Many people about how to make a good first impression, but not as much about a second impression. Why even worry about a second impression, though? No matter what situation you happen to be in, forging a professional relationship is often a multi-step process. Whether you’re coming in for a second job interview, or making a second contact with a prospect, the second impression is just as important as the first. While you may have been lucky enough to impress them the first time, you need to follow through once more (or multiple times) before totally winning them over.
As Tim Sanders puts it in an article for Oprah, the first meeting is often about gauging surface details like likability and basic skillsets. The next meeting will hone in on your competency. When gaining the trust of a potential client, you’re going to have to meet them multiple times. Learning to make a lasting second impression could be the key to improving sales productivity. Here are some tips for meeting with a business colleague or prospect for the second time:
Keep Discussion Centered on Them
Thinking about this in terms of a social call may relieve some of the pressure. When you’re going over to the neighbors’ house for dinner, you should ask them about themselves. A business situation is similar: you want them to know their industry is important to you, so you have to ask a question that demonstrates you’ve been keeping up with their progress online or in the media. Make sure you’re doing customer research between meetings so that you know of anything relevant you can bring up. While it’s tempting to fill any lull in the conversation with small talk, this is the ideal time to guide the direction in a more constructive way. According to Geoffrey James for Inc., a good question would be something along the lines of, “I saw on your blog that you were at the Worldcomp conference in Vegas this year. Did you see any innovative products that caught your eye?”
Another way to start off the conversation on the right foot is to reference your last meeting, according to Sanders. If you learned something poignant or important from your last meeting with the prospect, bring it up again. Ideally, you will have taken down notes during or after your first meeting so that you can retain this information.
Talk About Why You’re Meeting For a Second Time
Not too long into this conversation, you’re going to have to drive toward the heart of the matter. If you scheduled this meeting, it’s time to explain why. Don’t be too blunt, but don’t wait too long either. If you’ve brushed up on your customer research, it should be fairly straightforward to explain what you’d like to tackle.
Listen hard while they are talking, see if they give you something you can use to relate to the customer research you did and guide the conversation organically towards your product or their problem point. Odds are, they’ll give you an in. If not, make sure you’ve responded to their story about Worldcomp conference before diving into your pitch. Make your point quickly, and give them a chance to respond.
Be Respectful
When you contact this person for a second meeting, try to let them know exactly how much time you expect it to take. This shows you’re respectful of their time. Once you’re on the way out the door, thank them again for taking the time to talk to you.
Lead qualification can be a point of tension between sales and marketing teams. Sales reps often claim the marketing team doesn’t give them high-quality leads, while the marketing team argues that sales simply isn’t following up on the best leads they’ve been handed. Sometimes the problem is simply that these departments’ definitions of what makes a qualified lead are misaligned. On the other hand, the problem could be a misunderstanding of what qualities can predict a lead’s likelihood to buy.
Cut Down On the Noise
Some established companies have more leads than they know what to do with. By finding a better strategy to weed out the most unlikely leads, business can significantly improve sales productivity. Imagine a world where you can easily identify the junk before you devote too much time nurturing a lead that has no chance of converting. This world is possible, but will take some time and research.
Turn on the Lights
When your teams are stumbling around in the dark, it’s impossible to coordinate marketing and sales effectively. With a customer analytics platform, these departments will have access to the same intelligence data, including market events, mergers and introduction of new technology. Once the two teams are looking at the same information, they can gain a better awareness of what qualities are good predictors of a qualified lead. B2B Lead Blog suggests doing research to determine a correlation between leads and current customers to further identify the signals that your company has a good chance of making a sale. Once these two teams have a more complete picture, they can start coming up with better definitions for sales and marketing-qualified leads.
Learn Who Your Customers Are
An article from Forbes demonstrates how big data analytics can improve the performance of marketing automation software by telling marketers not just what qualities will predict a conversion, but who the customer really is. What analytics actually enable marketers and sales reps to do is develop an understanding of a company’s attributes outside of just the numbers. By collecting intelligence from across the Web, including viral social media posts, sales reps and marketers can really construct a picture of what it’s like to work in a specific industry. Customer intelligence allows marketers and sales reps to go deeper. When marketers are able to look at their leads’ markets through their perspectives, they can create marketing campaigns that really target the right companies.
