Business Development: Generating new sales through your sales pipeline
Building and maintaining a sales pipeline is critical to any business’s future success and survival, this is a well known and accepted fact. So why is this still one of the biggest hurdles a business faces in achieving its growth?
The hurdles
Internal sales teams are too busy looking to close immediate sales to achieve quarterly targets and neglect the nurturing and maintenance of the pipeline. Most leads are not “sales-ready”, a typical scenario is only 15% of your leads will be qualified and sales ready. We all have a tendency to focus on getting our current deals closed, so what happens about finding new opportunities for the next quarter and the the one after?
Marketing, content marketing and automation are all valid methods of delivering leads into the funnel, but often, what’s needed are more well-qualified opportunities. The easy answer, in many cases, is to engage the services of a telemarketing team to qualify the leads that have been generated. Sometimes, that’s enough. But that is not the complete solution especially if you are responsible for ‘big ticket’, complex sales, then a more sophisticated approach to tele-qualification is needed.
Keeping the sales team focused on closing what they have this quarter while a telemarketing lead generation team identifies, develops and nurtures opportunities for the next 12 months and beyond is a much more successful approach. This is achieved by using competitive intelligence, and accurate data management, you can build a pipeline that delivers high quality leads when they are ready to start the buying process.
The bottom line
What’s more important, the number of prospects in your sales pipeline, or the quality of leads in your pipeline? Do you want to speak to potential customers at the right stage in their decision making process?
Lead generation, for business growth, involves careful planning. VSL telemarketing and data services build you an intelligent sales pipeline that reaches the right target customer at the right moment, increasing your efficiency and delivering improved ROI.
The benefits of a telemarketing sales generation campaign
More sales — Knowing when potential customers are ready to make buying decisions means you contact them at the start of their sales process, increasing your conversion rates and reducing the time spent contacting leads who are not ready to change suppliers. This results in maximum sales, minimal work: An effective sales pipeline strategy will help you get the maximum sales and conversion from your prospects,in the most efficient way possible. It’s not about being lazy or taking shortcuts, it’s about working smarter and respecting your customers.
Less marketing waste — Increased business intelligence means you send the right marketing message, to the right prospect, at the right time. With every stage of the buying process, your prospects will accept different things from you. This includes type of information, frequency of contact, and channel(s) used to communicate. By using a pipeline with defined stages, most of this planning is already done for for your sales team, which leaves them free to concentrate on the execution.
Improved sales forecasting — The better the information in your sales pipeline, the more accurate your sales targets and sales projections will be, which in turn delivers the additional benefit of a more reliable way for a company to factor in future growth investment.
VSL can generate leads that deliver real results and keep your sales pipeline working to maximum efficiency, increasing the value of your prospect data, whilst your internal team focus on converting qualified leads into sales.
Using either your own data , or helping you to source it, our experienced telemarketers will first find out about your business and your aims, and then work out a strategy to ensure that new business leads are coming to you on a daily basis.
With over 50 years experience in business development throughout the UK, Europe and the USA, VSL can make sure that you and your salespeople are supplied with a constant source of fresh leads, appointments and enquiries, in order to keep the pipeline growing.
So to ensure that your company grows and grows, please contact us either by email sales@virtual-sales.com or call us on 01403 788481.
Tags: Business Development, Lead generation
Andy Dickens
Andy Dickens is a veteran of IT Sales, used to leading by example. He is the CEO of Virtual Sales Limited (VSL) who offer telesales, telemarketing, lead generation and appointment setting services to B2b businesses. He previously was Sales Director EMEA for Red Hat and before that ran sales at Visio before it was acquired by Microsoft.