You’ve been nurturing a prospect for months and have built a great relationship by learning about their company, listening to their pain points and offering solutions that fit their needs.
Then you hear the dreaded, “Now’s not the right time.”
This is a common form of rejection heard by sales reps, like me, in all industries. What we can’t do, but often tend to, is allow ourselves to write those prospects off as dead leads. Many factors can attribute to reps doing so with prospects who express this rejection, but none more prominent than the simple lack of time and lack of value seen in spending the time on stalled leads.
It should come as no surprise that more than 40% of the average sales rep’s time is spent on non-selling activities. On a recent client call, one sales manager even suggested his reps were spending closer to 80%. With so much to do, and so little time to do it, most reps choose to spend the majority of their selling time on the prospects closest to close. With sales quotas continually on the rise, it will be hard to get sales teams to change this behavior.
To further complicate the issue, the average outbound born B2B complex sale has three or four decision makers and eight or nine touch points including:
- Prospecting
- Initial contact
- Research and understanding
- Sales pitch
- Negotiations
- Often a repeat sales pitch
- … and of course, closing the deal.
Prospecting leads takes time, a lot of it, and that’s only the first step in the sales process. That’s why I was instantly intrigued by the SalesAmp process when I first came to North Star. The ability to combine content marketing with the prospecting stage of the sales cycle was a game-changer. Having a marketing team focused on positioning me as an expert in the industry, while producing sought-after, educational content provided me with a marketing engine that ran 24/7. I no longer lost sight of the leads that weren’t ready to buy. They were simply folded back into a nurture campaign to receive new content from me every month.
Continuous touch points are opportunities to educate, inform and assess a prospective client’s interest level. These are crucial components to understand if prospects are at the point of decision-making – after all, nurtured leads have a 20% increase in sales opportunities versus non-nurtured leads.1
With SalesAmp, I don’t sink a significant amount of my time on prospects that aren’t ready to speak to me or make a buying decision because my marketing and inside sales team can assess a prospect’s level of interest through metrics and engagement tracking. Only when a lead is deemed qualified to hand
over to me (requests a meeting, is engaging with a lot of content or multiple employees at one company show interest), the hand-off is initiated. I don’t need to spend my time on a prospect who isn’t ready – saving both time and money. It came as quite the shock to me to learn that 65% of companies do not have a lead nurturing process set up, when stats have shown that, on average, companies with lead nurturing programs bring in 50% more sales qualified leads, at a third of the cost.1
When marketing is focused on one thing — helping individual sales people sell more — both teams win. If you’re interested in learning how marketing can help sales drive more revenue, download our free guide “Five Marketing Must for Sales” or reach out today to learn more about our SalesAmp offering.
1 Spotio. “118 Eye Opening Sales Statistics for 2018.” https://spotio.com/blog/sales-statistics/
