When you get right down to brass tacks making money means selling something PROFITABLY. I capitalize the word “profitably” because far too many become enamored of acquiring new customers or up-selling existing ones, but they don’t keep the eye on whether they really are making money or if the cost of goods sold (COGS) means a loss of money.
The only time you should ever lose money on a sale is when you do so consciously. It may well be that to garner a “marquee” name customer who can be referenced to encourage others in a given industry to buy from you sell something at a loss. When and if you do lose money on a sale you should do so with eyes wide open aware that it is a sales tool itself to gain more profitable sales.
We’re all here to make money, and if you do not know the cost of making a sale odds are you are losing money.
Tools to keep you informed are many: from financial software to manage your “books” which include ERP (enterprise resource plannng) and CRM (customer relationship management). We’ve discussed a few of these tools in this blog — tools aimed at start-ups, mid-size companies all the way to the Fortune 100 — tools which can help you make money profitably if used appropriately.
Which brings me (finally) to the topic of this blog: software that helps you optimize your CRM sales funnel.
A sales funnel is the concept that to make one sale you must have X number of sales “leads” (potential customers) who become “suspects” (research shows they could use your offer) lined up that you can target and then winnow them down to “prospects.” Prospects are qualified businesses who could benefit from your offers — whether they know it or not. They have budget, they have a need and you can help them meet their own goals. The key in funnel management is to turn those prospects into customers — and in each step of the sales process of many “suspects” you will find only a few “prospects” and even fewer of them will turn into customers.
Even in the age of social media you still have to identify potential customers and somehow you need to make them aware that you have a service or a product they will find valuable. . . the methods for reaching them may be changing, but the fundamentals remain the same.
There is a very old saying in the computer industry — about as old as the industry itself. Surely you have heard the term GIGO (garbage in / garbage out). You must fill your sales funnel, but if you fill it with lots of names that do not have the potential to be a customer your “funnel management” is poor and your sales profitability will also be low.
To acquire profitable customers (new ones) or even identify what you can up-sell or cross-sell to existing customers you must have a way of identifying qualified leads from the very beginning. Cisco (the leading communications vendor) credits a company named eTrigue with increasing their SMB (small / medium business) sales appointments by 25% through just such pinpoint targeting of potential customers.
Linda Fassig-Knauer, (a Cisco marketing programs manager) is the one making the claim about eTrigue and 3Marketeers (advertising, marketing, and demand generation/lead generation) for better lead generation:
“eTrigue Intelligent lead scoring helps us determine which technology or offer the prospect is most interested in discussing with our sales teams and enables us to funnel those leads in a timely manner to our call center, who ultimately sends to our channel partners,” says Fassig-Knauer, “The information in eTrigue lead scoring gives us three times the information so our call center agents are much more prepared before a call. It also greatly increases the number of prospects we can identify as being interested in a solution because the system does not require the customer/prospect to register.”
Salesforce.com CRM users can view active prospects in eTrigue’s demand generation application within Salesforce — making it easy to use for sales reps. eTrigue won an award from DemandGen for its work with Cisco.
Given the fact that the economy is still slow you need to find a way to do more with less. Your sales reps need to be more efficient than ever. Tools like the cloud based SaaS (software as a service) Salesforce.com teamed with a demand generation tool like eTrigue can fill your funnel with a higher number of better-qualified leads faster, less expensively and with fewer resources.
You need to identify suspects and then you need to pinpoint target valuable information to them (using CRM with integrated email campaign tools and social media tools as well as the good old fashioned telephone!). Doing more with less in these times means working smart with inexpensive but highly valuable tools. Take a cue from Cisco and from Codice Software, who saw a 225% increase in qualified leads, and a 50% increase in actionable sales leads when it used eTrigue. Response rates went up by 160% versus the same period the prior year.
Another customer, Silver Peak, generated 30% more programs without additional staff. The cost is much lower than hiring more people — although if you get enough good leads you may need to put more feet on the street!
If you are using Salesforce.com I highly recommend that you take a look at eTrigue and see if automating your sales funnel demand generation makes sense.