Removing Uncertainty from Sales, Marketing & Lead Generation - Part 1

You don’t need to take my word for it.

I can show you how to reach the Holy Grail of a scalable business with a sales and marketing process that you know works and at what rate it converts.

To achieve this, you have to consider this as a longer-range market planning, sales lead nurturing and business development process than some firms are familiar with.

But not all firms!

99% of businesses, never get to this stage…and that’s not through lack of trying.

Staying on the plan, testing, refining, re-defining, and testing again can befuddle the best. Learning to deal with baby steps and acceptable levels of uncertainty is a must as you design and develop the blended sales and marketing process that will deliver for you and at a rate you want.

A good sales and marketing development plan means you can say goodbye to the stresses associated with hitting your sales target.

Enabling you, if you wish, to ramp it up and grow your business.

When you have a highly scalable model in play, just turn the marketing tap a little harder. Risks are minimal, growth is predictable and cost of leads/orders is as good as fixed.

So, how does this work for you?

Today, we are sharing ‘Part 1’ our key insights for taking uncertainty out of your sales and marketing process:

Know your current sales and marketing process – Know it in-depth, map it out, check the reality agrees with the schemed version, make sure everyone is following the sales process, throughout the process. If you can’t commit to this - stop reading now.

Understand where your leads come from – You may think you do but, map your marketing process, how it delivers leads, of what quality, frequency and value. Seriously review how you’re nurturing those sales leads. Indeed, are you really nurturing them? Or; are you letting them hang around on the off chance that the prospect reaches out to your business or one of your team spots them on the CRM?

Really know your numbers - For each of the respective sales and marketing funnels and channels, know them back to front at every step – This is why knowing your process is fundamental to any improvement process and removing the uncertainty that will stop you building a scalable sales generation engine.

Accept some level of uncertainty - You won’t have all the numbers straight away, some of the numbers will be easy to find, others will take some digging. Some numbers be updated frequently, others will lag. That’s all ok… work with it. Just get the best numbers you can.

Identify the critical metrics – Consider only the levers that, if you could manipulate the numbers, it would have a vast positive impact on the final results e.g. sales made, profitability, conversion rate etc.

Use qualitative and quantitative measures - Don’t just focus on the number of leads coming through your process, look at the quality. Anyone can grow a business throwing people and leads in a mix, but it’s costly, unstable and not sustainable.

Look at sales and marketing lead quality - Spend some time establishing the profile of your perfect lead or sales prospect. Then focus time on engaging and attracting just those prospects.

This takes lots of sales teams out of their comfort zone when they eschew high volume sales and marketing lead generation for highly focused sales and marketing lead generation. The sales pipeline looks skinny, but the quality is high.

Be totally transparent - Share the metrics and the results with the whole sales and marketing lead generation team, share the responsibility for small and large improvements in the sales, marketing lead generation, lead nurturing, selling and closing process with the specific functions that own that part of the process.

Accountability and ownership is key in the process improvement.

Be brave - Sometimes you’ll see metrics you just don’t want to see, this is where you need to be super brave, and resist the temptation to fold the exercise and go back to head in the sand. So, when you see figs you don’t like, dig around, get the skinny on why they’re like they are, and set about changing them.

Work the process - It’s the fastest way to continuous improvement in the sales and marketing lead generation process to deliver better business results and sales. A monthly 1% improvement might not seem much but, over time, that’s a game changer. Think, continuous improvement and marginal gains.

Ok, so that covers a lot of your sales and marketing lead generation and lead nurturing process; but a critical factor in your success is defined by having the correct people in your sales pipeline. Chasing low grade sales leads will just make your job harder, your sales cycles longer, your discounts bigger and your conversion rate lower!

It’s a lethal combination that will see the sales and marketing team busy fools. Who really has the time for that?

In ‘Part 2’ of “Removing Uncertainty from the Sales and Marketing, Lead Generation Process” we discuss the removal of uncertainty mid-funnel – practical steps you can take to simply remove uncertainty and never miss a prospect.