Growing Revenue Without Increasing Headcount

Conventional wisdom says that to grow a business means spending more on marketing (to generate more leads) and hiring more sales people (to close more deals). But what if we can increase revenues without hiring more people? What if we can help your current sales team sell more by off-loading their ‘non-selling’ tasks?

In this difficult economy, smart businesses are investing in tools and programs to do just this. The goal is to automate non-selling tasks such as prospecting for new leads, initial follow-up, lead qualification, and the nurturing of leads who just aren’t ready to buy when we happen to call them. Your sales team can then spend more time closing deals from a pipeline of ‘sales qualified’ leads and become much more productive at revenue generation.

A past study found that only 13% of the leads generated by a typical marketing campaign are actually ready to buy. It also went on to find that 45% of them eventually buy (from someone) within 12 months. This certainly seems to confirm real-world observations that only 1 out of 10 leads we call are actually potential customers. It also says that if we continue to follow-up and nurture these ‘leads’ that we could get up to four times as many ‘prospects’ with real sales opportunities – without spending any more on marketing or hiring more sales staff.

The goal of a good Lead Management Program is to properly design and automate this process. A specialized CRM tool with advanced marketing and sales automation features is generally used to send out a sequence of emails (and/or direct mail) and to monitor lead activity – so your sales team knows who to call back first and spend time with.

This is not a ‘batch-and-blast’ newsletter but instead a nurturing ‘campaign‘ that builds a relationship of trust with your leads by providing relevant information in a non-selling manner. Done right it can provide a much higher ROI (return-on-investment) from your marketing-generated leads and (with the right tool) be very cost-effective for today’s SMBs (small to medium-sized businesses).

So how much can you really grow using a Lead Management program to improve the efficiency of your sales team? Well, it depends how much time they’re currently spending on ‘non-selling’ activities. Studies show this can be up to 50% in some organizations.

For those who like to ‘run the numbers’, download this Lead Calculator Worksheet (MS Excel). Enter some basic business parameters and it calculates the number of leads you’ll need!

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Why Use Lead Management?

The average business capitalizes on only a small percentage of it’s leads each year – sometimes less than 10%. In addition, many businesses are not taking full advantage of the additional revenue possible from leads they may already have (e.g. from past customers, partners, etc)!  Unless you’re using some type of lead management tool you are almost certainly not realizing all the sales revenue you should be!

Like the majority of businesses out there, your sales success is your number one goal. And in order to grow you need to be successful at marketing (i.e. lead generation), lead management (i.e. nurturing) and sales (i.e. converting opportunities to revenue). With e-marketing being the most cost-effective way to gather leads, optimizing your website (or landing pages) for lead capture and automatic follow-up is absolutely essential to your success. A good lead management tool will help you collect information from your website visitors and automatically organize and follow-up so you close more deals.

Managing your sales activities is also a time-consuming, administrative task that many salespeople complain about. Instead of selling, they’re spending countless hours keeping track of contacts, phone calls, emails, meetings, etc. and usually don’t even follow-up on leads that aren’t ready to buy something right now. With lead management software, day-to-day tasks are simplified using pre-written email templates, automatic reminders, and simple Outlook integration. Leads that aren’t ready to buy now (but might in the future) are added to an automatic  lead nurturing track where they receive regular email every few weeks or so. Your sales team then contacts them only after they are ready to buy. Everyone works more efficiently and every lead is followed up with which (in the end) means your business grows.

When implementing a lead management program;

• Make sure ALL leads are put into your CRM database.
• Keep track of each lead source to evaluate marketing ROI.
• Segment your leads (by industry, job function, etc) so you can provide relevant information.
• Automate the process so you can spend more time closing those critical sales opportunities.
• Nurture leads who aren’t ready to buy now but may become a customer sometime in the future.
• Make sure every lead is assigned to an account manager who is responsible for its progress.

These days most people aren’t ‘purchasing’ software; they’re licensing an online service (e.g. software as a service – SaaS).  Don’t sign a long-term contract.  If you’ve signed a long-term contract and the software isn’t a good fit then you’re stuck with something that won’t be used. Find a company that will consult with you and take the time to gather information about your company, customize the software to fit your business needs and devise a plan to help implement the new system so that all departments are utilizing it.

