Improving Performance personal coaching – Virtual Sales Manager #2
I’m Reg Goslin from improving performance personal coaching, with a niche for careers. These short insights are for those of you in small businesses without the resource of sales trainers or personal development specialists. Just a few things that have worked for me in developing and improving my own performance during my near 40-year sales career.
How to qualify and Manage Leads
I was with a business owner a few weeks ago and they told me that they didn’t know how to sell. That actually can’t be true. They just don’t have a structured process and do what works for them. It’s still selling.
So I thought this edition should touch on qualification at the first contact.
Firstly, what is your definition of a lead? For a lot of businesses, it is a contact name, someone has given you their card after a conversation. For others, it is a response or referral.
For the purpose of this video, I am talking of a lead being a positive inquiry from a potential customer or client. This can be a result of your marketing, a networking event, a website click or a business referral for instance. Whichever way it came to you, they are asking you a business question about your product or service.
You must treat this like GOLD DUST.
All sales leads ought to be prioritized and contacted before anything else.
Cold calling is pretty pointless with today’s technology. It’s a debate, but tell me this…when was the last time you took a cold call and made a purchase as a new customer?
If there was a queue for calling a sales lead and one for cold calling, which queue would you want to be in? I know which one I’d be in. I’d be in that fricking long one!
So, you have the lead. The question is how to qualify it quickly and move it onto the next stage.
Call the potential customer. Even if it came as an inbound email, call them. People buy from people, so you must build a relationship. You can confirm the result by email.
There are a lot of sales qualification tools but they tend to be for customers you are already engaged with and you are in a sales cycle. But We will address that on another Virtual sales Manager event.
For sales leads, I use an acronym calls SPARK. Spark lead. See what I did there?
Situation – Who are they, What is their role in the business? What do they do? Who do they do it to? What are they looking for / to achieve?
Problem – What is the challenge that they face? The problem? Once you’ve understood that, what is the actual Pain that they are personally feeling as a result of that problem. This is important because this is what you will be selling – to remove their pain. So understand it and ensure the customer knows that you take this pain away.
Action – What you are going to do next. Be specific with a timescale. And, once you’ve agreed on this step….
Result – What is going to happen as a result of your action? Is it a meeting, a decision, another call? Whatever it is, schedule it on this call. And confirm it all in a short summary email. You may want to invest time in a template holding email that you can just add the actions and the next step after the call.
K – End the call by making sure the client has the Keys to YOUR kingdom. They can be a decision maker for this but not the bigger picture. If it is a bigger business, who else can you speak to if you have other services that you could sell?
I lost a deal once because I was speaking to the CEO. The FD was buying the HR software that my network would have supported but the CEO doesn’t get involved with those issues, he just signed them off. Ask. Never presume.
That wraps it up for today. If you want any information on this or any of the services that are provided by Improving Performance for your personal development requirements, please contact me today
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