A customer intelligence platform can deliver the In-depth information marketers and sales reps need to improve their collaboration and increase sales productivity.
This morning, the TAS Group held their ”Battling the 57%” webinar, hosted by their CEO, Donal Daly. Mr. Daly spoke about the changing sales process and how salespeople can use the Challenger method to react better to the buying process and close the sale.
The internet, and the generally wide availability of information, has drastically altered the traditional buying process. By the time they contact you, a buyer is 57% of the way through their process, and have probably already started forming opinions of what solutions they think they want.
So it comes down to this: are you engaging the customer, or is the customer engaging you? Are you getting to them before that 57% threshold? As a seller, it’s up to you to create value—even if the client seems to be leaning away from you.
But how do you create value where the client sees none? The answer lies in truly understanding what’s moving your customers. Using customer insights and doing your research on a prospect will allow you to see how your solution will help them. It may also allow you to uncover challenges in their business they didn’t even know they had—and by creating that value for them (and showing them how your solution can solve their challenge), you’ll be seen as a trusted advisor, making them more inclined to do business with you.
Mr. Daly summed it up nicely: you want to “create, develop, pursue and win business that delivers mutual value for you and your customers.” By thoroughly understanding a customer’s business, you can uncover whether your solution is a good fit for them—and, too, whether they are a good fit for your solution. Everyone wants to make the sale, but doing your research and using customer insights up front will help you focus your efforts on the areas they’ll be most effective.
Understanding your customer more deeply can lead to an increase in sales. In this data-driven world, the relationship between sales rep and prospect is different than it used to be. In the past, salespeople sold solutions to problems; they now sell insights, according to Mark Bergen of Vision Critical, an insight community technology provider.
With all of the information that is available to prospects today, they have little use for the same old solutions. They are also more likely to know right off the bat whether your services will work for them. Since they arrive into the sales funnel with more knowledge, the entire sales process is being turned on its head. When a sales rep can give them assistance on top of what they already know, this individual has an opportunity to become not just a sales person, but a colleague.
In this new landscape, the most powerful sales strategy is having insight into your customers market that no one else has. Once you have this information, you won’t just be selling clients a solution to a pain point, but valuable knowledge they can only get from you.
How to understand your customer’s end market There are several options, but one thing is clear: a simple Google search doesn’t cut it anymore. Knowing your customer’s market requires in-depth research, from scouring social media platforms to reading industry publications. It can be a time-consuming activity. That’s why the best option is to invest in a customer intelligence platform that will deliver personalized information about customers’ markets. The right solution will allow you to tune out the noise and focus just on relevant events and big data analytics.
Here are just two examples of what you can accomplish when you know your end-customer:
1. Sell your prospect an outcome Don’t work in the dark. Use key insights to determine what your client really needs, beyond how you believe your product can help them. According to Anthony Iannarino for Salesforce blog, you need to focus on the final outcome instead. By honing in on their market, you can develop a better understanding of what the customer is looking for. Successful salespeople pitch the future outcome that the client is looking for. However, depending on where the client is at in the buying process, they may not be aware of their desired outcome. As a valuable asset to your prospect, this is an idea you can help them develop. Iannarino also provides another valuable piece of advice: a sale will only happen if stakeholders are in agreement on the desired outcome. Using the market intelligence you’ve gleaned, you can help guide the decision-makers into a consensus on what direction operations could go.
2. See needs before your customers do According to Bergen, by monitoring your customer’s market very closely, you can often identify problems they don’t know they have. Bergen notes how his company, which provides software that facilitates communication between customers and businesses, found a solution for sports teams whose end-customer was sports fans. After doing some research, his firm determined that sports teams don’t offer the engagement tools that sports fans want. For instance, sports teams weren’t always reaching out on digital platforms. In addition, digital platforms enabling fans to branch out from just supporting local teams. This knowledge helped Bergen’s company pitch their product to sports teams.
When you are well-versed in all the elements that make your customer’s market tick, you have opportunities to provide valuable insight in addition to products and services. The role of the sales person is changing. Do you have the tools you need to be a 21st century sales rep?
In the modern, data-driven environment, we have myriad contact methods to reach prospects. The variety of choices can make it difficult for sales reps to determine which medium is the right one. However, making this choice can have a surprising impact on sales productivity. To be a good sales rep, you have to be aware that at any given point in the sales funnel, the right communication strategy is going to be different. On the other hand, the medium also depends on what you have to say.
