By OKS-Ameridial: Jim Beuoy and Dan Werner
Salespeople are most effective when they spend all of their time with qualified prospects. Doing this is also the best use of your money. Why would you have an expensive salesperson spending most of their day calling people who are not qualified, have no interest, etc.!? This is where the 2-step sales model comes in. Basically, you split up the sales process into Lead Generation and Sales. Have the Lead Generation team focus on the beginning steps in the sales process while the Sales team spends all of their time closing business, speaking with qualified prospects, and managing their pipeline. This system works best in a Business-to-Business model where the sales cycles are longer and/or require multiple calls to close the sale.
Closers and Lead Generators are different people
Closers aren’t prospectors and prospectors aren’t closers! Successful companies acknowledge these different personalities, have separated the functions within the sales process, and (by some reports) have doubled and tripled their revenue.
• Salespeople hate cold calling. A recent report suggests 93% of all outside salespeople hate or dislike cold calling. Results show that either they are ineffective at doing it or end up not doing it at all.
• Contact Management Systems and account management is different. Lead Generators need to have contacts dialed continuously and need to keep a steady pace of contacts. Their job is to quickly get through as many contacts as possible, qualify them, and pass them off as leads. They don’t get distracted by customizing a sales quote, reviewing their pipeline of deals to close this month, or writing persuasive proposals. On the other hand, the Sales Team needs to be able to review the history of the account, try multiple contact methods to get the decision-maker on the line to close the deal, update their pipeline, meet with the sales manager, etc.
• Salespeople are expensive and they only want to close deals. Salespeople should be spending 80% or more of their time on qualified opportunities and closing business. If they are not, then they are not happy and you end up using an expensive resource to do a task that they may not be good at.
• Salespeople are good at selling and lead generators are good at finding leads. It is very difficult to find a salesperson that also likes to cold call or generate leads. These are usually 2 different types of people and it is hard to be good at both. The salesperson excels at getting the decision-maker to sign the proposal, while the lead generator excels at getting through the Gate-Keeper and quickly qualifying a prospect as a lead.
Keep a steady flow of qualified leads in the pipeline
Salespeople will find a way to minimize their time spent on cold calling by primarily focusing on follow-up calls, tracking down paperwork, calling hot leads, and tracking their pipeline. All of these activities are necessary for a closer, but the pipeline will quickly dry up if you don’t have a dedicated team solely focused on generating new hot leads for your closers on a daily basis.
2-Step Model
Below is an overview of how the 2-step model works:
• Clearly defined sales process. Step by step, document how your prospects are converted to customers, who in your company is responsible at each stage, draft voicemail and email message templates to insure a consistent message, etc. You need to ensure that your Lead Generation team knows when to pass a lead and when to further nurture it. The last thing you want is to have your Sales Team stop following up on leads because they deem them to be a waste of their time.
• Establish Metrics for each team. The Sales Team needs to be measured against a quota, conversion rate, and stick rate. The Lead Generation team needs to be measured against dials, quantity of leads per day/week, phone time, and a lead quota.
• Lead qualification criteria. Document definitions for Lead Qualification to help everyone in Sales stay focused on the highest priority follow-ups. Without this, reps waste time on the wrong prospects.
• Incentives. The Lead Generation team needs incentives based on quantity of leads and quality, while the Sales Team needs to receive incentives based on closing sales and quota attainment.
• Contact Management System usage and reports. Have a system that is customized to reflect your sales process. And consistent usage is important for understanding your business. A new rep should be able to look up her/his prospects and customers in your system, see a historical record of contacts, and establish credibility and rapport faster, leading to shorter sales cycles.
• Sales tools, collateral, demos. Create the documents and tools that support your inside sales team to get new reps up to speed quickly.
• Training programs. Establish inside sales-specific training to accelerate the start-up time for new reps. This training would be different for the Sales Team compared to the Lead Generation team since they need to be focused on different stages within the sales process.
• Focused Lead Generation Process. Lead Generation Team gets into a groove of producing a continuous flow of qualified leads to their assigned Sales Person. This ensures that your Sales Team always has new qualified leads to go after.
Proven Success
OKS-Ameridial has deployed this model across a number of business-to-business applications, including directory sales, messaging on hold, custom printed office forms, and web site development. In a number of projects, the prospector’s objective was simply to qualify, identify the Decision-Maker (or major influence), gather accurate spellings, and define the best time to reach. Even though the prospector’s objectives didn’t include generating interest, the model worked more effectively than the one-step model where the sales person did it all. It’s not atypical for us to achieve increases of 40%, including both the prospecting labor and sales labor, by separating the functions into specialized disciplines. Specialization doesn’t always achieve those kinds of results, but it has worked better in every test.
Summary
Salespeople are highly paid individuals and should be spending their time in front of qualified prospects. This is the best use of their time, skills, and the money you spend on their expertise. The best use of their time is not by having them make cold calls. By implementing a 2-step model, you ensure that your sales people have a continuous flow of qualified prospects to contact while the lead generation time focuses on making the cold calls.
For further information or if you have any questions, please contact Dan Werner at dwerner@oksameridial.com or 866-671-0778.