A healthy sales pipeline is a must to achieve your revenue goals and objectives. However, the health of the sales pipeline depends on the number of quality prospects it holds. Sometimes sales teams emphasize on increasing the volume of the deals in the sales pipeline, but if they are not converting into sales, then there isn’t any value of those deals. To increases sales, you need to have high-quality prospects in your sales pipelines as they maximize your margins, shorten the sales cycle length, increases productivity and saves time.
What are quality prospects?
High-quality prospects refer to potential buyers that fit into all the criteria you have set to meet the desired sales results which in turn has a significant impact on the overall growth of your business. Such prospects display genuine interest in your product and have fewer chances of quitting in mid-way of the sales cycle. Connecting with the right prospect reduces risks and increases the chances of meeting the sales targets as you will see less dropout and more conversions in your sales pipeline.
You can’t accidentally come across a quality prospect; efforts and perseverance are needed to fill your sales pipeline with high-quality prospects.
Here are few tactics to fill your sales pipeline with quality prospects:
Create an ideal customer persona
Having a roadmap is helpful in quickly reaching your destination, similarly describing your ideal customer persona will help you in approaching and connecting with quality prospects. With accurate target audience insights, you will have a specific direction to focus that will make your work simpler.
To create a highly effective ideal customer persona, you need to consider the following points:
- Companies from which industry will benefit the most from your product?
- Once you identify the industry, you need to define the business size you want to approach
- Try to know their annual revenue to understand if they can pay you for the value you provide
- Understand the challenges faced by the specific industry you intend to target.
Analyze your successful customers
Your successful past can be a strong base for achieving success in future too. You need to identify the traits and characteristics of the customers who are succeeding with your solution. Create a list of successful customers to analyze their buying behavior and other information like which sector they belong to, what is their company size and annual revenue. You can even contact them to understand how much value are they getting from your product. It will give you a tentative idea of what kind of businesses you need to approach to achieve cent percent positive results.
Analysis of lost prospects
Lost prospects are as important as successful customers. It is disappointing when a prospect does not turn into a customer even after spending so much time and efforts. Knowing what went wrong in the past, can help in being cautious in the future. Analyzing the lost prospects will acquaint you with the weak areas and mistakes that you need to avoid for increasing your conversion ratio. Understanding the factors for prospect’s dissatisfaction can help you in improving performance and offering better solutions.
Below are the points that you need to pay attention to while analyzing a lost prospect-
- The causes of prospect loss
- What characteristics do these companies who quit in the past have in common?
- What were the issues faced by these companies that they refused to move ahead?
- What were the factors missing in your solution according to these companies?
- How much time did you spend on the lost prospects?
Separate lead generation from sales process
Lead generation and sales process are two main but different aspects of sales that shouldn’t be combined. In most of the organization, a sales rep is the one who handles the complete sales process from approaching a prospect to creating a deal and successfully closing it. In this case, the sales personnel don’t have enough time to concentrate on one aspect like if he is focusing on nurturing a deal, he won’t get time to conduct research and identify a quality prospect. There should be a special marketing team to connect with high-quality prospects.
In most of the cases even if the organization has its in-house marketing team, there are chances that they don’t coordinate with the sales teams. Without the help of the sales team, targeting the right audience can be a difficult task for the marketing team. For achieving the company’s revenue goal, the sales and marketing team need to walk together in unity. The two teams need to coordinate and discuss the requirement for achieving better sales results.
Use a CRM to maintain quality
Once you identify the potential prospect, taking them forward in the sales pipeline is your responsibility. Even if you have approached the right prospect, but if you do not take care of them with on-time follow-ups and responses then there are chances they might lose interest in your product. A CRM is a useful tool that supports your efforts and helps you in taking a prospect forward.
With a CRM like Salesmate, you can systematically organize all the data about your prospects and easily track their progress in the sales cycle. You can seamlessly maintain healthy relationships with them by sending automated greeting emails and following-up on time. It also allows you to create detailed reports for getting a better insight into the deal. You can even schedule emails to connect on the right time with prospects in different time zone. With a CRM, deal conversion gets easier as it increases efficiency with its exclusive automation, integration and forecasting features and helps the sales rep in delivering optimum performance.