- Steve  (http://LeadMaster.SPMsolns.com)

4 Types of Lead Management Campaigns

Lead Management is an exciting new area that allows you to get the most revenue out of your hard-earned marketing leads. It is based on a series of customized  ’touches’ (email, letters, etc) that educate and inform your leads so when they have a buying opportunity they (ideally) contact you! This eliminates the wasted time calling on leads who might be aware of your product/service but not ready to buy yet.

The most successful lead management campaigns are those designed to address your leads depending on which stage of the buying cycle they are in. Think of a simple 3-stage buying cyle.

1. Awareness Stage – where leads know you exist and a little about what you do.
2. Interest Stage – when a lead ‘may’ have a buying opportunity and is open to more details.
3. Decision Stage – when a lead turns into a prospect and starts to evaluate what you offer.

A good lead management program only gives your leads the information they really need so you maintain their interest and they don’t opt-out. Here are four basic lead management campaigns that address leads in the various stages of the sales cycle.

1. Lead Acquisition – this should more accurately be called lead generation. The goal is to get leads to the ‘awareness’ stage and have interest in your product/service.
2. Lead Engagement - addresses leads who are at the ‘interest’ stage and open to learning more. The goal is to ‘engage’ them by providing industry information, analyst reports, etc. so they see you as a trusted advisor. Ideally, they respond to your emails and phone calls because they don’t feel like you are trying to sell them something.
3. Lead Conversion – addresses leads who are actually ready to buy (i.e. prospects). This is the time to provide buying guides, pricing information, customer testimonials, ROI analysis, etc.
4. Keep-in-Touch – is a long-term campaign for inactive leads. This is your typical quarterly newsletter or even an updated link, etc. At this point the lead should know about your products/services so the goal is to be ‘top of mind’ when a buying opportunity arises.

Optimizing your lead management campaigns so they are automated and give true value to your leads is the key to engaging them. When they have a need for your product/service their activity levels will pick up and be ready to move to the next buying stage.

<Download> this 1-page illustration of the above concepts.

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Building Your Sales Process

At some point even the most seasoned sales managers realize the need to write down how to sell properly. Perhaps they just can’t get their new sales people to come up to speed fast enough or (more commonly) they’re tired of putting together monthly forecasts that have very little credibility behind them. Having a documented sales process that works for your company is fundamental to growing your business. It doesn’t have to be long and complicated. In fact,  the shorter and simpler it is means the better chance you’ll have of people actually using it.

I found a nice (and free) online tool called ProvenPath from Landslide Technologies. This tool allows you to easily create and document a custom sales process for your company. It is based on a sales process that includes;

• Phases – these are very high-level divisions of the sales process. You might (for example) prefer to use Qualification, Needs Analysis, Product Demonstration, Proposal Submission, Negotiation and Closing as your 5 sales phases. Each phase also includes the typical phase duration (in days) so you can track how things are progressing versus an average sales cycle.
• Goals - these are the general goals you hope to achieve in each phase. If you haven’t achieved these goals then you can’t progress to the next phase. You might only have 3 or 4 goals for each selling phase. Make them as generic as possible so they apply to all selling situations.  Each goal will have a percentage confidence factor to better measure your overall likelihood of closing the deal. 
• Activities – these are the typical activities done to achieve a specific goal. They are not specifically measured but useful to remind a sales person of the steps they need to take.
• Tools - these are the resources available when executing activities and may include product brochures, email templates, white papers, etc. 

You can create a simple sales process that you follow for all your business or you can create multiple processes for different business segments. Either way, this is a nice and simple tool that can be used by sales managers to track progress and better forecast revenues from their pipeline opportunities.

Download this nice white paper on Building a Sales Process.

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Just What Is SALES 2.0?

Sales 2.0 is all about breaking down the walls between marketing and sales. It is about using customer-focused methodologies along with product-enhancing technology. It’s about working with customers who are more informed than ever and turned off by old-school selling.   

Still a little fuzzy? Maybe it’s easier to explain it relative to Sales 1.0

In Sales 1.0 marketing used mass-marketed direct-mail campaigns. They handed out lots of glossy brochures and had very little data to justify their effectiveness at generating leads. Their sales team relied on personal relationships (and their Rolodex) to generate leads, they played lots of golf, and made cold calls when necessary to meet quota.

