Many of your customers are not ready to buy when they first meet you. They are in the research and education phase of their buying process. If you are a sales organization, your process typically revolves heavily around selling to ready customers. The lens becomes narrowly focused on who is ready. These are the minority. The majority might be ready in 90 days and beyond.
Following Up Via Marketing Automation
It’s amazing that organizations will pay a person salary plus benefits often totaling $70K+ per year not including the management responsibilities. The majority of this person’s time is spent following up. And how does the typical salesperson follow up? They call and interrupt people. Buyers have become quite adept today at blocking out strangers, interruptions and things they are not ready for. Caller ID, spam filtering, do not mail, etc. are in place because of sales processes that miss the mark. They are selling rather than nurturing with value. It creates mistrust and brand damage.
A New Sales Process With Less Cost
So what if you re-engineered your sales process recognizing the dramatic change in how people buy today? Here’s how it could look:
Fewer Sales People That Focus On Closing
Have fewer sales people that focus only on the last leg of the sale – conversion. This is what a good salesperson is about. They know how to close. Allow them to be set up for success by economizing their time rather than filling it with a pipeline of largely improbability. Thus, they would be talking to those that are ready to move forward with your value proposition. They would be brought in to do their job in the most relevant conversation of their job.
More Nurturing
Allow your marketing automation system to nurture and make ready those who are unready today. Within the Loopfuse system, you can set up various campaigns, Lead Flows, metrics and action triggers to help a buyer become more ready. This system has far less cost than a salesperson and is much more effective because it brings value, is consistent and creates transparency to a buyer’s readiness.
You can design your automation processes to work with specific buyer profiles you have identified and nurture them in a custom and intimate way.
If you fail to nurture, are inconsistent or create interruption, you will lose the larger potential from a continuous closing pipeline.
The world has changed. Change with it by recognizing that nurturing is critical when you are not allowed to interrupt today. Your value, messaging and timing better be focused in order to win a customer who has many options.
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