This may sound entry-level, but if you use the wrong channel to relay information, it may not be received the way you intended; being successful in sales relies on picking up on nuances in the way people communicate. Business executives are busy people, and you want to make things as easy as possible for them. Choosing between email, phone and face-to-face may sound simple, but you have to consider at least two things: first, what is the best medium for what you’re trying to say; second, how will it be perceived by the client?
Think Before Making Contact In a recent article from Fast Company, the author related her surprise that many people contacting her had little knowledge of contemporary communications etiquette. She cited an example of receiving long-winded emails outlining a problem when a quick phone call would have saved time on both ends. Needless to say, when you’re dealing with prospects, you want to do everything you can to use their time most efficiently, and also make sure they actually comprehend your messages.
A similar argument can be made for email. For quick queries or check-ins, prospects are likely to appreciate the use of email over a phone call, because email allows for valuable multi-tasking time that the telephone doesn’t. A face-to-face meeting should be reserved for the most important conversations, according to Anthony Iannarino.
Another point Iannarino makes is that the method of communication sends a message about how important you consider the discussion to be. For this reason, it’s imperative that certain meetings be in-person.
Make Sure You’re Developing the Relationship In response to the email/phone/in-person debate, B2B Lead Blog noted that the primary concern in customer relationships is about developing a relationship. Whatever medium you choose to send your communications, make sure the message helps you build a relationship. So, even if you think your pitch warrants a face-to-face meeting, remember that your prospect probably isn’t ready for that yet, and being too forceful may turn them off.
Developing the kind of trusted relationship that actually creates sales requires that reps start early. Use big data analytics to find potential leads early on in the buying process. Then using expertise gleaned from this market intelligence, begin forming a relationship and nurturing the lead until they are ready to buy—earning you in the coveted role of advisor. You can demonstrate your in-depth knowledge of their field and use this information to gain their trust over time. Being a trusted colleague also means that you understand your customer and the fact that they may need more information before committing to a sale.
However, here’s where communications comes in: bombarding prospects with sales pitches or salesy information too early can be a deterrent. Based on where the prospect is in the buyer’s journey, you should carefully consider not only what you’re saying to them, but what method you’re using to send the message. And make sure you’re aligning the content of your communications correctly with the method you send them.
In sales, these subtleties can make all the difference.
Much of the time, your first contact with a prospect will be through email. However, sending out shoddy messages that appear mass-produced and untailored to the specific business can wreak havoc on your sales productivity. You have to treat each email like it’s a conversation, because that’s how your prospect will be thinking about it. Sending out a generic template just won’t cut it.
For instance, a typical email may tout the company, talk about your services and end with a call-to-action. This could literally be sent out to anyone, and probably is. Instead, you need to do a better job of targeting it.
Sympathize With Your Prospect
In Inc., sales expert Geoffrey James notes that if you think about how your emails look from the customer’s perspective, it may start to make more sense as to why leads aren’t biting. Most likely, they’re asking, “what does this have to do with me?” They may be wondering why you are reaching out to them at all, and they may even be truly annoyed that you wasted their time with spam. In each case, you’ve all but lost your prospect before you’ve begun.
Prioritize Customer Research
It may seem like a no-brainer, but you need to do some work figuring out who your prospect is before shooting off an email. Once again, a cursory look at their homepage probably won’t be enough. You want is to exceed their expectations, not barely meet them—so you need to dig deeper. Customer intelligence analytics allow you to not only see what your customer has been doing, but what’s going on in their marketplace.
How to Use Sales Insights to Write Messages
Generally, prospects are more likely to respond when a message is relevant to their interests. This means it’s best to contact someone who has been looking around your site. You should not only mention their presence on your page, but exactly what they looked at. However, intelligence gives you the details that can make a cold email work. For instance, it enables you to see trigger events that create new product needs. According to HubSpot, events like this can be an excellent way to open an email.
Now that you have a better idea of their industry, and what it takes to excel in this environment, you will have a much easier time getting into the client’s perspective and understanding what will compel them to respond to your email. Keep things simple. James suggests that you give examples, not just of businesses you’ve worked with, but what you’ve done for them. Even better, align this small pitch to their specific market niche.
