Building More Business — Sherburne

THE OBJECTIVE of marketing your business is two-fold: to build market awareness about your products and services and to generate qualified leads. Both are important elements of the customer acquisition process. Building market awareness makes the sales process easier.

Prospective customers are more likely to talk with a firm that has a recognized name. And lead generation, if done correctly, provides you with information about qualified prospects that are likely to purchase your products or services, reducing the amount of time your sales force must spend on expensive, and often unproductive, cold calling.

In previous columns, I have shared ideas about how to build market awareness and generate leads using vehicles such as direct mail and Internet search optimization. But what happens to those leads once you acquire them? Obviously, simply generating the leads is not enough. Leads must be acted upon by qualified sales professionals to turn those leads into revenue. And ensuring that this happens requires constant management oversight.

When I was in sales at Xerox, I had a manager who always said, “You can’t expect what you don’t inspect.” As business owners and sales managers, not only should you make sure that you clearly communicate your expectations to your sales force, you must also follow up on those expectations to ensure that they are met.

One efficient way for management to follow up on expectations is through the implementation of a sales force automation tool, such as ACT! or Goldmine, or an online solution such as SalesForce.com. Salespeople can sell more by leveraging their knowledge of prospects and existing accounts. With the right tools, they can eliminate some of the repetitive administrative tasks that keep them in the office instead of in front of customers. And by leveraging a sales automation tool, your sales force can better focus on—and close—the highest probability deals.

In order for a sales force automation tool to be effective, though, it must be used religiously. Every contact with the customer must be documented and the next contact scheduled. This ensures a continuous series of customer touch points, each building on the last in a logical manner. It also provides a single repository of customer data that can be used as a basis for direct mail campaigns and other broad-based marketing activities. It provides a single go-to point for managers to gain a comprehensive view of the overall sales pipeline. And, perhaps most importantly, it ensures that the knowledge your firm gains about its customer base doesn’t walk out the door when a sales rep chooses to pursue other opportunities.

Effective implementation of a sales force automation tool requires top-down management support. Keeping the database updated must be non-negotiable, or people simply won’t do it. This must be part of the expectations you establish for your sales force. A sales automation tool must also be easy to use and accessible from anywhere. Salespeople should be able to update the database on-the-fly, whether they are connected or not, and automatically synchronize with the master database the next time they connect.

If a sales automation tool consumes more administrative time than the sales rep is already spending, it will fail. Ideally, a sales automation tool should also link into other parts of the organization to ensure good data flow and to eliminate rekeying of data.

So Part One of the process is collecting data about customers and prospects and monitoring where they are in the sales cycle. Part Two of the process—the inspection part—is conducting regular territory account reviews that not only hold your sales force accountable for their progress by account, but also provide a platform for engaging your organization’s brain power to develop more effective account-by-account sales strategies.

Sales force automation does not need to be costly. But it is a critical element in building a successful business in today’s complex world.

What’s on the Agenda

In my book, “Understanding Customers: The Complete Guide to Building a Customer Service Strategy” (NAPL 2003), I suggested a comprehensive agenda for territory account reviews that will facilitate structured sales efforts and ensure that your sales team follows through on each and every qualified lead. This includes the acquisition of new customers, as well as further development of existing customers.

* Review previous month’s activities

* Status of open action items or issues

* Customer visits and contacts

* Number of jobs and total revenue generated

* Review of account profitability

* Backlog of orders

* Projects under way

* Competitive activity, if any, within the account

* Organizational changes of note

* Develop action plan, including individual accountable and due dates

* Resolving customer problems

* Planning for customer visits or other contacts

* Planning the next steps for open sales cycles and pending projects

* Heading off the competition

* Build a go-forward strategy

* What unmet needs does this customer have that we can meet?

* How can we continue to differentiate ourselves from the competition to maintain—or gain—a prime position with this account?

* re there additional contacts within the account that can be developed to further cement the relationship and grow the business?

* Is there anything unique about the way we are serving this account that can be leveraged with other customers?

Combining a sales automation program with a structured territory account review process builds accountability into your sales process. It ensures that your sales force is spending its time on the right activities with the right customers. It is the only effective way to guarantee a return on your marketing investment.

And it is the best way to help your sales force sell more per deal, sell more deals, improve their close rates and improve the profitability of individual deals.

—CARY SHERBURNE

About the Author
Cary Sherburne is a well-known journalist, author and strategic marketing consultant working primarily with the printing and publishing industry. She is a frequent speaker at industry events, a regular contributor to industry publications and has written three books, available through the National Association for Printing Leadership (www.napl.org). Sherburne can be reached at Cary@SherburneAssociates.com.