By Emma Vas, Published October 29, 2014
Generating revenue for your business shouldn’t be a disjointed process with isolated teams and tasks. Instead, your sales process needs to flow seamlessly from initial warm lead generation to closing the deal.
But with so many different teams working on various sales and marketing goals (like optimizing a marketing channel, setting appointments and finalizing agreements), it’s sometimes difficult to see the big picture of the entire sales cycle. However, if you don’t keep the overall, high-level process running smoothly, your teams become siloed and dysfunctional.
Here are four steps to help you optimize your sales process from initial warm leads to final closing:
1. Define Your Target Audience
If you don’t define whom you’re targeting with your sales and marketing efforts, you won’t ever know if those efforts are successful. Before you start focusing on warm lead generation, you must outline your audience’s demographics and personality traits.
One of the best ways to clearly express who you’re targeting is to develop a buyer persona. This avatar of your ideal customer defines not only demographics, but also psychographics and other qualifying traits. With a solid buyer persona in front of your sales and marketing teams, your revenue efforts are more focused and effective at capturing the exact type of sales you’re looking for – while not being distracted by non-ideal opportunities.
2. Conduct A Multi-Channel Marketing Campaign
With your buyer persona clearly defined, you need to start actively campaigning and pursuing your target audience. And, because your prospects are not likely to engage with your business on only one channel, you need to ensure your campaigns include multiple marketing channels.
The ultimate goal of your multi-channel marketing campaign should be to draw interest to your company’s product or solution. A well-conducted marketing campaign transforms cold visitors or first-time callers into warm leads who want to learn more about your offerings.
3. Qualify Leads Efficiently And Appropriately
Without high-quality, warm leads, your company’s revenue efforts are getting nowhere. Furthermore, website forms and landing pages are only able to qualify your prospects so much before you must have a personal conversation with each prospect.
On the phone, your salespeople need to discover each prospect’s needs, pains and goals to determine if they’re a good fit for your business. Robust lead qualification should involve open-ended questions about the prospect’s envisioned solution and avoid a direct pitch that comes across as a hard sell. The best salespeople ask the prospect a series of questions that leads to no other alternative than your company’s solution.
And finally, a salesperson should also determine if a prospect’s answer to a solution is “no” (and always going to be “no”), because these leads aren’t worth your time or effort.
4. Close The Sale Without Surprises
Closing a sale doesn’t have to be difficult: If your sales team has completed the correct steps through the sales process, finalizing a deal should be a hassle-free procedure. One of those essential steps is setting the right expectations throughout the marketing and sales process.
With proper expectations set and check-ins performed throughout the process, your close should be a foregone conclusion – not a surprise ending – because a properly qualified lead doesn’t have final objections at the last minute.
If your goal is top-line growth, you need a sales process that’s integrated all the way from defining your target audience through warm lead generation and onto the final close. With a unified approach, your sales and marketing teams generate revenue in the most effective way possible, meaning that more of your top-line growth shows up on the bottom line as well.
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