Another tip HubSpot offers is that with the first email, you’re really looking for a response, not a sale. Try to establish yourself as a trustworthy source who cares about the outcome of their company rather than going after the pitch right away.
Other suggestions:
When you take the time to understand your customers, you can write messages that they really respond to.
Even the best sales people need some tips now and then. When it comes down to it, the problem could simply be one of time management—your reps may be spending too much time chasing down leads that will never convert. The sales funnel shouldn’t be a black hole; make sure salespeople know when to persevere and when to surrender in order to improve sales productivity.
1. Do More with Less
According to Geoffrey James for Salesforce blog, you may need to refocus your time to increase sales. While it may seem counterintuitive, sometimes you need to reduce the number of opportunities you go after in order to increase sales. The problem with chasing too many leads is that you may not be giving each one the time they deserve. Instead, choose the most qualified leads and prepare sufficiently for each pitch.
2. Know Your Customer
This point goes along with the first one. Going after the right leads means doing significant prep work. Utilizing sales intelligence and good, old-fashioned customer research are the best resources. Make sure you are having a sales conversation based on the needs of your potential client, suggests Selling Power. To be able to pitch a meaningful solution, you have to understand what drives their market. In the same regard, if you’ve done the research and it doesn’t seem like your product is the right fit for them, odds are the company’s buyers will come to the same conclusion. It will be more beneficial to focus your efforts elsewhere.
3. Work on Your Pitch
Once you’ve improved your time management and started focusing in on the sales you can actually make, it’s time to work on the most basic part of your strategy: the pitch. If you’re not effectively closing sales, the culprit could be the pitch itself. The problem could be that your pitch is too much of a hard sell, and not enough like a conversation. According to sales training group Fearless Selling, a canned pitch can really turn off your prospects. Once again, you need to respect your potential clients as individuals with specific needs—remember to pitch your solution to their pain points, not your product. Your product won’t work the same way for everyone, and neither will your pitch. Try ditching your notes and having a real talk instead of giving a presentation.
When you really think about how you’re working and try to perfect each element, the results can be surprising.
Humans respond to narratives, and we are more likely to retain information when it comes packaged in a story; so, storytelling is one of the greatest tools in the sales and marketing toolbox to engage your customers.
In a video from Marketo called “Lead Generation Tips from 6 Really Really Smart Human Beings,” Lee Odden, founder of TopRank Online Marketing said, “Facts tell. Stories sell.” This is the kind of catchphrase you should write down on a post-it-note and stick on your computer monitor—it’s that important. You can use statistics about your product as a selling point, but your prospect’s eyes may glaze over. However, tie these numbers up in a compelling tale about how your product completely turned a business around in its time of need, and you are much more likely to grab their full attention. Numbers make people nod, but stories make them care—and people are more likely to invest in something they care about.
Do Background Research
In the same video from Marketo, Nick Westergaard, chief brand strategist and founder of Driven Digital, said, “Questions are currency.” In other words, what marketers really need to do is identify what their potential client’s questions are and provide an answer before the prospect even thinks to ask. But how do you do that? You do a whole lot of customer research: determine what’s going on in their markets and use big data analytics to get a sense of their industry climate. When you know your audience, you’ll understand what kinds of stories make them tick.
Where Do You Tell Your Stories?
If you haven’t noticed, narratives are pervasive in our culture. That’s because they work well, no matter what medium you use to tell them, be it podcast, text or video. Using them in sales pitches can be extremely effective too. When it comes to digital marketing, video is a pretty safe bet. Internet video is a huge part of marketing and unlikely to go away anytime soon. When it comes to sending a succinct, effective message, video is a medium unlike any other. Make a video to use on a landing page or share on social media.
How Do You Tell Your Stories?
Once you choose a vehicle for your brand story, it’s all about creating a narrative that will sell. The important thing is that it contains all the right elements to engage with the audience. According to Forbes, it’s important to create characters that your clients will root for. After all, a story without a protagonist isn’t much of a story at all. Make sure it’s someone with issues that will resonate with your audience. Remember in grade school when you learned that a story has a beginning, middle and an end? That’s still true. Don’t forget to craft a story arc. In the beginning, present a stable situation, which then gets upset by the introduction of a problem that your product will solve for them.
