Solutions to help: Improve close rates

Eliminate rubbish leads that waste your time

You know the story. Marketing complains that sales people doesn’t follow up all the leads they supply – either not quickly enough or not at all.

Sales people complain that many of the leads marketing supplies are a waste of time. Often both are right.

In real life it can take a lot of time and effort to follow up a lead – sometimes from three to ten touches – before a meeting is scheduled. If a sales person spends hours or days setting up a meeting or phone call and the “lead” turns out to be poorly qualified and a waste of their time, they get discouraged. Soon they come to expect leads to be a waste of time and don’t bother to follow up, or don’t follow up with enough persistence.

The irony is that by not following up, or by following up too late, they can miss out on genuine opportunities as well as leaving a poor impression in the marketplace.

The answer is to only pass high quality leads to sales, ones with a trusted relationship in place, where there’s a defined need, with the right person and where there’s enough information to give salespeople a head start. Once they have confidence that a lead is worthwhile they will make a big effort to follow them up.

The result is to eliminate “leads” that are a waste of time, giving your sales people genuine sales opportunities, a fuller pipeline, better close rates and more sales. Our Clients know the leads we provide are true gold, not fool’s gold.

Eliminate deals that will never close

Salespeople are notoriously reluctant to qualify out of deals, even when their chances of winning are slim – particularly when they don’t have other deals in the pipeline.

The pressure to have a full pipeline can make sales people reluctant to be realistic even when it’s obvious they can’t win, leading to companies throwing good money and resources after bad in a futile attempt to win unwinnable deals.

By providing a steady flow of high quality opportunities where you have a good chance of winning, and by providing clear visibility of future pipeline, we remove the temptation to cling on to futile hopes and make it easy for salespeople and companies to move on to opportunities where there’s high chance of winning.

We also make sure we don’t send you unwinnable leads in the first place. This, combined with the freedom our Clients’ sales people feel to qualify out of unwinnable deals early, helps you to improve close rates as well as to save them time money.

Get into companies at a higher level

The higher you can engage with a company the more influence you have. If a “C” level decision maker is your first port of call you have a better chance of winning business than if you start with someone in the bowels of the IT department.

You can always be referred down but it’s very, very hard to climb up.

However, people lower down the corporate food chain can say “No” even if they can’t say “Yes”, so you can’t afford to ignore them. You need to gain agreement from recommenders and influencers as well as decision makers

Our ARM Business Platform is designed to help us build relationships at different levels in potential customers, so we can help our Clients to improve their close rates by engaging, educating and nurturing prospects at executive level – and we also help them build relationships and educate influencers and recommenders at lower levels, so they have all bases covered.

Get into deals earlier and drive the agenda

A lot of things happen between prospect deciding they have a priority business issue and placing an order.

In the early part of the buying journey they evaluate different approaches, research potential solutions, evaluate the ROI and set their priorities. Only once these activities have been completed do they determine timeframes and budgets and move into the later stages of the buying process.

Companies that engage early on can influence their prospects’ approach, their requirements and the budget via consistent and regular nurturing and education.

The earlier you get into a deal the more you can influence it and the better your chance of winning. And of course if you don’t even know there’s a deal on the table your chances of winning are zero.

But – on the other hand, your sales people have short term quotas to fill and can’t waste too much time working with people who aren’t ready to buy and don’t have a budget yet.

That’s how we help our Clients. Our ARM Business Platform allows us to discover out what deals are coming up, understand the driving factors, educate, nurture and build relationships before your sales people become involved. So you get the best of both worlds – you get in early before anyone else does to drive the agenda and influence the requirements but allow your sales people to focus on immediate opportunities until prospects are closer to making a decision.

It gives your sales people a much better chance of winning and significantly improves your close rates (and time to close).