Most of us as can recall times we have been “sold.” Salespeople pushing product, being aggressive, or being unaware of, or insensitive to our needs, leading to an unpleasant sales experience. Perhaps we walk away feeling that we didn’t get what we were looking for, or walk away without buying anything. We would have been more satisfied with the outcome if a consultative sales approach was undertaken.
Consultative sales is a benefit for any sales process. It entails selling by building relationships rather than pushing product. It involves uncovering the needs of potential customers through a series of questions, getting them to speak about what is important to them and what their needs are, and most importantly building a rapport with them. Once that relationship is established and the customer’s needs known, the salesperson can more easily suggest products or services that would help solve the customer’s problem. Instead of being pushy, a salesperson can be seen as a resource, someone with expert knowledge of what customers need, and how to get them to the right solution.
The consultative sales approach can be applied to every step of the sales process. At the earliest stage, it involves doing research before approaching a prospect, to find out such important information as company size, types of products or services they offer and who their target market is. Armed with that research, salespeople can ask the right questions of prospects, and find out what they really need.
Consultative selling is used throughout the pre-sales process, a very important and highly successful way to gain qualifying leads. According to The Harvard Business Review, a properly executed pre-sales process can increase new business 13%.
Pre-sales involves learning about leads, weeding out ones that aren’t a good fit and cultivating a relationship with prospective customers by engaging in conversation with them and asking questions, and probing for more information.
Another aspect of pre-sales that uses consultative sales to generate leads is cold calling, a process that even many of the most seasoned salespeople dislike. The defining image of cold calling is a prospect hanging up on a salesperson trying to sell a product or service over the phone. However, the use of consultative sales within the cold calling process can actually result in more pre-qualified leads. Using consultative sales in cold calls, engaging in conversation with a prospect on the phone, and learning about a prospect’s needs, goes a long way toward generating leads.
Honing skills in consultative sales and lead qualification can pave the way to better prospects, more productive sales calls, and a noticeable increase in the bottom line.
Like building a house, cold calling campaigns must follow a process to make them successful. The first step in building a house is to excavate and pour the foundation. Once that is done, floor joists or footings are installed and walls are framed out. The process doesn’t deviate and nothing can be omitted.
The same is true with lead generation campaigns. In order for lead generation to be successful, a strong foundation needs to be laid. That foundation includes:
Understanding your target audience and identifying and extracting the lead data
Gaining expertise on products/services, value propositions, challenges solved, etc.
Developing the scripts and emails needed for various aspects of the campaign
This is accomplished with regular collaboration between your cold calling team, outside sales, marketing and leadership. No aspect of the foundation of the campaign can be skipped and the cold calling cannot begin before the entire foundation is laid.
Laying the foundation is not the only aspect of lead generation that requires a long-term vision. Prospects may commit to meet in a week, some in a month, some in a year or more. If you expect to get immediate results on any lead generation campaign, you will be disappointed. And if don’t lay down the right foundation, it will lead to failure. Laying the proper foundation for your campaign and following a well, thought-out process will deliver qualified leads and relationship building that will continuously feed your pipeline.
It is likely that you, people on your sales team and your prospects will take a week off sometime during July and August. Perhaps a few will take 2 weeks. But does that mean you should stop cold calling during the summer? The impact of suspending or delaying your cold calling campaign will be far reaching.
In terms of business activity, the summer months may seem a little quieter. However, suspending cold calling, will impact sales results for months to come. Here’s why.
You lose the opportunity to set-up an appointment at any time. There is no particular day or time that is better or worse to reach out to a prospect.
By suspending your cold calling campaign, you will lose the momentum of the campaign. A cold calling campaign is a combination of initial calls, emails and building rapport. Interfering with this process will set you back, possibly to the beginning.
You may lose the rapport you had established with prospects.
You now have a gap in your sales funnel. Without a constant flow of prospects to your sales team, there will be a lag in sales in the coming month or months.
