Ten Tremendous Tactics for Turning Your Pipe Dream into a Bulging Pipeline of Sales Leads

by | Sep 13, 2013

In a perfect world all sales leads will be easily sorted as: qualified to purchase right away or not ready yet.  The ones that are qualified set appointments with one of the sales team and those not yet ready are placed into lead nurturing campaigns.

Sounds like a pipe dream, doesn’t it?

It doesn’t have to be a dream when you use marketing automation tools to help you.

Within integrated CRM software, you can:

  • Create email campaigns that directly address the challenges faced by your future customers.  You then send them out to new sales leads in minutes.
  • Script qualifying questions for your sales team to use when talking to new sales leads and record responses with only one click.
  • Outline your company sales process to guide sales people and also record what is working and what processes need improvement.
  • Accurately forecast pipeline revenue with predictive measures revealed in your CRM data.

Here is the step-by-step procedure for achieving such dreamy results:

1. Clearly identify your best clients.  Know their industry, level in company, age, gender, hobbies and anything else you can find in your CRM database.

2. Make a list of what challenged those clients prior to finding your solution.

3. Create content for each of the challenges you listed.  That content can be an article, white paper, case study, video, info-graphic or any other type of content that is compelling and educates sales leads about your solution.  (Remember not to sell your solution, just educate them to find a good solution.)

4. Set up an email campaign series that uses the same list.  Make the subject lines compelling, emails brief, and motivate them to click on the link to your content.

5. Follow up all sales leads with a quick phone call to disqualify all who are not yet ready to purchase.  Those sales leads can come from trade shows, web forms or even a contact list downloaded from an online business contact source.

6. Place the disqualified leads in a new, lead nurturing email automation series that continues to educate while building trust with your company.

7. Set up measurement tools within your sales process to monitor what processes are producing the results you want.  Tweak every step of the sales cycle based on how the sales lead responds.  Train sales team members to use the sales CRM as their best source of sales success.

8. Use data from those measurements to accurately forecast future revenue.  This will enable you to produce impressive pipeline reports for your banker when your company is realizing rapid growth.

9. Give everyone in your company access to customer data.  When your prospects and customers are at the center of your business and every team member can see their activity, you can seamlessly meet their needs.

10. Build in checkpoints to your online CRM that enable you to revise each and every step continually.  Not only will this analysis benefit the sales process, it will also reveal actions that can be taken to satisfy customers in an every-increasing way.  Customer loyalty is built from this type of focus.

 

Every company dreams of a consistently profitable pipeline of business.  Using and integrated online CRM to adjust to the rapidly changing sales environment is one of the only proven methods for turning your pipe dream into a profitable pipeline of business.