Be Honest
When we talk about stories in marketing, we’re not talking about fiction. Your stories should be rooted in real encounters. This may sound less interesting than writing the great American novel, but using real events actually makes the whole process easier. You probably have an entire file full of client success stories. Think about one of these sales from the company’s perspective. Rather than just being a percentage point in a sales record, this situation is a story waiting to be told.
Whether you are making a pitch, creating a video or e-book, basing your marketing and sales efforts in stories is the way to go.
Navigating social media without analytics is like crossing the ocean without stars.
No self-respecting ancient mariner, or night-migrating bird for that matter, would try to cross from Knossos to Delos without use of the stars. The ocean is too large, and full, and dark.
But sales people are trying to follow their B2B customers on Twitter without the stars. They load up users and keywords into excellent B2C support apps like Hootsuite or Radian6, but still miss their destination because they can’t navigate the business developments by following people. To understand how your customer’s business, and so your target, is changing, you need to be navigating through all of Twitter and extracting out the B2B business trends buffeting your prospect.
That takes analytics. Analytics that process every tweet and figure out its meaning, in real time. Analytics that figure out whether it is relevant to you. Does it match your personal interests, does it have meaning to your business and your strategy, whether or not the keywords you put in are matched?
That’s what we’re doing at FirstRain; it’s all very personal. We analyze Twitter the way a Minoan navigator would study the stars 10,000 years ago. We’re finding you the path through Twitter’s ocean to get to your ultimate destination: revenue growth.
How’s your current sales model treating you? Is the sales funnel failing to produce legitimate results? It could be because you haven’t updated it for the 21st century. In this digital landscape, more companies are generating their leads from social media, and, in some cases, turning the traditional sales funnel on its head. Read on to learn how to be more dynamic in the social realm.
Learn From Larger Brands
A recent report from Simply Measured found that the most successful brands worldwide tend to tweet frequently. While it’s not surprising that these large brands have a higher following than smaller businesses, they also tend to be far more engaged with social media than peers in the small-business sector. Of the Interbrand Top 100 Brands, 98 percent tweeted at least once a day during the fourth quarter of 2013, while more than half of smaller companies didn’t tweet every day. There is a relationship between engagement and frequency of posts, and every business can benefit from being more engaged.
Engage Your Customers for Maximum Returns
The most successful companies know that when you engage with customers, they will do a lot of your work for you. According to ClickZ, re-thinking the funnel to include social media can revolutionize the sales cycle. Getting clients to advocate for you is a great way to gain new business; there’s no better place for them to share their experiences than through social networks like Facebook and Twitter. You can even use these platforms to gauge new marketing methods. Try throwing out some questions to your captive audience. How did they find your company in the first place? If they found you through word of mouth, you should be focusing your efforts on customer retention.
Identifying Sales Opportunities with Social Platforms
Platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook can enhance the sales funnel in other ways as well. For instance, social media is optimal for lead generation. According to Jeff Kalter on Business 2 Community, a website alone is not enough to generate interest. Some enterprises are disappointed in the lack of leads they are getting from their Web presence, but this can usually be improved dramatically by strategic use of social networking. Promote your blog entries on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re lucky, your followers may share your media as well. Just make sure your presence isn’t entirely geared toward self-promotion. Share information posted by other people, and it’s more likely others will share your original content.
Optimize Your Funnel for Social Media Lead Generation
First, you have to choose one or two channels to work with. Depending on the size of your company, you should probably keep it to just one or two, at least in the beginning. Doing some customer research can help determine which platforms to use. Media companies tend to excel on Twitter, while more visually-oriented brands can do well on Pinterest. Are you in the business-to-business sphere? You may want to start with LinkedIn.
If you already have a Facebook or Twitter page, take a look at your platform from the customer’s point of view. In an article for Social Media Examiner, Nichole Kelly suggests that you make it as easy as possible for potential buyers to make a conversion. For instance, when people do find you on Facebook or LinkedIn, do they have to search around the platform to find a link to your site? Rather than making them jump around, have a clear call to action, you will create more leads.
Segment Your Leads
Kelly suggests that leads found through social media should be nurtured differently. Social media users may enter the sales funnel earlier in the buying process than other leads, so you have to be careful with how you treat them. Don’t immediately ply them with information they won’t need. Create a segment on your email marketing campaign list for leads found on social media. Send them useful information that will help guide them in the eventual decision-making process.
