I recently spoke with a senior Sales Director who was using a combination of in-house and outsourced ‘telemarketing’ to generate leads for the company’s sales team. This was his take ‘three months of activity, 15 leads, 5 sat, no opportunity at any of them. In fact, at one of the appointments, I sat to talk about our automated lifting and racking systems… they wouldn’t even fit in the prospect’s warehouse!’
OUCH! Double OUCH!
Bizarrely, this is not an uncommon theme when we’re talking to Sales teams… Qualification. The single biggest factor determining shining success or embarrassing failure in lead generation. You can have all the data and insight (AKA targeting) correct; you can have the most emphatic sales pitch and the most compelling product, BUT, if you’ve not established appetite and business fit, then it’s all infuriatingly wasted. The dead effort, dead investment.
So…qualification is THE most important element in the lead generation process. Get it right, and you stand a chance of downstream sale conversion; get it wrong, and there’s blood on the carpet!
CONVERTA has a tried and tested process to ensure our clients (which include Shell, IVECO, Linde, Hako, and Portakabin) only get the best quality sales opportunities/leads from us. Qualified leads and appointments stand the best chance of converting into sales.
Our program is DNA (Define, Nurture, Activate), and it follows a rigorous process of data profiling and enrichment. The sort of data enrichment that you can’t buy off-the-shelf. It’s not good enough to make contact and ask, ‘Do you want some?’ and try and press-gang an unwitting prospect into either taking an appointment that they’ve no intention of sitting or getting you off the phone as quickly as possible.
You need to qualify the opportunity at every stage of the sales process to make sure there is an appetite for your services, make sure there is the budget for it, and make sure there is a business fit – that the product ‘fits in the warehouse’!
Our teams of business developers and lead generators are trained to ask the right questions and establish budget, authority, need and timing. These are the minimum requirements for any lead generation program. Our programmes always go beyond this minimum requirement, covering the following:
- establishing the competitive playing field -so you can make informed decisions around your sales pitch
- understanding the company financials – so you’re clear about risk and reward
- defining group structure – so you can adapt your commercials for future growth opportunities
- pinpointing critical timelines – so you can be ready and primed for action
If you are not asking the right questions. You won’t get the right answers. If you want better conversion at the bottom of your sales to funnel, make sure you start as you mean to go on! Quality = qualify.
CONVERTA is a specialist lead generation agency that operates in the high-value manufacturing, energy, automotive, professional services and logistics sectors. Our clients include Shell, IVECO, Linde, Lotus, and Morgan. The average length of our client relationships is over 5 years.
We help our clients Create More and Convert More.