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🎵 So, you’ve got some responses from your prospecting campaign? That don’t impress me much… 🎵🎶
Actually, getting your first leads should be cause for celebration but it’s certainly not the end of the journey – in fact, it’s just the beginning.
What you need now is the knowledge and expertise to turn those prospects into leads, and then into closed deals. So, let’s take a look at how to implement best practices for your sales team.
Lead tracking is an essential part of your sales team’s process, and starting at the beginning of your customer journey makes the most sense.
And we get it: sometimes we get too busy and things can get overlooked – there’s always the middle child whose baby book starts when they were two – but it’s important to keep track of your prospects from day one.
If you don’t have a CRM or some marketing automation software to do this for you, you can start by putting this information into an excel spreadsheet. This can be time-consuming to do manually but it’s the only way to keep track of leads.
Without tracking, you won’t have a history of the conversations and content shared, or know when leads have reached critical milestones, stalled in their journey, or need a gentle follow-up to keep them moving towards a sale.
This is when you should start lead scoring.
Lead scoring is a way to work out which leads you should prioritise. Essentially, you’re determining how likely they are to convert, and if you should put your time and effort into them.
You might want to subcategorise your leads, for example:
This is a very basic overview and your sales pipeline will be much more complicated than this. But using a scoring system of any kind will ensure you’re not wasting your time or your sales team’s time.
You can also assign a score to your different prospects – based on who best fits your ideal customer profile.
If you’re looking for a more in-depth view of lead scoring, check out this blog: 5 lead scoring best practices.
Once a lead is established, the deal is still far from done. It can’t just sit in your inbox. You need to take the time to nurture that lead.
It’s important to build a rapport with your customer throughout every stage of the sales process. It increases the likelihood that a customer will sign, buit also continue to work with you; which also means keeping a relationship with your leads even after the deal is closed.
Reach out with useful and relevant content, you might be able to add value and offer something that will genuinely help them – if you maintain a good relationship, the sales door will always be open.
If you’re an Outbase customer you’ll have access to the Deal Navigator. This essential tool helps you optimise and streamline your sales process, and gives sales reps everything they need at their fingertips.
In most companies, sales reps are left to find their own way of selling. A typical sale department looks like this:
So, while selling styles can and should vary between individuals, there is often too much variety. Too much making it up on the hoof.
From the sales side, performance varies too much. But from a prospect/customer standpoint, the experience of the buyer journey varies massively too.
Compare that experience to a team with the Outbase Deal Navigator set up…
Deal Navigator lets you design a sales playbook. This guide outlines the optimum sales process, and should be built by the most experienced and high performing team members.
Having this planned out process allows you to update the whole team in one go too. If you decide you can optimise a stage in our sales journey, you can simply update it in the Deal Navigator. If you release a new product feature or update your pricing, that can be rolled out to everyone at once.
Plus, it’s the perfect tool for onboarding team members. New sales reps are walked through the optimum sales journey from the start, ensuring they are set up for success.
Want to know more about Deal Navigator? Watch this video 👇
Outbase is a B2B sales engagement platform that helps you source, engage, nurture and track prospects through your sales pipeline and into a customer. Let Outbase do the hard work, so you can focus on sales.
