Has a cold entered your pipeline? The best treatments for restoring CRM
Over 70% of sales managers regularly review the status of their pipeline with team members. However, 63% of these managers don’t believe that their companies are doing a good job at maintaining it. Sales pipeline management might seem simple: You build your pipeline, hire great sales reps, pour in leads, and watch as your revenue soars. But managing your pipeline can be difficult. You may lose leads and these leads fall through the cracks. Marketing attracts the wrong sort of people. Sales reps need to focus on lower value tasks and these tasks clog the pipeline with deadwood. So if you want to know more about this, then this blog is for you.
For today’s blog, exclusive for our Real Estate Heaven members, we will be learning about the best treatments for restoring CRM. For executive management and all members of the sales team, a CRM system proves its value by improving the quality of the sales pipeline and efficiency of closing those deals. Sure, contact and account information are valuable to management — but they pale in comparison to the value of deals that will (or won’t) make the quarter. If a CRM system helps win just one more deal every quarter, it more than pays for itself. There are too many pipelines that lead nowhere, and there is the opposite problem where deals could happen but haven’t shown up in any system yet.
These deals are never harmless surprises and can be harmful if there is a long supply chain. There are a few ways to tell if your pipeline is healthy. Some metrics include the number of bugs, total completion time, and production deployment frequency. Great pipeline health also hinges on policies, automation, and business processes providing incentives for good behavior. The sales pipeline is the lifeline of any business and preventing mistakes from damaging it can be essential. One way to do this is to clean up your sales pipeline, which ensures that results are as they should be. If you notice that there are mistakes in your system, you need to fix them right away to prevent them from damaging your chances of surviving in the competitive market. So here are ways to improve your sales pipeline for a smoother sales process.
When the pace of prospecting slackens, you might need to decrease the pipeline. This often happens when a business becomes complacent after achieving a benchmark. This can lead not only to the cessation of prospecting but also to the cessation of professional development in sales people. For example, according to 59% of professionals, they stop changing once they find a practice that works for them. It’s important to focus on building a pipeline of prospects and converting leads consistently, instead of waiting until prospects dry up to start the process again. This way, you won’t have to start from scratch when you do need new customers. One important thing you need to do then is set up a system for qualifying prospects, so they don’t waste your time. It is imperative that you monitor every stage and make sure people are progressing all the way through – this will grow your pipeline.
The next time you’re looking for an easy sale, think about getting your current customers who are satisfied to buy from you again. This will be much more successful than trying to find new prospects. Businesses can avoid losing leads by maintaining consistent contact with new customers who otherwise would have stopped at their first purchase. The most popular marketing technique that businesses use to keep in touch is email marketing, which is highly efficient and successful. To achieve better results, you need to think creatively and use a variety of methods for staying connected as well as reconnecting with your leads.
One of the more efficient practices that often gets overlooked is sending postcards. A postcard (unlike an email) will not be discarded without being opened. You will also benefit from the nostalgia induced by handling a postcard. You must create a positive association with your brand by creating a short, focused message that directs your audience to take some kind of action, rather than making a direct sale on the card itself.
Better still, businesses today don’t even need to spend money on designing a card because there are lots of pre-made template designs available on the web. It is important to reach out, but more than one type of contact method is advisable. For example, use email twice a week, social media every other day, and only make phone calls about 1-2 times a month. When sending postcards, keep them relevant and sent out for special occasions and holidays.
Is your sales process slow because of dead leads that are never converted? With Tango, you can discover leads and convert them into sales contracts to get accurate estimates on the long-term prospects for your company. One of the biggest sales pipeline mistakes is allowing it to get messy. Therefore, you need to revise and clean up your pipeline regularly. Be sure to remove “old” prospects from your marketing list, because they have been through the average sales cycle with you. Sending out “sales breakup” emails for the last time before removing the prospect from your pipeline. The most important rule is to constantly monitor the Pipeline and address any “stuck” prospects. You should also have a revision that occurs at least once or twice a year, adjusting your pipeline to the evolving needs of your business.
Lots of companies have deals that aren’t in the CRM pipeline and are badly misrepresented. It is best to create synthetic deals that represent all the corner cases as well, such as “run rate” business, distributor/reseller deals, renewals, etc. The deal should be clearly distinguished from standard ones using record types or other flags to prevent confusion in reporting and business processes.
At the beginning of time, sales reps have had heartbreaking moments when they realize that the person they’ve been speaking to is not who they thought. The rep has worked hard and closely with a prospect, thinking they are close to a conversion point only to find out it’s not the decision maker. This is called the gatekeeper problem (or if your prospects are building up near the end of your pipeline, the gatekeeper bottleneck) and it’s immensely frustrating for sales reps. To eliminate this gatekeeper bottleneck, add a custom field for the person approving leads in your CRM and make it required.
Then whoever does the lead generation won’t be able to create leads without checking who the gatekeeper is. New software can help sales reps determine whether the person they are trying to speak with is an actual decision maker, or if they’ll need to speak to a different person.
