations’ sales team which is why it is important to quickly find a solution that will help meet business objectives.

Let’s first start with defining an inquiry, which can be any inbound contact made via email, phone, web or online chat. Inquiries can either be solicited by way of marketing campaigns, advertising or other outbound marketing activities, or can be unsolicited and unexpected, through activities such as web searches, word-of-mouth or referrals. In either instance, an inquiry is a valuable opportunity and should be handled with precision and care.

Inquiry management involves any step that a company takes to capture, respond and react to an inbound inquiry. A typical inquiry management process would consist of three stages: information capture, response/follow up and lead classification.

Information Capture: This stage is the first introduction that a company has to the inbound inquiry. During this time, critical information is captured, and when possible, preliminary research is conducted to gain a high-level understanding of the company and potential fit.

Response/Follow Up: Following the preliminary information capture, this stage involves the initial lead qualification where interaction/communication with the inbound inquiry is initiated to gather more in-depth information, including detailed insights into the prospect’s budget, needs and authority to purchase.

Lead Classification: The lead classification is the final stage in inquiry management, where inquiries are classified as leads and appropriate next steps are assigned based on the information gathered from previous interactions. In this stage the sales-ready leads are separated from those with longer term potential, or no potential at all.

To learn more about inquiry management, specifically as it relates to web inquiries, download The Truth Behind Web Inquiry Management. Or check out Inquiry Management on our website.

More often than not, inquiry management activities carve out a large portion of time from sales taking their attention away from closing deals. Sales may quickly become overwhelmed by having to work a large database of contacts in order to find the most qualified prospects, let alone having to manage all of the emails and phone calls that go along with that. To solve this problem, many businesses look to outsource inquiry management lead generation activities to firms that have experience managing inquires effectively.

Fill the sales pipeline – Outsourcing inquiry management can help fill the pipeline by identifying, scoring and segmenting inquiries and handing off the most qualified to sales, while nurturing prospects that aren’t quite ready to purchase.

Lead data cleansing for CRM systems – another benefit of outsourcing inquiry management is your businesses will receive cleansed data that can be added to your existing CRM. When your inquiry management lead generation vendor works through the list, they are able to update contact information which will also save you time in the long run.

Receive valuable reporting – Outsourcing inquiry management efforts allows time to double verify sales ready leads and provide detailed insights of all records. This analysis can uncover additional inquiry sources which can deliver a higher ROI.

How is your organization currently handling inquiry management? To learn more about this and other services, check out www.inveniomarketing.com/b2b/inquiry-management

From a lead generation standpoint, Facebook and other social media sites can be a great avenue to reach and connect with prospects. Businesses are constantly being told to use social media to help with branding and sales efforts, but inquiring minds want to know, does Facebook actually help to drive business?

Facebook by far is the leader in social media activities and because of this, businesses have a greater chance of reaching prospects by having an active Facebook page. In lead generation, it is important to have a targeted message for a targeted market to ensure that the sales pipeline is filled with stronger leads. Facebook is great for getting the targeted message across because only the prospects that have opted in by liking the page will be able to get updates from your business. If your business has had the ability to generate enough interest in the page, then you already have a greater opportunity to further the sales conversation with those prospects.

Facebook can be a great tool to help drive business as long as it is used as part of a larger marketing mix. Depending on your business and industry, Facebook alone will not provide a huge lift in closing business deals, but rather a tool to help communicate with current customers and prospects. One of the other great reasons why social media is so important is that it provides businesses with the ability to interact with other businesses in order to develop a network that can be used for referrals. It’s a great way to build rapport and business relationships, while creating brand awareness and managing the organization’s online reputation.

There seem to be obvious benefits for using Facebook for lead generation tactics which is why you will also find our organization on Facebook (‘Like’ us here). Tell us how you utilize Facebook for your lead generation efforts. Are you seeing a major impact?