Number of leads, quality leads and management capacity
Once you explain that our hallmark is to always meet the targets set, it happens as a mixture of success in setting them and taking it personally, and you indicate that the proposal reaches up to the delivery of the lead to its commercial structure (I mention structure and not department), they always propose to do the honors if you achieve these goals. The client confirms that they will manage the sale and that this should not be a concern for the agency.
However, once the project is underway and targets in number of leads are met, new problems arise.
This usually happens for several reasons.
- The company has a commercial structure, but not a commercial department, as I mentioned before.
- The company confuses a lead with a sale.
- There is no methodology or adequate work tools.
- They have erred in calculating the necessary resources.
- Their salespeople follow the same practices as 20 years ago.
{{cta(‘bb2971b9-bf36-4c36-8edc-75223dba5208’)}}Differences between sales department and sales structure
The world today is more complex. Manufacturers want to skip the middlemen and the middlemen seek to protect their knowledge of distribution networks and the market. Small companies, open a website, B2B or B2C, ecommerce or not, with the intention of addressing the end customer or expanding their geographical or sectorial area of influence.
Companies that were not used to having to address the end customer, because they have always developed their activity through distributors or because they were limited to a local audience and filled their business with word of mouth, open up to a complexity they do not know and have to manage new relationships to which they are not accustomed. And, on many occasions, they do so without having sales professionals. They have a sales structure, usually entrusted to the owner or director, but they do not have a team that is professionally dedicated to it.
It is also essential that when it comes to generating and publishing this content you are realistic. You may have more time to create it now, but you may not later. For this reason, you must prioritize which are the main objectives given the current circumstances. In this case, assess what are the needs of your current customers and what kind of content you should generate.
Lead and sale
The first problem is to believe that a lead is a sale.
In your previous stage, most people who showed up in your business were buying (surely?). Right now, the customer is more informed and compares more. That’s how it is and none of us are going to change it, you have to accept it and profit from it.
It’s not that the leads are of poor quality; it’s that now a buyer contacts you in MLQ phase or in SQL phase, there are many more contacts coming to you and you have to manage this complexity. And this means talking to a customer who is not close to you, with whom you cannot have a face-to-face conversation and who requires more effort. More leads and more complex.
Lack of methodology and adequate work tools
Usually, the owner of the company smiles when you indicate that he must prepare his company for the leads that are going to be generated, in a display of vanity. However, it is common that, when the leads start arriving, he does not know what to do with them, complains about their quality and realizes that the previous work methodology does not work in the face of the new reality.
Until now, as an owner you did not record your budgets, you did not keep the data of your customers nor did you worry about doing studies on their sales. You were lucky, but you should have started doing that a long time ago.
Now you need to understand that the increase in contact volume requires you to keep track of these activities to understand your customers’ buying process and adjust your sales methodology for continued success.
What is the solution to this challenge?
Understand that selling is complex
It is a discipline that should not be underestimated. Most of our clients know their business but admit that they do not know how to face the new situation. The technological transformation is beyond us.
