How to improve your sales process in 2016

It’s the end of the year, time to evaluate this year’s sales performance. But it is also time to plan ahead and think about your sales process in 2016. Jake Spence, durhamlane’s Sales Operations Director, wants to share a few thoughts that can benefit your business considerably.

Create a strong sales pipeline

Creating a strong sales pipeline help s your sales team to focus on the best opportunities, so they are not wasting time on poor leads. At durhamlane, we use a lead scoring system (The Magic 35) to identify high quality leads. ‘This helps our salespeople to prioritise the best prospects and close more quickly. I am surprised there are not more businesses applying lead scoring processes’, Jake says. Here is how you can detect your best, most interested prospects:

• Identify your target market to focus on prospects who are most like your typical customer, but also investigate new potential markets.

• Describe your ideal customer, so these leads earn higher scores. Define the characteristics that make them perfect. This might be their budget, company size, role. The more information you have about your leads, the better you can assess their value. Do you know if the prospect has the authority to make decisions? Do they have the budget you are aiming for or will they have it at a later date? When is the prospect looking to make a decision? Is the prospect a good fit, is there a need for your solution?

• Study the prospect’s engagement with your business to find the leads that are most interested. List all possible behaviour and score them according to their importance. These might be Email clicks, Social Media shares, Ebook downloads, free trials, etc.

Now that you have a set of rules, it is critical to assign point values to each criterion. We use our Magic 35 qualification toolkit to score our leads. For most of the businesses a simple lead scoring scale is sufficient. Think carefully about this because the rules may not be equally valuable. Discuss the scoring system with your sales organisation and continue to improve over time.

Do you want to learn more about how to set up your sales scoring process? – Get in touch with Jake or his team on Tel: 0191 481 3800 or info@durhamlane.co.uk

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