To conclude
Besides filling your sales pipeline with high-quality prospects, you even need to concentrate on satisfying their business needs and pushing them ahead in the sales pipeline. A CRM can be your support in your strive to increase conversions. For achieving maximum benefits from a CRM, you need to be aware of all its features. To discover various features and capabilities of a CRM, get in touch with our team or you can even ask for a free demo to explore its functionalities and see how will it be helpful for your business.
A healthy sales pipeline is a must to achieve your revenue goals and objectives. However, the health of the sales pipeline depends on the number of quality prospects it holds. Sometimes sales teams emphasize on increasing the volume of the deals in the sales pipeline, but if they are not converting into sales, then there isn’t any value of those deals. To increases sales, you need to have high-quality prospects in your sales pipelines as they maximize your margins, shorten the sales cycle length, increases productivity and saves time.
What are quality prospects?
High-quality prospects refer to potential buyers that fit into all the criteria you have set to meet the desired sales results which in turn has a significant impact on the overall growth of your business. Such prospects display genuine interest in your product and have fewer chances of quitting in mid-way of the sales cycle. Connecting with the right prospect reduces risks and increases the chances of meeting the sales targets as you will see less dropout and more conversions in your sales pipeline.
You can’t accidentally come across a quality prospect; efforts and perseverance are needed to fill your sales pipeline with high-quality prospects.
Here are few tactics to fill your sales pipeline with quality prospects:
Create an ideal customer persona
Having a roadmap is helpful in quickly reaching your destination, similarly describing your ideal customer persona will help you in approaching and connecting with quality prospects. With accurate target audience insights, you will have a specific direction to focus that will make your work simpler.
To create a highly effective ideal customer persona, you need to consider the following points:
Analyze your successful customers
Your successful past can be a strong base for achieving success in future too. You need to identify the traits and characteristics of the customers who are succeeding with your solution. Create a list of successful customers to analyze their buying behavior and other information like which sector they belong to, what is their company size and annual revenue. You can even contact them to understand how much value are they getting from your product. It will give you a tentative idea of what kind of businesses you need to approach to achieve cent percent positive results.
Analysis of lost prospects
Lost prospects are as important as successful customers. It is disappointing when a prospect does not turn into a customer even after spending so much time and efforts. Knowing what went wrong in the past, can help in being cautious in the future. Analyzing the lost prospects will acquaint you with the weak areas and mistakes that you need to avoid for increasing your conversion ratio. Understanding the factors for prospect’s dissatisfaction can help you in improving performance and offering better solutions.
Below are the points that you need to pay attention to while analyzing a lost prospect-
Separate lead generation from sales process
Lead generation and sales process are two main but different aspects of sales that shouldn’t be combined. In most of the organization, a sales rep is the one who handles the complete sales process from approaching a prospect to creating a deal and successfully closing it. In this case, the sales personnel don’t have enough time to concentrate on one aspect like if he is focusing on nurturing a deal, he won’t get time to conduct research and identify a quality prospect. There should be a special marketing team to connect with high-quality prospects.
In most of the cases even if the organization has its in-house marketing team, there are chances that they don’t coordinate with the sales teams. Without the help of the sales team, targeting the right audience can be a difficult task for the marketing team. For achieving the company’s revenue goal, the sales and marketing team need to walk together in unity. The two teams need to coordinate and discuss the requirement for achieving better sales results.
Use a CRM to maintain quality
Once you identify the potential prospect, taking them forward in the sales pipeline is your responsibility. Even if you have approached the right prospect, but if you do not take care of them with on-time follow-ups and responses then there are chances they might lose interest in your product. A CRM is a useful tool that supports your efforts and helps you in taking a prospect forward.
With a CRM like Salesmate, you can systematically organize all the data about your prospects and easily track their progress in the sales cycle. You can seamlessly maintain healthy relationships with them by sending automated greeting emails and following-up on time. It also allows you to create detailed reports for getting a better insight into the deal. You can even schedule emails to connect on the right time with prospects in different time zone. With a CRM, deal conversion gets easier as it increases efficiency with its exclusive automation, integration and forecasting features and helps the sales rep in delivering optimum performance.
To conclude
Besides filling your sales pipeline with high-quality prospects, you even need to concentrate on satisfying their business needs and pushing them ahead in the sales pipeline. A CRM can be your support in your strive to increase conversions. For achieving maximum benefits from a CRM, you need to be aware of all its features. To discover various features and capabilities of a CRM, get in touch with our team or you can even ask for a free demo to explore its functionalities and see how will it be helpful for your business.
Coreen Menezes