by Sonnhalter | Dec 12, 2017 | Tradesmen Insights, Uncategorized
Today we have a guest post from Russ Hill, Founder of Ultimate Lead Systems.
I recently lunched with some long-time friends and sales and marketing professionals. The topic turned to the importance of Customer Service in the face of the plethora of CRM and Marketing Automation software available today. The conversation raised more questions than it answered.
We agreed on the following definitions for the purpose of the discussion:
Customer Service – The interaction with a customer or prospect that traditionally revolves around resolving a problem and producing a positive outcome. This could be in person or via phone or email.
CRM – It’s not software but a strategic process designed to cultivate and enhance the relationship with customers. The goal is to maximize retention rates and capitalize on the life-time value of the customer.
Something else we agreed upon was that companies seem to be racing to dramatically reduce their costs of engaging customers. Those costs are typically associated with people on payroll, and management too often views automated systems as a means of delivering customer engagement AND customer service at reduced cost. We also agreed that Customer Service is all about NOW and all other engagements are about future opportunities.
We’ve all experienced agonizingly long waits in Customer Service phone queues that assure us our “call is important” only to get transferred to a voicemail box that is full and not taking messages. Programs like Hubspot, Marketo, Eloqua and Exact Target can help deliver content that may be of value to customers they already know. What about new customer and prospects? Websites without phone numbers that force the customer to do all of the work to find solutions to their own needs do not make it easy for customers to buy or remain customers. How many take their business elsewhere because Customer Service is self-serve or non-existent…and the vendor neither knows nor cares?
Dimensional Research found that Customer Service was the #1 factor impacting vendor trust, and:
- 62% of B2B customers purchase more after a good Customer Service experience.
- 66% of B2B customers stopped buying after a BAD Customer Service experience.
- 88% of B2B customers were influenced by online customer service reviews when making purchasing decisions.
Customer Service clearly can be the difference between winning, keeping and losing business, and that can mean significant lifetime value won or lost. As for me, we experienced business service from AT&T that has been nothing but a nightmare. I’ll spare you the details, but we will never do business with them again. Does AT&T care? They don’t appear to.We have other vendors who do stellar jobs that we couldn’t live without. I’ll bet you do too.
In the end, we were all able to agree that people have relationships with people, that customers have “experiences” with companies, and that people do business with people they know, like and trust. It begged the question, do your customers have a relationship with you, or just have an “experience” with your company? It makes a difference.
This post originally appeared on the Ultimate Lead blog and is reposted with permission.
by tradesmeninsights | Sep 6, 2016 | Uncategorized
Today we have a guest post from Russ Hill, Founder and CEO of Ultimate Lead Systems.
OK, let’s get real about sales people for a minute. Sales people want to make sales calls. They want to make calls on qualified leads and on profitable customers who can generate sales and compensation. They are like gunslingers interested in the “quick kill.” You hire them to sell and that’s where you want them to spend their time.
But they are also given business plans and projections to write and update. They also have prospecting and travel to schedule. And they are frequently required to spend time on software training…you know the CRM program, Excel, quote building software, the ERP system and the other third-party programs and resources that are pushed out to them, so they can be “more productive.”
The days of sales people making sales calls and writing up “simple” call reports (primarily for their own benefit) are long gone. Besides making calls, today’s sales people need to master and manage a variety of tasks and complex software. The need for the fundamental call report stills exists and management would be wise to keep that in mind. That means that one of the most important things management can do to help their sales people be more productive is to reduce the sales person’s administrative and non-sales related tasks.
by tradesmeninsights | Aug 25, 2015 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Trends, Traditional Marketing
By John Sonnhalter, Rainmaker Journeyman, Sonnhalter
We’re all focused on generating more leads these days, but I find it ironic that most companies don’t do much with them once they get them. Simply fulfilling a request is not the answer, but yet many companies do just that. According to a survey of people who have requested info suggests that 80% of all sales are made on or after the third contact. The survey polled over 700 respondents with only 8% buying after the first call.
