After your marketing team has generated leads, sales executives screen and verify the prospect quality to move forward with the sales funnel. The process of sales development is identifying potential leads and customers to turn them into sales.
While the job of marketing is to fill your database with more contacts, sales development executives are expected to identify, review, reach out, educate, and follow up with those leads to secure a deal.
A sales development strategy is not a rule of thumb that works for all. You need to determine who your customers are and how you can bring your best sales experience to them.
But, there are specific strategies that have worked out for other organizations and should work for you too.
Here are the top 9 sales development strategies to grow your organization.
1. Categorize Your Leads
Not every lead your marketing team adds to the database is worthy of your sales efforts. Your sales development strategy should revolve around the ideal customer behavior in your business segment. To categorize leads and analyze where to put the best efforts follow the steps mentioned below.
• Buyer Behavior
As you must already know who your target customers are, use the elements of information to determine who your ideal customer is. Most successful companies categorize their leads on the basis of their budget, past history, demographic behavior, and buying intent.
• Analyze Past Information
If you already have a steady lead generation technique. Employ different sales models to apply to different customer categories to gather information on what works the best for which leads. You can also keep applying the same model to different groups before trying out the next one.
Your marketing team should be the ones gathering information on previous leads. As they have access to the metrics, you need to make both the marketing and sales team work with each other on this aspect.
Once you’ve gathered all the information on different models, you can analyze the results and understand what works and what doesn’t.
2. Take Outsource Sales Help
Not every organization has its own marketing and sales team to commit to the cause. Even if they do, their efforts are often overshadowed by bureaucracy. If you are a business that’s looking forward to growing their business through sales strategies, outsourcing sales development can be of great help in:
• Getting a Different Perspective
It’s always best to get a fresh look at your website, marketing, and sales strategies. An outsourced sales development team can help you in the lead generation process in addition to breaking away the traditional techniques that are causing bottlenecks to your sales.
• Nothing is Off-Limits
When you hire your own marketing team, getting stuck in an endless recruitment process is inevitable. As you need different experiences for different aspects of marketing, the existing employee base is never enough.
An agency, experienced in both b2b lead generation services, can support your sales development strategy without you ever needing to worry about the assets. You can ask for any campaign design and it’ll be prepared for your review within a day or two, saving your money and resources.
• Faster Feedback and Integration
When you’ve outsourced sales development, the feedback and integration cycle of campaigns increase in pace as the agency has multiple sets of employees to handle the different components of the campaigns.
3. Don’t Hesitate to Follow-Up
Only 2% of the leads end up in sales after the first meeting. Only after six follow-ups, the number increases to 92%. But, only 8% of sales executives follow-up on a lead to this extent.
Following-up can be confusing and a source of botheration to the prospect but if you keep an effective model of approach, follow-ups can be a great source of communication.
Despite your best efforts, you can’t always succeed in categorizing leads by their behavior. You’d need to design your follow-up sales development strategy by communicating with the lead for the first time.
4. Focus on Link Building
Inbound and outbound links can be great sources of lead generation and sales. If you are being referred from an authentic media or personnel, your chances of turning the lead into sales grow more.
Your website content plays a major role here. Providing value to the customers through your content can also be a very effective sales development strategy. Authority outbound links to trustable websites can also be effective to rank your website on SERPs.
5. Don’t Shy Away from Social Media
Social media plays a major role in developing sales strategies. As most internet users are somehow connected to social media, it’s now almost necessary to bring your sales and campaign strategy there.
While using social media as a tool, remember to keep your tone consistent with the theme of that particular platform. You can’t expect the tone of a tweet to work on LinkedIn.
6. Respond to Queries Faster
A faster response time makes a lead much happier than waiting hours for product or order information. Make faster responses an objective of your sales development team to grow your organization effectively.
7. Keep Calls Short and Concise
Short calls below 10 min are most effective while closing a deal. Don’t keep your customers waiting to get to their next meeting by talking about personal and repetitive things. It’s in your best interest to not indulge in discussions over the phone that doesn’t contribute to the interest of your organization. Don’t make your customers run from you.
8. Use Technology to Your Benefit
Use CRM, email tools, and data tools to your benefit while designing the next sales development strategy. These tools can help you schedule the welcome emails, remind you about follow-ups, let you analyze the past data to incorporate into future projects, and much more.
9. Keep Your Leads Informed
If one of your hot leads have fallen out of the sales funnel, after analyzing the reason, keep them informed about the new deals, offer them a discount, or make them remember why they were looking for your product in the first place. Most of the customers, who were genuinely interested in the product, will return back to the funnel if effective information is passed on to them.
The Bottom Line
Lead generation processes are highly effective in the field of sales development strategy. Although you can employ your own team of marketers, it’s only best if you outsource sales companies to handle the process for you while you take care of the products.
You can develop an efficient sales development strategy by categorizing your leads, following-up, building links, engaging through social media, and using technology in your favor.
