Anyone who is interested comes back.
Even if you prospect large companies, the counterparts involved in the future solution will be responsive.
And if you deal with owners and decision-makers and they have a real interest in the possible purchase, the returns will be quick.
Responsiveness is the main factor in the temperature of a lead.
Responsive lead = Hot lead.
Hot doesn't mean qualified, but at least you will get a quick answer about closing a deal.
95 to 97% of the people you talk to to close a corporate deal, will not buy, regardless of whether they came via active or inbound channel.
The efficiency of sales is to generate the leads in volume and secondly to have an extremely pragmatic screening process.
More harmful than a lack of leads is dealing with cold or speculative leads.
Lead speculative is one who "wants to know more" and stops there.
It turns out that this "I want to know more" can take you half a day.
If it is a large company and you have a staunch sponsor within it wanting to make it viable, it may take months for you to realize that it was a speculative opportunity.
So the only bitter medicine I recommend is to shorten the turnaround times and "on the quiet", take it down.
There are four possible outcomes to your sales approach:
- No interest
- There is interest now
- There may be interest in the future
- Silence (no response)
To close deals and bring customers in we need on the radar of companies that have interest now.
The rest is foam.
Foam is part of it. But it is foam.
I want you to deal with real closing situations. I want you to talk to people who are genuinely interested in evaluating what you sell because they need the solution.
So you can't spend the day slapping your hand in the water making foam.
To do this apply the following rules:
- Have you opened the conversation, sent your materials, and not heard back in 7 days? Drop it, that is, take it out of your pipeline.
- Lead scheduled a call and didn't show up? Drop it summarily.
- Lead said he would return the day after tomorrow and he didn't return and didn't give any satisfaction? Take it down.
I know that your pipeline is going to get thin very quickly.
But better shallow than full of ghosts.
The effort is 50% to get people in and 50% to convert those who are really worthwhile.
Imagine the following scenario.
You handle 100 opportunities in a month.
You are a patient guy.
85 of your interlocutors receive your materials and do not return.
But you insist. You call again to see if they got it. And you send a second e-mail. And you schedule it in the CRM to send again in 7 days. You are flirting with an unresponsive audience.
The other 15 interlocutors are distributed like this:
- 7 said they have no interest right away
- 4 asked for a meeting or a call
- 4 asked for a proposal
So there we have 8 people who are really interested in advancing the opportunity.
Now imagine your energy (which is limited) being distributed in 93 (85 + 8) leads evenly where only 8 of these have a real chance of buying.
The chances of you actually capricing those 8 fall to the ground.
You spend your time opening your email and thinking about how to get your 83 leads to respond instead of dealing with converting the real chances with the 8 that can move forward.
The best thing to do is to leave only these 8 on your radar. The rest should be discarded.
Why the attachment with non-responding leads.
Because it costs money to generate a lead. That's why many professionals have an attachment and don't want to discard it. They think it is a waste.
In B2B a lead can cost upwards of R$1,000.00 to generate, either by prospecting or inbound campaigns.
Then you generate 15 of these in a week, but only 2 are actually responsive. How do you discard 13 leads that cost a fortune to generate just because they are not responsive?
"You'll see the guys are busy with other things."
"Maybe we didn't have the time and opportunity to build value in their minds. Who knows, maybe one or two more killer emails won't do the trick?"
Unfortunately these beliefs will dilute your energy and spread it into innocuous opportunities.
Therefore.
Short, short turnaround times. Short patience with those who don't show genuine interest.
You need good leads. Good leads need you. The rest, out.
Those who really need something, act on it.