David Frey, the senior content editor and author of several marketing books advises, “An educated prospect is your best prospect, and if they haven’t become a customer, it’s because you haven’t fully educated them on the value of your product and developed a relationship of trust.” Why do many businesses have a problem following up with their prospective customers? Mr. Frey explained, “The problem is not that small businesses don’t have the capacity to follow-up with prospects, it’s that they don’t have the systems in place to do it well.”
In his recent newsletter, “Follow-Up Marketing: How To Win More Sales With Less Effort,” Mr. Frey advised, “A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:
- It should be systematic.
- It should generate consistent, predictable results.
- It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.
This leads to a more pressing issue and that is, what is the difference between sales lead management and a CRM tool? According to Russ Hill, President of Ultimate Lead Systems: Sales lead management is a sub-function within an overall CRM strategy. Traditional CRM programs like Salesforce.com, SalesLogix, ACT, Goldmine, Maximizer and others focus on the sales person entering and managing his own data and pushing it “up” to management.
Sales lead management starts with management generating and capturing leads from all sources, fulfilling information requests and delivering them to the sales channel and tracking follow-up and sales results to measure marketing return-on-investment.
Here are some other interesting facts:
INQUIRIES MEAN NEW BUSINESS!
- 67% of all inquiries are from legitimate prospects with real needs.
- 34% have current needs that must be satisfied within 6 months!
- 70% did not know the company made the product before seeing their ad … making them NEW PROSPECTS!
A six-year study* of nearly 60,000 inquiries conducted by Penton Media Company also found that:
- 43% of inquirers receive literature and information too late to be of use.
- 72% of inquirers are NEVER CONTACTED by a salesman.
- 25% of sales contacts are made at the inquirer’s request.
- 40% of inquirers purchase the advertised product, a competitive product or change their suppliers.
* NED Reader Action Reports
The key is to get a lead management system in place that can help your CRM convert those leads into sales.
by tradesmeninsights | Feb 26, 2013 | Marketing Tips, Social Marketing, Traditional Marketing
In the B-to-B world, most sales are not immediate. The longer selling cycles for most industrial/contractor purchases involve more than one person and selling cycles can go from months to years.
So B-to-B marketers need to be patient. I believe Marketing should be the ones who nurture the leads through, and when ready, transition to sales to close the deal.
I think marketing, if the right processes are in place, is in a better position to move them through the process. Effective nurturing is a series of content-relevant info for each stage of the buying process.
Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.
B-to-B companies shouldn’t be worried about quantity but quality of leads. According to Albertson Performance Group, quality lead nurturing can lead to 70% more sales. According to them, nurturing will:
- decrease selling cycles
- increase profit margins
- lessen the competition
- decrease price pressure
- get more referrals
Nurturing is the right way to show ROI on marketing efforts.
by tradesmeninsights | May 9, 2012 | Marketing Tips, Marketing Tools, Traditional Marketing
I’ve been around this crazy business for over 35 years, and one of the biggest issues still today is handing off leads from marketing to sales. You would think that with all the technology today it would be easy, right? Not the case!
Several years ago, marketing would generate leads for various sources and pass them onto sales for follow-up. Then one day someone from the C suite asked how much new business are we getting from our promotional efforts? Marketing said we developed X amount of leads and Sales would say they were all crap. Obviously the finger-pointing wasn’t going to solve the question of how much new business are we getting.
Thus started the process of lead management, qualification, nurturing and at some point turning it over to sales with a little more history behind the leads than there were several years ago. Russ Hill from Ultimate Leads calls it the “Transition Zone.” It is the place in time where marketing hands off the lead they so carefully nurtured to sales to close the loop. But in order to do it successfully, you must have a process that everyone is in tune with, and sales needs to make sure to keep info on that lead current in your lead database so we know when a new customer has arrived, from where and what they bought.
A good follow-up marketing system should have three attributes:
1. It should be systematic.
2. It should generate consistent, predictable results.
3. It should require minimal physical interaction to make it run.
What are you doing to ensure you’re getting the most out of your leads?
If you like this post, you might want to read:
Where Are Your New Business Prospects in the Selling Cycle?
How Many Calls Does it Take to Make a Sale?