Contrast that to Sales 2.0 where marketing and sales collaborate as a single unit utilizing the latest web technologies. Prospects find you and research your product/service – sometimes before you even know about it. Selling now follows a process of providing information to prospects that helps them through the buying cycle – smoothly and quickly. Web technology is used to track who is looking for your product/service, how they actually found you, what information they downloaded, and how they would like to proceed.

Your marketing team now has data to measure how successful each campaign really was and can optimize for better performance. Prospects are nurtured along (using marketing automation tools) until they have an actual buying opportunity and then handed over to the proper sales rep to close.

Some of the web technologies used in Sales 2.0 include …

• Lead Generation/Prospecting – LinkedIn, Jigsaw
• CRM - Salesforce.com, Sugar CRM
• Email Marketing – Constant Contact, iContact
• Marketing Automation – Eloqua, Genius
• Online Meetings – GoToMeeting, WebEx
• Sales Force Automation – Salesforce.com, NetSuite

and many, many, many more!

Other good references to help explain Sales 2.0 include;

• Sales 2.0 for Dummies (free eBook, download online)
• eMarketing for the Complex Sale (from Amazon)
• B2B Marketing/Sales Trends

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Basic Principles of Good Lead Management

Many business owners believe that business growth requires increased marketing to generate more leads. Many times they already have enough leads but haven’t done a good job following up and nurturing them.

In this challenging economy customers are doing more research and delaying their purchases which leads to longer sales cycles.  Remember, customers buy from you on their time frame, not necessarily when you contact them. It may take up to 20 ‘touches before a prospect actually buys something so never give up after the first few emails or phone calls. This is why a good lead management program (also called follow-up, keep-in-touch, or marketing automation) is critical.

So what are the principles of a good lead management program?

1. Have Leads Opt-In - Nobody likes SPAM. Just because someone gives you their business card doesn’t mean they want to be added to your newsletter. A better approach is to send them a few short (but informative) emails and then ask if they want to continue receiving information from you.
2. Use Mixed-Media - Mix up your correspondence using a combination of email, direct mail, phone calls, face-to-face meetings and even the old-fashioned FAX.
3. Make It Concise, Informative, and Timely – If you want your emails/letters to be read then make them short and concise. You’ll also want to offer something informative (and timely) so it’s worthwhile reading. As you can see, this is much more than sending a generic newsletter to a distribution list!
4. Give Something of Value –  As the saying goes ‘givers gain’. Offer a good article, a link to a new website you found, or maybe suggest an upcoming webinar you heard about. The goal is to be a trusted advisor in their business world. Resist the temptation to send them too much stuff about you and your business.
5. Customize Your Follow-Up -  Don’t send everyone the same email. Categorize the people you meet. You might (for example) categorize your contacts into leads, partners, customers, etc. and optimize a sequence of correspondences for each category.
6. Regularly Check Their Interest Level – Ideally, you want them to tell you when to contact them to discuss a buying opportunity! There are great lead management tools out there that monitor email opens, clickthrus, forwards, etc. that can used to ‘score’ your leads and highlight the ones with current activity. Alternatively, simply remind them every few months to contact you if they want more information. Also don’t forget to ask for referrals (in a casual way).
7. Allow Them to Opt-Out -  The last thing you want to do is keep sending information to someone who doesn’t really care. If you think there is a potential business opportunity then put them on an extended ‘keep-in-touch’ program but if they aren’t showing any signs of interest then offer them a simple opt-out opportunity.

By properly implementing a well thought-out lead management program you will soon be able to hand over sales-qualified leads to your sales team.

For more information check out this nice article:  Ten Tips for Best Practices in Lead Management from Marketo.

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Lead Nurturing Tools for Higher-Quality Sales Leads

In today’s economy, it’s critical that all leads are followed-up appropriately, nurtured along until they are ready to buy, and then efficiently handed over to your sales team to close. According to the Sales Lead Management  Association (SLMA), 69% of  small businesses fail to qualify leads before giving them to their salespeople which certainly seems to explain the common sales persons complaint about poor leads that are not ready to buy!

