In my previous blogs, we discussed how to integrate the teams in to one demand generation unit. We also reviewed how to uncover leakage points in your pipeline. For this installment, we are going to dig a bit deeper in to those leakage points and start to uncover ways for you to fix yours. Let’s start by chatting a bit about opportunities.
Well, all opportunities are not the same. It’s critical that everyone understand this. What if opportunities were baskets of different fruit?
would provide nutrition, possibly both grow on trees and be good for you – but still be very, very different from each other. This is the case with opportunities. There are actually two types – at first glance,they look similar, but in reality are very, very different. The first one is the Sales-generated opportunity. Key characteristics include:* Are known to the Salesperson
* A time investment has been made
* Are focused – possibly from a specific sales-driven campaign
* Are warm in temperature – already a nearly full BanTT
* Have a specific “trust” level – they know where they came from
* Sales is responsible for them - accountability is apparent
On the other side of the fruit we have the Marketing-generated opportunity. Key characteristics include:
* The opportunity is unknown to the Salesperson
* There’s no investment made by Sales
* It may not be in focus – not what the Rep needs at this time or in line with Sales demands
* Is cold or possibly warm – deemed to need more qualification
* They come with a low trust level – they have historical baggage
* Marketing is responsible – Sales Rep has little or no accountability
Sales Teams need to be skilled to handle both. They need coaching to handle both. They need tools to handle both. If there is any part of this paper where we need to be on the same page, it’s this point. If you do one thing after reading this blog today, you will immediately review your types of opportunities and find out how you can improve the follow up.
When you jump right into understanding your leakage points, it would be helpful to have a set of questions to start from. Here are my best practice questions that are great starting points for each part of the nurture and upper pipeline leakage points:
Top of the pipeline leakage – following up and nurture to received leads
* What % of my responders convert to nurture phase?
* What % velocity rate do I have in each nurture phase?
* Where are most of the leads discontinued?
* Why are they discontinued?
* How long do leads stay in each nurture stage?
* What is my cost per lead nurtured?
* How many attempts does it take to BanTT a lead?
Top of pipeline leakage
* What is the average follow-up time for an opportunity?
* What is the opportunity volume?
* What % are immediately discontinued?
* Why are they immediately discontinued?
* What are the immediate follow-up costs per opportunity?
Middle of pipeline leakage
* What is the conversion rate from Stage 1 to Stage 2?
* What is the age of the average opportunity in Stage 1?
* What is the quality score of an opportunity in Stage 1?
* Why are opportunities discontinued?
* What is the average opportunity size?
* How many opportunities are in Stage 1 with no value?
* What is the forecast accuracy?
Once you have many of the answers to the above questions, then compare the results between Sales-generated opportunities and Marketing-generated opportunities. I think that you will immediately see some very interesting reasons for your leakages.
So now what do you do? After you have successfully analyzed your pipeline leakage points, corrective actions need to be taken. It would be a shame to come this far and now fall down on the implementation. Corrective action comes in the form of behavioral change and corresponding tools that will reinforce those changes. Let’s begin with skills training.
It’s safe to say that your Responders may not be jumping for joy to hear from you. When your inside Sales Team or your designated Nurture Group picks up the phone to contact the Responders and begin the nurture process, they need skills, they need tools, and they need the will to make the calls! Let’s take a look at the follow up or nurture leakage.
Let’s start with the dialogue. There are six critical skills where they need training:
Presence – Relating – Questioning – Listening – Positioning – Checking
Second, they need to be able to overcome objections. Objection training is critical, because they will get every possible objection thrown at them. If they do not learn how to successfully react to the objections, their dialogues will be short and the only leads they will advance will be the lucky ones that they stumble upon. The following objection skills should be trained:
Acknowledgement/Empathy, Questioning, Positioning, and Checking.
And the last step is to train every team member how to BanTT. We covered BanTT in my previous blog – so read that first if you are not familiar with BanTT. There are best-practice questions and a particular flow to determining a BanTT score. Every member of your Nurture Team should know the questions, be trained on how to ask the questions, and leverage their objection training to ensure successful BanTT performance.
The training to improve leakage points in the top and middle of your pipeline should happen at the same time. They have the same goal to be “Sales ready”. Sales ready means being equipped with the skills, knowledge, and processes at a point of interaction with a client or prospect that drives an effective dialogue. It is my experience that there are four major tactics that need to be employed to improve these leakage points.
First, we have skills training. Understand the current skill levels of your Sales Team. Perform diagnostics on your Team to understand core strength and weaknesses. Develop skills training and implement the training in accordance with the results from your diagnostics. Make sure you cover the same fundamental six skills that we discussed in the first leakage point – presence, relating, questioning, listening, positioning, and checking.
Second, teach follow-up fundamentals. This is critical. Getting ready to follow up on a lead is like paining a room, 80% is preparation and the remaining 20% is the actual phone call or live meeting. Start with teaching the Sales Team how to do Research:
* Provide them with information to understand the opportunity history, the person, the problem, the company, and the industry. The goal is to find a “hinge” that will create a meaningful call. Leverage tools like LinkedIn, Facebook, and other popular social networking sites.
* Plan for the call. A best practice is to use a call planner to map out or visualize the dialogue, collaborate with Team Members before the call, and ultimately archive the planning for future coaching and learning.
The third item on our sales readiness list is to lower the barriers to making the actual call. The goal is to improve the Will of the Sales Representatives who don’t like this work.
* Examine existing processes – streamline for efficiency and productivity – make sure everyone knows the flow and has adopted the process
* Improve touch tactics – Marketing needs to help here with items like personalized and integrated e-mail, point of contact notifications, spiffs, and leader boards to promote Responder success
* Leverage web intelligence tools that can aggregate information and mash-up social networking sites. This can speed up the research process greatly.
The final training is to ensure that Salespeople are capturing and recording data. CRM training on critical CRM data fields and adoption reporting is critical. Without Sales capturing data points like recording contact attempts and why opportunities are discontinued, there will be no way for Marketing and Sales to have insight in to how the top of the pipeline is performing. Sales Management will also be lacking critical data that will allow them to coach each Sales Rep on how to improve their individual performance.
For my next blog, I will cover coaching to the pipeline.
