Learn how to increase your sales production with lead tracking and prioritization. Working on the right sales opportunities can make all of the difference.
Increasing sales performance has a lot to do with working on the right things. Applying sales activity to the right sales opportunities and leads. However,
without a consistent sales process and lead metrics prioritizing your sales pipeline can be nearly impossible.
Often sales pipeline management is crippled by this lack of measurements and prioritization.
If you want to get your sales pipeline back into shape and pumping out closed deals, tune your process with these 5 simple hints:
1. Start managing the pipeline: Start managing your sales leads. Crazy as it might sound, most sales teams have nothing resembling lead management in their sales process. Leads are distributed and worked haphazardly with little or no tracking of results. Whether you are managing debt leads or enterprise software leads there should be a defined process. Sales agents should be following a consistent sales process. Otherwise, measuring and analyzing results to improve sales output is going to be impossible.
Managing your pipeline should begin by highlighting categories, marketing sources, and sales processes that are most effective. These top performing lead types, marketing campaigns, and processed should get top priority.
2. Discrete dispositions on every opportunity: Common mistake number two, bad data. Define lead dispositions and then annotate (consistently) every lead, every time it is touched. This will immediately assist your lead management program. You will understand what happened to every sales opportunity, how long it took, and when it turned into a deal or death.
Prioritization starts with sales statuses. The classic sale funnel is still one of the best prioritization mechanisms, but you have to track the status.
3. Analyze contact rates: There is no clearer path to closing a deal than contacting a prospect. If you don't get the opportunity to talk to someone you certainly won't close a deal. So, track and analyze contact rates. If you can increase conversations you will increase sales. If you improve your sales to contact rate you will have the top sales team. However, you have to start by tracking and measuring contact rates.
Contact rates can help you to focus on the most responsive marketing channels first, speeding overall sales velocity and increasing sale motivation.
4. Analyze velocity: Time is the number one killer of sales. If you let an opportunity age or wander you will lose. Track your call back periods and create a rhythm that works. Use these tracking metrics to analyze overall sales velocity.
Sales velocity is critical to pushing more revenue through your sales organization. Tracking and prioritizing the fastest converting lead types can help apply sale pressure to the right places in your pipeline.
5. Analyze revenue concentration: This is probably the most logical of the 5 steps, but least applied. Sales activity should be concentrated on the top revenue producing lead sources or marketing channels. Whether this is sorted by opportunity attributes, product type, or marketing channel identify the top correlations between category and revenue. Then work them in that order.
Prioritization is critical to maximizing your marketing ROI and sales production. Your sales and marketing processes should be organized to help you prioritize a healthy increase in your revenue.
