caution: hot sales leads. handle with care

Caution:Leads may be hot.Handle with care.

Could your salespeople be

disqualifying too many good leads

rather than qualifying them?

Does it seem like the more leads you provide,

the faster leads get disqualified and bounced back in the holding queue?

Reasons could be:Lack of data- Invalid or no phone number

Bias - “Can’t possibly be large enough deal”

Attitudes - “The more I close out, the sooner I’ll find something that works”

This churning of sales leads results in

significant cost of acquisition.

And significant processing resources – both machine and

human.

If your sales reps’ lead closeout rate is 50%, your net cost is twice the

initial cost!

Marketers and sales leaders often respond by finding ways to deliver a

greater number of qualified leads faster.

But if you’re using predictive analytics with your sales processes,

more leads faster may not be better.

What

How can more, and faster,

not be better?

Predictive analytics models score and deliver

ideal sales prospects.

Predictive analytics models increase sales productivity and ROI.

They help achieve specific outcomes: getting appointments or sales,

moving newly-acquired customers into repeat customers,

improving cross and upsell.

But caution: predictive models

may produce leads with

characteristics that are

counter-intuitive!

CounterIntuitiveness

Ahead

This is where you may be handed

hot leads to handle with care.

By their nature, scored leads will be a lot fewer —

typically 20-40% of available leads.

And the high scoring leads may

have attributes that sales reps consider not desirable!

These leads may not have some fields that reps

typically look for.

Yet these leads have been predicted to

produce a high level of performance.

This leads to a few lessons …

Lesson 1.Teach reps to

look past some traditional

criteria and look at the sales

prospect holistically.

Lesson 2.For maximum sales performance,

do not allow reps to pull leads from other sources unless all

the scored leads have been acted upon.

This is because if reps continue their old practice of disqualifying scored leads,

they may close out leads more likely to convert. Because high-quality scored leads are fewer in number, upon exhausting them, reps tend to

scour other lead sources that perform significantly worse.*

This socks a double whammy to your sales performance and productivity!

* You would find this result with back-testing.

Lesson 3. Leads scoring high for one

outcome (like getting an appointment) are also more likely to produce a sale, at a

higher average order amount, and with more add-ons.

Train reps to nurture these leads to achieve such

multiplicative sales value.

In summary, predictive analytics leads you through

a fundamental shift from tactical to

strategic thinking.

NewParadigm

Ahead

Predictive analytics may deliver

fewer but better sales leads –

be careful to not burn through them.

Instead, handle carefully and profit from their sales

potential.

Advanced Analytics Apps for Sales

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Lead gen, call timing, cross and upsell, customer nurturing and much more.