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Following up on Business-to-Business Sales Leads - to Turn Them Into Sales
Following up on Business-to-Business
Sales Leads - and Turning Them
Into Sales Opportunities
Brought to you by emedia
Accelerated B2B Lead Generation -On Demand
Copyright 2009 emedia 1Executive Summary - Our Paper Illuminates the Following Points
Sales' function - its reason for being - is to provide clients with a satisfactory solution to the problem at hand. To help drive this, the post-acquisition follow-up works best when it emphasizes Problem and Solution.
A. Focus on the prospect's problem
B. Focus on your solution to it
Come Prepared - Research the Prospect Prior to Follow-Up
1. Create a Great Follow-up Message - Focus on connecting with the contact, rather than on explaining the features of your product. Keep conversations and emails light, and demonstrate that you're interested in helping prospects solve their problems. With emails, remember to lead off with a purposeful, enticing subject line. emedia finds that a quick-response email, sent within one day from the account executive's email address, is a great way to begin following up with someone that came in as a sales lead, with a phone call at a later point. However, there is no single correct follow-up schedule for everyone.
2. Figure Out How Your Lead Found You and Make it Work for You - Your prospect downloaded your offer for a reason. Your account executive should find out why. You don't have to directly reference the marketing promotion. Instead, offer to answer any questions he may have, and look to get to the root of why this prospect was interested in your collateral.
Copyright 2009 emedia 2Following up on Business-to-Business Sales Leads - to Turn Them Into Sales
3. Adapt Your Follow-up to the Lead - Every sale is going to be different, so don't fall into a formulaic approach. Take a look at the role of your contact in his organization. Be prepared with financial facts and figures for CFOs, holistic strategies for the C-suite and technological details for the operations staff, for example.
4. Follow Up Promptly - Make a follow-up schedule and stick to it. Staying in the customer's mind ensures that your product gets top consideration. When ending a call, offer a follow-up timeframe. Try to use multiple methods to follow up. Send an email introducing yourself, and follow up with an invitation to LinkedIn, if you can.
5. Get a Commitment to the Next step - During the first conversation, get a verbal commitment from the prospect to take a particular action towards the next step. Or, set the next meeting. Follow this principle with each conversation.
6. make the most of every Prospect - Don't throw away a single lead. Even if your contact does not have a current need for your product, by keeping in contact over time, you'll create a rapport that can turn into a sale. Moreover, the more contacts that you, in tandem with Marketing, nurture within an account, the better you'll penetrate the account over time.
There are four primary variables impacting how companies follow up:
A. Type of Offer - White paper, guide, webinar, product trial, podcast, etc.
B. Prospect's Point on Sales Cycle - Just researching, problem identification, budgeting, vendor selection, etc.
C. Who You Are Reaching - Audience, industry vertical, job titles, etc.
D. Lead Source - Email bulletins, Google Adwords, syndication sites, broadcast email, print, website traffic analysis, etc.
Each of these variables affects how you will design and implement your follow-up plan and communications. This paper illustrates this process and how to approach these variables.
Copyright 2009 emedia 3Following up on Business-to-Business Sales Leads - to Turn Them Into Sales
Following up on Business-to-Business Sales Leads -
and Turning Them Into Sales Opportunities
LeAD GeNerAtiON is A steP-BY-steP PrOCess thAt DOes NOt stOP with LeAD ACqUisitiON.
Once Marketing acquires a lead, the next step is to properly reach out to the contact there, in a way that further drives engagement and spurs interest in your company's solution.
For those companies whose motive is to identify customers that have a need now (or in the near future), and pursue them, there are some best practices they can follow to maximize returns. These compan... [download for more]
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