Sales Tips From Jonathan London

When thinking about your lead gen strategy, here are 17 interesting questions that are relevant for a salesperson or sales organization:

1. How many leads are you getting in total from both inbound and outbound activities?
2. Are the ratios correct from each? Is lead gen giving you the number of quality leads you need or should you spend more money and time on outbound?
3. Do the 2 feed off each other?
4. What is your close ratio on each?
5. Are you getting enough leads (stupid question to ask a salesperson) to meet your number or do you need more leads or a higher close ratio
6. Quality of leads – which lead is better regardless of volume – your own outbound or the inbound
7. For your outbound do you have named accounts that you are going after
8. Are they verticalized? They should be if they aren’t
9. How many accounts are on this list?
10. Rotate accounts – how often do you rotate them? What is your criteria for this list? Do you have an ideal profile?
11. Assign by contacts – are you taking advantage of social media and assigning accounts by who knows who?
12. Do you allow people to trade accounts based upon criteria that gives them a better chance to sell them?
13. If you are a manager, do you take accounts away from people since they are not active?
14. If you are using a lead gen capability, how and when do accounts go back in for a “drip” campaign?
15. If you are a manager, what is your lead distribution philosophy? Is it round robin, or do you have someway of distributing leads to those who are performing better and doing better with the leads?
16. as a sales leader are you giving your lead gen/marketing group enough direction?
17. should you be using more targeted lead gen activities if you are in a very tight

You Decide if You Want the Appointment or Your Call Could Be the Most Important a Prospect Takes.

In working with a client this last week, it wasn't surprising to see how dispirited they were. It was an inside sales team of 20 people who had to make 125 calls a day (puuhleeese) and were finding it difficult to make appointments for their outside sales specialists. In fact when a customer said yes to them they would jump for joy. Not an easy job.

While teaching them new techniques (which I will delineate in a second) I told them two things that completely changed their perspective for the better:

1.    Since they were selling enterprise voice solutions that leverage a prospect’s strategic investments, taking an appointment with them could be the most important thing that prospect could do

2.    Therefore, they should be confident and assertive when calling, not apologetic, shy or feel like they were bothering people, NO MATTER how many times they had to call, email, text, use smoke signals or carrier pigeons to get the appointment

So what did we discuss and change so they would get more appointments:

•  using our 3 stage process (credibility – benefits – close) we shortened each phone call from 3 minutes to 20-30 seconds.
•  we taught them how to leave a voicemail that was intriguing and would capture somebody’s interest AND how to get out of voicemail to see if they could get them live
• using the “no scroll rule” they can now send emails that are tight, succinct, relevant and easy to read and decide upon 
• we increased the number of attempts to get somebody using a mix and match of techniques that would increase the odds of getting to someone
• how to use social media, blogs, LinkedIn, FB, Phinkit, Twitter, databases and more to get to people more easily
• how to anticipate and handle objections more effectively to get more appointments
• finally, their job was to get the appointment AND THEN DECIDE if it was a good one, or they should delay the meeting. Kind of like catching a fish and deciding if it was big enough to keep vs. begging the fish to go on the hook.

Before I got home or in less than 12 hours I received two emails saying how the techniques we discussed got people appointments they otherwise couldn't get.

What do you do? What questions do you have?
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