There are a number of new vendors with really exciting tools for lead management (or as some call it - marketing automation, lead nurturing, drip marketing, stay-in-touch marketing,  etc.). All of them can run independently or as an add-on app that conveniently integrates with salesforce.com (SFDC).

Most marketing automation tools now include the following features;

• Integration with popular CRM solutions (SFDC, Outlook, etc)
• Email marketing and templates
• Landing page builder
• Web sign-up forms
• Website visitor tracking
• Lead scoring (email opens, web visits, downloads, etc)
• Assignment rules and work-flows

Eloqua – Probably the biggest player in the field but seems to target Enterprise class companies. Includes both lead generation and lead management tools.

Marketo – Full-featured solution for Enterprise and SMBs. Website also includes a lot of useful resources.

Pardot -  New solution targeting SMBs. Also integrates with Google (analytics and adwords), Jigsaw, and LinkedIn.

LeadMaster – Easy-to-use and cost-effective tool targeting smaller businesses. Includes all the features that most small businesses need.

If your business has been around awhile then your probably have plenty of leads (i.e. current customers, past customers, lost business, trade-show attendees, purchased lists, etc) and could benefit from a well thought-out lead management strategy.

Many believe it takes 7 or 8 ‘touches’ with a prospect before they ever buy from you but in the current economy some are saying it can now take 20!

It certainly seems like all businesses can benefit from staying in touch with potential prospects. Providing them with useful and relevant information, in a timely manner, is the goal so when they are ready to buy, they buy from you!

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Cutbacks Force Greater Marketing Accountability

Widespread budget cuts and demands to ‘do more with less’ have forced corporate marketers to step up their accountability and measurement efforts and improve collaboration with other organizational departments, according to a recent survey from Marketing Management Analytics (MMA) and the Association of National Advertisers (ANA).

The study also found that cost-saving measures are causing marketers to shift campaigns away from traditional media toward digital formats, away from brand-building activities toward promotional tactics, and into lower-cost media in general, MarketingCharts reports.

“With the economy still struggling to find its way out of the doldrums, marketing accountability has moved from the category of ‘nice to have’ to ‘must have,’” said Douglas Brooks, SVP and marketing officer for MMA. “Management and finance are getting on board in increasing numbers, and becoming enthusiastic champions of marketing accountability as they see the results in black and white.”

Improving Effectiveness Without Spending

Nearly all the firms in the survey (92%) say they are taking steps to improve marketing effectiveness without spending more in 2009. To do so, they are employing significant tactical changes:

• Shifting investments from traditional to digital media (70% of respondents).
• Shifting advertising investment from brand-building initiatives to promotional marketing (53).
• Shifting into lower-cost media, i.e. local vs. national TV spots, 15-second vs. 30-second, etc (38% of respondents).

Read the full report at;  Cutbacks Force Greater Marketing Accountability, Collaboration – MarketingVOX

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

The Five Sentence Email

When you send email, you most definitely want it to be read! With everyone’s inboxes bulging at the seams with unwanted come-ons you face an awful lot of competition in your recipient’s inbox for their attention. Getting read is no small feat,  getting your reader to take action even a greater accomplishment. Lets face it – E-mail that takes too long to respond to results in continuous inbox overflow for those who receive a lot of it.

Good writers know that lean, vibrant language is almost always preferable to verbose, rambling writing. There is virtually no writing in the world so good that it can’t be made better by making it shorter. There are exceptions, of course – a contract needs to cover every possible potentiality, as does the text of an international treaty, but these documents are not really meant to be read, they’re meant to be enacted.  

Writing concisely offers benefits on its own – the short email, particularly the email whose contents fit into the preview pane without any scrolling, has a much higher chance of gaining a reader’s attention than one that starts off with three pages about trivia.

This is what Mike Davidson (five.sentenc.es) figured out – if his recipients were half as slammed as he was, he figured they could use some relief from long-winded emails that ramble on and on in the guise of pleasantries. Instead, he committed himself to writing emails that were five sentences or less, every single time.

That’s all well and good, of course, but how can you make sure you say what you need to say if you limit yourself to five sentences?  You don’t want to leave anything out, right? Fortunately, super-entrepreneur Guy Kawasaki offered this advice - ”whether UR young or old, the point is that the optimal length of an email message is five sentences. All you should do is explain who you are, what you want, why you should get it, and when you need it by.

