Teaching Technology To Staff: Having established and put in place the technological infrastructure required and possibly having adapted your marketing activities there is only one aspect left to address, and that is how your sales staff perform. Many companies expect their salespeople to perform irrespective of any significant marketing activities in place. The salesperson is supposed to be the superstar! When looking at Pareto’s law of the 80:20, that is 20% of your team providing 80% of the revenue, it is always a bone of contention with sales managers and sales directors that they are not able to harness the effectiveness of this 20% and apply it to the other 80%.
It is important to consider how much time and effort has been expended in the past and how effective your methods have been at evaluating your staff. If you are a company that needs to be assured of continuous ongoing business and require a regular source of new prospects, then this approach applies to you.
Using the technology and the marketing strategies illustrated, your salespeople can now effectively be managed and evaluated against their targets.
When looking at the timetable of your sales activities, the first contact your salespeople may well have had with your potential customers is when they cleaned up the database and made sure that the people they were speaking to were correct, i.e. you have the correct contact such as the Managing Director’s name and e-mail address.
Assuming all of the information is now correct, your team’s next spoken contact is to ascertain the prospect’s impression of your first newsletter. This is a non-threatening way of beginning a dialogue with the prospect and could well prove to be the most crucial conversation of the relationship. Your salespeople are not telephoning for an appointment; they’re not phoning for a close of any sort. The purpose of the call is simply to ask a prospective customer if they received the newsletter and if they would be willing to continue to receive the newsletter in the months to come, preferably by e-mail.
Each company agreeing to receive copies of your newsletter via e-mail is acknowledging recognition of
your company and the information you are providing.
As previously mentioned, the objective is to help your prospective customer. It is a new relationship and it is highly unlikely that they will buy from you after the first call or first meeting. The salesperson’s initial purpose is to see if there is some common ground between your businesses. They have to confirm and convince any new prospect that they genuinely want to help them; failure to do this could be perceived as your sales person wanting something from them. A prospect’s natural reaction will then be to shy away and back off.
The purpose of the newsletters is to keep your name, approach and information in front of your customers. When the time does come to talk about your products they will feel they already know you because you have been helping them and giving them information about your products and how your products can help their company.
Ultimately, when the prospect feels completely at ease and reassured that your intention is to help them they will buy from you; if you try to sell to them too soon and close them down it will not work.
Newsletters also help the salesperson to overcome typical telephone sales barriers such as getting past the gatekeeper and being tongue-tied when they finally get through to a prospect. Making regular post or email contact with your prospects builds rapport, so that when they do call they are less likely to be “fobbed off”.
It is important to remember that prospects now have access to more information, more easily than ever before. It is therefore crucial for you to plant yourself firmly in the prospect’s mind so that when they are looking to buy they will think of you first.
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