The prospecting process has changed over the years. No longer are sales reps making hundreds of cold calls a day repeating the same pitch over and over again. Consumers have limitless resources to research a product before they even speak with a salesperson. To keep up with the ever-changing sales process, you need the right sales tools that help you reach potential customers and improve your win-rate.
Insert here, a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) application. A CRM application will help you prospect and closed deals in the modern sales era. Before we get into how a CRM can help improve sales and prospecting efforts, it is important to understand what sales prospecting is.
Mike Gingerich defines prospecting as “the process of finding, nurturing, and contacting potential customers for the purpose of converting them into paying customers.” He then breaks prospecting into three stages:
1. Identifying Leads
Determine which source your leads came from. Did they fill out a form for more information? Did they sign up for a newsletter? Identify which leads are coming from which source so you can segment them and target them accordingly.
2. Nurturing Leads into Qualified Leads
Leads become qualified leads once they meet your target audience or buying persona. When you begin having conversations with your identified leads, you will begin to understand how each individual fall into a persona and have a higher likelihood of converting into a sale. You can qualify leads if they have attended a webinar you hosted or requested a demo or have inquired about with a high interest in purchasing a product.
3. Making Calls to Close Leads into Prospects
This is where sales reps will make their money. They have identified and qualified leads with the highest potential to close. Now they must work with the prospect to understand their pain points and deliver the value their product will provide.
Now that we have defined the prospecting pipeline, we can understand how a CRM will help with these efforts and improve success.
1. Transform the Way You Target Accounts
Although you may want to contact as many leads as possible, not all leads are a good fit for your business. Rather than placing call after call after call and so on, it is more beneficial to your time to filter your leads into target audiences within your CRM application. You can filter your leads by industry, source, and custom fields tailored to your business. This helps you determine how to target specific segments of your leads appropriately. CRM applications will help you rank or rate your leads based on likelihood to convert, considering how many activities or conversations you’ve had with a lead.
2. Create Personalized Outreach Plans
Segmenting your leads into specific target audiences is a good start. Next, you want to personalize your conversations to each individual you are speaking to whether through phone or email. It is important to research the lead to understand the industry, social media activity, and their business needs. Your CRM should have the capability to look up pertinent lead/company information on the fly, so you have the details you need to personalize your conversation.
With the information to personalize the content of your conversation, you should also personalize your greetings. If you are sending out a mass email campaign through your CRM, you can make personalize email by using merge fields that pull details from lead record directly into your email. This way you can greet hundreds of leads by their first name, all at once.
Not only can your CRM personalize your outreach efforts, but it can report on these efforts and give you the insights you need to determine what is working and where you may need to make some changes to your messaging. According to liveclicker.com, personalized email marketing generates a median ROI of 122% - which is all the more reason why to start personalizing your email efforts.
3. Reach Out and Schedule a Call/Meeting
Now that you have your leads segmenting and are ready to personalize your conversation – start reaching out! If placing calls is how you conduct your prospecting, find a CRM with robust phone features like click-to-dial and automatic call logging. These types of features help save a tremendous amount of time by eliminating manual work and will help you reach more prospects and book more meetings or demos. Other features like scheduling follow-up activities are important to help you keep your efforts tied together and organized. You will be able to see how many activities went in to converting a lead into an opportunity and converting an opportunity into a closed won deal. These types of insights allow you to replicate your successes and make the necessary improvements where needed.
Ultimately, a CRM application will help with all aspects of the sale from qualifying leads to prospecting to providing post-sale support. It is up to you to choose the application that fits your business’ needs.
AMPED is a CRM application with powerful features to help in every step of your lead prospecting efforts. From custom segmentation, to automatic call logging and personalized emails, the tools you need to improve your prospecting results are all within AMPED. Additionally, the iSeek Hot Button, unique to AMPED, provides you with instant research on a company’s or lead’s recent news and social activity so you will always be prepared before making that next call.
Try AMPED for free today and combine your strong prospecting plan with a powerful sales tool to AMP up your sales!