By suspending cold calling efforts, you have increased the length of your sales cycle. You may have initiated contact in June but with a lapse in effort, those prospects won’t be closed for months.
When your sales team isn’t working on high-quality warm leads, your revenue generation efforts risk becoming stagnant. It will be harder to close a prospect who doesn’t have you top-of-mind.
When lead qualification is not a priority, sales cannot be closed effectively. A lapse in cold calling creates a roller coaster ride in profit and loss.
When you take sales for granted, that’s when sales fall short. It’s never a good idea to suspend cold calling efforts because it will have a ripple effect on the entire sales process, revenues and profits.
Often cold calling success is measured simply by the number of appointments made with relation to the number of calls. Some look at cold calling as a panacea for lead generation and expect an appointment for every call made. This is thoroughly unrealistic. When cold calling is done correctly, several levels of value are intrinsic in every call, even if an appointment is not obtained.
Cold calling:
Provides an opportunity to be in front of the prospect, even if at the time of the call the prospect was not experiencing the pain you could address.
Engages with the decision maker, nurturing your relationship with them.
Provides value to your sales process by adding indispensable information garnered from the conversation with the prospect.
Serves to clean up your list. No matter what your source or how recent you obtained the data, 20% of your information can be out of date.
Saves time and expense by eliminating unqualified leads in your database
The mentality that every call must result in an appointment or that a certain volume of appointments must be met loses site of the greater purpose of cold calling. Cold calling is the foundation for getting sales off the ground. Without cold calling, companies would find themselves without a consistent flow of appointments, without the information they need to take sales to the next step, and without the relationship that is needed to close the sale.
Don’t lose sight of the bigger picture. When your cold calling efforts don’t return a certain volume of appointments, the call campaign was far from worthless.
Appointment setting is crucial for sales organizations that rely on leads and is a key element of their process. It is considered one of the most difficult parts of the sales process and often a major hurdle to meeting sales goals. If you are looking for better outcomes and less fruitless sales, you might consider outsourcing lead generation. Here are seven areas where you can benefit.
Lower costs. While big businesses can afford to maintain inside sales departments including recruiting, hiring and training plus phone, computer and supplies, for most businesses it is cost prohibitive. The ongoing costs of one new hire outweighs the price of using an experienced lead generation company.
More qualified. Not all salespeople are good at finding new prospects as well as nurturing and closing them. Appointment setting requires a different skill set from sales presentations and closing. It is rare to find a salesperson who is good at all three. B2B lead generation companies are experts at just that.
Better use of your time. Managing a sales team can monopolize your time. Outsourcing B2B lead generation allows you to focus on other priorities including turning prospects into sales.
Scalability. The outsource company will ramp up to deliver the number of appointments you need to fill your pipeline. When business fluctuates, outsourcing allows you to scale efforts up or down accordingly. It’s easier to adjust the budget than hire or fire employees.
Accountability. It is the lead generation company’s commitment to keep you fully engaged throughout the process. They continually refine and hone their methodologies to improve outcomes. Their reporting and metrics allow you to evaluate the ROI of the program.
Quality of appointments. What you don’t want is your sales team wasting time on calls to prospects that are not a good fit for your company. Outsourcing companies are experts at analyzing information, identifying appropriate decision makers, and weeding out the leads that will go nowhere.
Better results. B2B appointment setting companies are experts in their field. They know the best practices to get decision makers on the phone, quickly establish rapport, uncover needs, and get the appointment.
A company may find significant benefits from outsourcing its appointment setting efforts, rather than relying on its sales force to set their own appointments or implementing an in-house program given better quality outcomes and the fixed costs and overhead involved.
Most of us as can recall times we have been “sold.” Salespeople pushing product, being aggressive, or being unaware of, or insensitive to our needs, leading to an unpleasant sales experience. Perhaps we walk away feeling that we didn’t get what we were looking for, or walk away without buying anything. We would have been more satisfied with the outcome if a consultative sales approach was undertaken.
