In this article we look at a key part of business development: Intelligently prospecting, qualifying and prioritising sales leads, at scale.
Every organisation’s sales representatives need to prospect, qualify and lead score/prioritise their leads. This encourages insight led sales activities, which builds a quality pipeline and therefore accurate forecasts.
So, let’s bring this to life 🙂
Or, skip the intro and go straight down to the demo >>>…
Sandra is an Account Manager for ACME Corp. ACME provide Contract, CRM and Storage Solutions across a number of industries. Being responsible for 100 accounts, Sandra must:
- Find additional revenue within existing contracts
- Find new business revenue for her account base
- Protect revenue in the shape of renewals
However, Sandra doesn’t consistently hit her targets.  She and her leadership team believes that the main reason for this is a lack of quality pipeline stemming from poor prospecting of new business and nurturing of existing clients.
Sandra has categorised her 100 accounts, A to D;
| Account Grade | Current Contract Value | Potential Contract Value* | Typical number of Key contacts engaged | Churn Risk | Account Alias |
| A | Low | High | Fewer than 3 | Low | Target |
| B | Medium | High | Fewer than 3 | Medium/High | Key |
| C | Low | Medium | n/a | Low | Prospect |
| D | Low | Low | n/a | Low | Retain |
*Potential contract value has been defined by a number of variables, such as industry, number of employees, turnover, budget, projects, etc
ACME employ a single threaded approach to sales, meaning that Sandra typically only has one properly engaged contact within each account at any one time.
Those that are familiar with The Challenger Customer (Dixon, Toman, Adamson, Spenner, 2015) will recall that the average number of stakeholders involved in a purchasing decision is now 6.8.
However, Sandra feels as though she doesn’t have the time to nurture her accounts effectively. The time that could be invested into prospecting is actually spent:
- answering inbound emails
- negotiating contracts
- internal meetings
- general administrative tasks that come with an Account Management role
Then, when Sandra does block out a few hours to hit the phones, all she gets is voicemails, or she needs to trawl through LinkedIn to find the right contact.
An idea:
Ask your sales team…
- Who are their target accounts? Eg, Which accounts are there reasons to engage with ASAP.
- Why, what characteristics define them? Eg. Sector, contract value, number of employees, etc.
- Who are the contacts, decision makers, influencers? Eg. volume, names, job role, influence and authority.
- What is the value proposition that would engage them? Eg. Industry specific insight, job role motivations.
Take a sales leader, and use the above to create a campaign that complements Marketing efforts, not adds to them. But do it with your team and your number in mind. Take ownership of this process and embrace it.
Disclaimer* I’m not a technical resource at Kulea, and I built everything you’ll see in this demonstration, in a morning.
What you’ll find in the below demonstration is, how you can prospect, qualify and prioritize clients, at scale, around the clock, using automation and personalisation.
- Through automated tailored communications
- Defining content based on CRM values (industry, job role, account grade, contract value) Â
- Tracking and measuring engagement (online behaviour with web pages, data sheets, email content, etc),
- Alerting Account Managers of different levels of engagement, prioritising their activities