A good outline for a five-sentence email might look something like this:

1. Who are you?  – This might be skipped if you already have a relationship with the recipient; otherwise, in as little space as possible, explain the relevant facts about yourself.
2. What do you want? – Explain why you’re writing the email, what you expect your recipient to do about it, and any relevant information they need to respond with the appropriate action.
3. Why should you get it? -  Why should they bother? Explain why your request is important, and if relevant, what’s in it for them.
4. When do you need them to act? Open-ended requests get responded to whenever the recipient gets around to it. Be as specific as possible, so that your recipient a) has a sense of urgency, b) feels that their response is important to you, and c) feels inspired to act.

If more information is needed, a formal report, a webpage, or some other document is probably going to be better-suited rather than presenting it than an email. Send an attachment, send a link, or schedule a face-to-face meeting if necessary; don’t blast off a giant email that takes you hours to write in the vain hope that it will be read. It probably won’t!

This material was summarized from Mastering the Short Email by Dustin Wax.

 - Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)

Collecting Web Leads

Once you start getting visitors to your website, then it’s time to concentrate on capturing their contact information so you can market to them. There are many ways to set up simple web forms to capture this information depending on how technical you are or how much you want to pay a 3rd party solution.

Remember these basics. The most effective way to get someone to give you their email address is by offering something of REAL value in return (e.g. an article, newsletter, etc). Keep your web form short and basic. Asking for too much initial information is a sure way to kill your response rate. Offering visitors something of value ensures you get people who actually have interest in what you do and therefore they agree to ‘opt in’. Having a long list of names that don’t really have any interest in what you offer is a waste of time and effort. Quality is much more important than quantity.

Your objective is to not give out anything until you confirm their email address. This is usually done by simply letting them know that you will be emailing them further instructions on how to download the promised information. If they don’t give you a legitimate email address then they won’t get the information! Try not to send documents as email attachments. Many people have problems receiving them. Instead point them to a website location where your document is being stored. You can either store your document on your own website hosting server or use a 3rd party online storage solution (usually free) from Windows Live Skydrive, docstoc, or Google Docs.

There are basically 3 ways to to use web forms to collect this information – the main difference being how lead information actually gets into your contact management database.

1. Manual and Low-Tech:  Simply add a ‘Contact Us’ form to your web site or a button that triggers their local email program to send you an email requesting the information you’re giving out. Nearly all website development tools can do this. There should be no HTML code or scripts to write. You respond by sending them an email with a link to where they can find the document. After that, you manually add them to your contact manager (e.g. Outlook). This approach is easy and inexpensive but only for low volumes of responses. If you want to use a 3rd party contact form, check out formspring or emailmeform. They usually offer a basic service for free. Google Docs also offers basic forms for free. Check out my FREE Coaching Session form.
2. Semi-Automated and Low-Tech: If you plan to collect a lot of leads and want everything handled automatically then I would suggest using a 3rd party email marketing service. These can send out mass emails or fancy newsletters depending on your preference. The approach is basically the same as before except they generate the sign-up forms. All new leads are automatically sent a confirmation email (to verify their email address) and then automatically added to your email list database. These services are inexpensive and typically the best solution for most small businesses. The big players in this field are Constant Contact, aWeber, iContact . There is even one service (EliteEmail) where you only pay for what you send out (i.e. no monthly fees). When using this approach you usually end up exporting the lead list to an excel file and then importing back into your contact manager (e.g. Outlook).
3. Fully-Automated and High-Tech:  If you are using a CRM application like Salesforce.com, SugarCRM, or ZohoCRM then they offer (at no extra cost) basic ’web-to-lead’ form generation utilities. In this case, they generate a form for you to put on your website which collects visitor information, automatically sends a confirmation email, and then directly puts the lead information into your own CRM database. This approach requires you to be somewhat comfortable with cutting and pasting HTML code but is the preferred approach for small-to-medium sized businesses.

It is rarely worth the effort to try anything more complicated that email confirmation before sending out your material. Forget about usernames/passwords since they are not worth the hassle and don’t worry if people don’t give you real names either. Having a valid email address is the most important item. Your goal now is to market to them in a manner they feel comfortable with so, they gradually give you more information and never ’opt out’.

- Steve (www.SPMsolutions.NET)