In an article for Forbes, William Flaiz remembers his experience of a company where sales and marketing were totally disconnected. The company shifted its approach to the Miller Heiman method: a method of sales targeting that involves focusing on multiple types of decision makers and prospective clients. But no one told Marketing about the switch. The company’s marketing team continued to focus on the number of companies rather than within each company. This led to a wholesale misalignment of priorities and goals between two teams, as well as declining performance. You should always have a shared definition of a “good” lead between Marketing and Sales. If you don’t, Marketing will attract leads that your sales team can’t convert, so they’ll struggle. Flaiz’s story shows this.
Having a shared understanding of what constitutes a ‘good’ lead is important for Sales and Marketing. A win/loss analysis can be used to clarify the definition based on past performance. To start with, export all your won and lost opportunities along with all the associated demographics and behavioral, marketing, and commercial data from your CRM. When you’re not sure which of your opportunities to pursue, determine the commonalities. Do all your prospects for this service or product come from one industry? If there are many prospects in a small geographic area, is it because that is where you are marketing heavily? With the business understanding which kind of leads are successful, you can start to define what qualifications for leads. With these standards in place, your marketing team will be able to design campaigns that attract these kinds of leads.
5their time actually making money. The rest of their day is spent on activities not generating income: emailing, managing their appointments, prospecting. If a sales rep spends more time selling, they will ultimately sell more. This is because the more time they spend pitching, the better acquainted they become with their product. The best-performing sales reps use automation to take care of low-value tasks and spend more time on high-value tasks. Start by having all sales reps track their activity through a tool like Toggl.
Once they understand where they’re spending their time, they can identify time-intensive, non-revenue-generating tasks for automation. For example, if a sales rep discovers they are spending two hours per day writing follow-up emails to prospects, that’s obviously not a great use of their resources. If a salesperson wants to save time, they can automate a drip campaign to send email follow-ups until the prospect eventually responds. We’ll talk more about this later.
You have five minutes to respond to a lead after they contact you. If you take longer than that, the leads submit 80% less qualified leads. After 10 minutes, which is when there is 400% decrease in qualifying leads. Yet, according to Drift, only 7% of companies manage to get in under the five-minute threshold. As your business grows, you might need to refine this language. For now, your lead’s responses should give the appearance of your being thorough with their needs. One way to improve customer service is to automate it. Canned responses or “automated responses” in one’s CRM make for more efficient communication, opening the door for personalized feedback.
Corporate executives face many financial risks, but dirty data causes the most damage. Dirty data results in $3.1 trillion of lost revenue every year for US businesses. This problem is most prominent with sales, where inaccurate or incorrect data can sap your pipeline and hamper any efforts to generate revenue. The most common cause of bad data is dead wood, which is any opportunity you probably won’t close. For example, if there’s a high value $10,000 deal in your pipeline, you might wait six months before giving up on it. Sales forecasts usually use your whole pipeline of potentials so that deal will allow them to increase their forecast the next month. Clearing away the dead ends from your sales pipeline can be important for sales.
Sales reps may not want to do this because they’re afraid that they are gonna discard a lead that could eventually convert. Here is a simple three step process to make sure you don’t discard live leads. One, you should find prospects who have been in your pipeline for at least double the amount of time, on average, that it usually takes for a customer to buy from you. Then, validate contact information, make sure that your contact still works at the company. Lastly, send an easy to read “break-up” email and make it clear what the customer is expected to do. Typically customers will respond with one of three responses: “Yes, I am still interested,” “No, I am not interested,” or “I don’t have time right now—contact me again in six months.”
If you’ve run every lead through the three-step process, you should be able to either move it down the sales funnel, discard it, or put a delay on the deal. Your sales pipeline will look more restocked, so that any potential clients are able to see the work you have available and choose what they want.
With 140 emails received per day, people can’t hope to reply to all of the emails they receive. It’s unreasonable to expect people to read all of their messages, with the number of emails being too high. Considering how many emails we get, it’s not surprising that sales reps achieve only a 9% average reply rate to sequences of three or fewer emails. This can result in a sales pipeline which fills up quickly. Your sales rep will mistakenly mark the opportunity as lost, when the prospect didn’t even respond to their email. Put your prospect’s email address into a CRM, and set up email drip campaigns to automatically follow up with emails.
Drip emails use automation to create a sense of constant presence in the inbox so that you continually stay top of mind for the recipient. Quoting a Woodpecker study, the average reply rate for sequences between three and four emails is 9%. An email campaign with five or more messages will have an average reply rate of 27%. The email campaign resulted in a 12% response rate. Ambition used an eight-email sequence, which generated 73 responses from 578 cold leads. This was compared to 52 challenges and their three-email sequence which achieved a 30% reply rate.
When you know your pipeline needs help, much like a doctor diagnoses an ailment with a stethoscope, our services will provide the right solution to nurture and fix your pipeline. We can quickly find and address any issue with your CRM system. The prescription for good health can bring plenty of advantages, but patients may suffer some potential drawbacks, such as the awkwardness of contacting old clients and getting back in touch with people you have never met.
This is especially true when market stats seem doom and gloom, and the world appears to steadily surprise us with unprecedented events and stress that once wasn’t such a large part of our lives. If you want your CRM to run optimally, you need to figure out what’s wrong and fix it. Sales managers will often have marathon strategies that are tailored to whatever is happening in the market at the moment. The time-consuming cure is to wait and be patient, but it can be difficult. If you use the prescription, you will earn the fulfillment of accomplishing a task well done.
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