There are two important lead generation tools that you may have overlooked.
Not using them, and not using them in the right order, is punching more and more holes in your sales lead bucket. You can try to play whack-a-mole and patch the increasing cascade of leaks one by one, but the momentum is more powerful than your efforts to stop the leaks and keep the qualified sales leads in your bucket.
You could buy that flex seal stuff sold on TV by the crate and it wouldn’t be enough to stop the leaks in your sales funnel.
The overlooked and mostly forgotten tools you must use to keep your sales team and individual efforts on track are a pair of binoculars and a microscope. Those tools will save you. They will create a momentum that stops qualified leads from leaking out of your sales bucket and you won’t waste time playing whack-a-mole.
Common sales scenario of impending doom
Here is a call I get a lot. “If only… we had a good voicemail, knew what to say to gatekeepers, had good responses to objections, had a good script… blah blah blah.”
Those forensic sales doctors have pulled out their microscopes and are searching for the details that will make all the difference. Problem commonly is that there is a mountain of contrary evidence that is working against them. The forensic sales scientists are either ignoring or unaware of other factors or evidence that simply overwhelm anything they could possibly find with that microscope. Spend all the time you want looking into that sales strategy microscope and crank up the magnification, but you won’t find any answers that will make a meaningful lasting difference with lead generation, inside sales results or your sales scripts.
Why not? Because there is a bigger picture you can’t see with a microscope.
If you are managing a sales team or your own sales effort, you need to see a bigger picture, the total landscape, before deciding what individual steps to take. You need to use binoculars.
Your sales management binoculars enable you to see the total environment in which your sales team lives and competes. One you have an accurate read on the sales environment and the factors that most influence your teams’ sales results, then you properly allocate scarce resources and drill down to the details that will make a difference.
Sales Managers Need to Look… and Know What They Are Looking For
It’s not enough to just look through the binoculars, sales managers need to know what they are looking for. Who the buyers are, how many, what their profile is, prioritization of groups of targets, competitor’s strengths and weaknesses, your teams ability to move efficiently through a highly probably group of potential buyers, your teams ability to create interactions and then convert those interactions to substantive next steps… those are the things your sales binoculars enable you to see.
Sales representatives often don’t have the sales binoculars.
Many times sales reps can’t see what sales management should be seeing. It is the sacred duty of sales managers to grasp the bigger picture and create an environment which makes it more likely that sales representatives will succeed.
When I get those calls about the details of voicemails, scripts and gatekeepers, a major assumption is being made by the caller. An assumption that is often incorrect. That getting those details “right” will bring the result they seek. Too often, the answer is “not a chance.”
So I ask questions about buyers, their lists, their crm / contact manager setup, their call process, how they communicate credibility and benefits, how they allocate sales prospecting time, blah blah blah. Those issues often don’t get proper attention and as a result time and money is misallocated and more and more leaks are pop, pop, popping in the sales bucket. You can focus on each hole one by one and use all the flex seal you want, but new holes will never stop popping.
The Sales Binoculars were not used, so qualified leads are being missed
Your sales team is doing all the work, yet getting only a fraction of the results, because the bigger picture issues, those that are the underlying drivers of success, are not properly in place.
Particularly for smaller teams, under 10 reps, getting a handle on those bigger picture issues so that sales time is being directed to the highest probability places and the team has the proper tools (which they actually use) to be much more efficient and effective is really not that big a deal.
Getting the big picture issues right can often be done in a few weeks. Voila!!! Now as a manager you KNOW where time is going, you direct where time is going, you are able to keep the team focused, you have enabled them to work efficiently, you have drastically increased the odds that they will bump into high probability buyers.
Now the Sales Microscope Helps You with The Right Sales Tactics
Now it is time to pull out the sales microscope. Now that you have created the best environment for your sales team to succeed, you can drill down to the details and those tweaks and massages will actually make a difference. Your reps are now riding the waves rather than fighting the waves.
Use your sales binoculars before the selling microscope and you won’t have to keep using flex seal.
