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What Is a Sales Opportunity?

April 16, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

“To succeed, jump as quickly at opportunities as you do at conclusions.” — Benjamin Franklin

Of course, before you put your gym shoes on, you need to step back and look at your sales process. Does your sales team know what distinguishes sales opportunities from leads? Are they prioritizing their time and channeling their efforts where they get the most returns?

It is important to define what a sales opportunity is. As basic as this sounds, your definition becomes the qualifiers that move people from lead to opportunity. It gives your sales reps guidelines to follow so they can manage their leads consistently with the rest of the team. And, in turn, you get forecasting accuracy and a true picture of where people and accounts are in your sales pipeline.

Leads VS. Sales Opportunities

Simply put, sales opportunities are people or accounts that have been qualified. You’ve called these contacts and talked about their needs. You’ve assessed their fit. They’re in your pipeline and are in touch with you. You feel good about the possibility of closing the deal.

Contrast this with leads. A lead is just a contact that you have minimal information about. It could be a marketing-generated lead, which is inbound and top-of-the-funnel. The contact might have downloaded content or filled out a form. Or, it could be a sales-generated lead, gathered through efforts of your outbound sales team or SDRs.

Communication lies in between. You need to talk to your leads and gather enough information to help you qualify them. Do they share the top characteristics typical of your sales opportunities? Can you justify devoting more of your time and effort to nurturing these leads?

Top Characteristics of Sales Opportunities

“Find your trigger. Find the qualities that make a lead more likely to convert, and focus on those leads.” – Brian Kardon, CMO at Lattice Engines, a B2B cloud applications company.

In time, you will notice similar characteristics that are shared by leads who convert to sales opportunities. Take note of the top three: need, interest, and fit. These characteristics help you come up with an accurate profile of your ideal customer. You can then focus your efforts on nurturing leads that more or less fit into this mold.

Need: This pertains to the common pain points shared by your ideal customers. Your qualified sales opportunities experience a similar problem. The primary motivation to buy is to fix this problem and lessen the pain. Your sales rep’s job is to help identify the pain and frame your product as the best-fit salve.

Interest: Having a need for your product – or a pain point that has to be resolved – is just the start. Need does not always translate to interest. For instance, a start-up might need a CRM software. But, if they’re set on using MS Excel for their client management needs, a CRM system is going to be difficult to sell.

Fit: Here, you need to consider your product and how it fits into your lead’s current business and its capacity. Because, as much as you are able to lessen pain points, a SMB is not a good fit if your product is enterprise-scale. A business with a few hundred bucks to spare will not be able to buy your million dollar solution.

How to Manage Your Sales Opportunities

“It’s not about having the right opportunities. It’s about handling the opportunities right.” – Mark Hunter, author, speaker and lead expert at The Sales Hunter

In a lot of ways, the line between closed deals and lost sales depends on how you manage sales opportunities. Here are some things to consider:

Accurately qualify your leads: There may be cases wherein you promote your leads to sales opportunities prematurely. It could be that the lead needs further nurturing, and is not yet sales-ready. When you inaccurately qualify your leads, you end up devoting your efforts on opportunities that take longer to close.

Know your buyer: It takes trust and rapport when you want to develop business relationships with your sales opportunities. To get to this point, you need to know your prospective buyer like the back of your hand. So, do the groundwork and understand your prospect’s business, their buying processes, needs/ motivations and the decision-making team, among other aspects.

Know your prospect’s obstacles to buying: There are always perceived risks when buying a product or solution. Understand what might keep a prospect from making a purchase and address these issues.

Track the deal’s progress: Once a lead becomes an opportunity, it becomes more important to track deal milestones, instead of monitoring activity levels. A prospect’s time on your website, their downloads and all that are still good indicators of interest. However, you need to focus more on where they are in the decision-making process and their requirements to move this process along.

Don’t be afraid to disqualify: Not all sales opportunities move to the next stage. Some of them become lost opportunities due to something that you discover as you engage with them. When this happens, don’t be afraid to disqualify. This is ultimately better than devoting your time to opportunities you can’t close.

This article first appeared on Tenfold

Other articles you might like:

6 Sales and Marketing Tips & Ideas to Grow Your Business

7 Useful Tips for Developing Your Sales and Marketing Strategy

What Is the Meaning Of Pipeline in Sales and Marketing

Sales Tips: Only Focus on The Sales Metrics You Can Control (Infographic)

April 9, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

The data-driven world that we now live in as made tremendous advancements in various technologies. This has helped sales managers all over the world in gathering and analysing important pieces of information to make accurate reports and forecasts of the company’s sales standing. Through numerous programs and applications, the painstaking process of identifying key metrics and KPI’s have never been easier.

However, having access to this wide range of data is futile if the sales manager lacks focus on the metrics that matter the most. With so much data in their hands, it’s easy to get derailed and fly off the tangent, entirely missing the statistics that should’ve been the focus instead.

But how can this be counteracted, or avoided altogether? Find out today with this infographic by Kona AU.

Infographic by Kona AU.

5 Factors that May be Responsible for Your Low Retail Sales

March 28, 2018 by Guest Post Leave a Comment

Is your retail business experiencing unusually low retail sales and you really can’t explain what is responsible? Then you’re not alone. Many ecommerce businesses have experienced or continue to experience this phenomenon.

This is even more puzzling when you believe you’ve done everything in your power yet for some unknown reasons the sales never seem to come in as expected. This can be very frustrating, it’s like dealing with guerilla warfare.

Truth is there could be a thousand factors responsible for this. In this article we’ll highlight 5 such factors that could be sabotaging your ecommerce sales so you can take steps to fix them ASAP or even learn to avoid them if you’re just starting your own business, but first

How do you Identify the Problem?

To identify the problem(s) with your retail sales it is necessary to first know the cause(s) so as not to merely treat symptoms. Troubleshooting will help you identify the root cause(s) for your low monthly returns.

We can troubleshoot by gathering information from

customer surveys,
Google Analytics,
WP stats,
Software diagnostics tools, or
by hiring experts, as the case may be

Other options include A/B Testing, Split Testing, etc. Each or all of these can give actionable insights as to why your retail sales are down.

And before you begin to troubleshoot, you’ve probably noticed some signs of low sales which is why you’re investigating.

Following hereunder are

Signs of Low Ecommerce Sales

When you begin to notice the following based on feedback or analytics, then you need to take action fast. They include:

high traffic, low or no conversion
high bounce rate
low time on site
high shopping cart abandonment
low repeat purchase rate
low turnover, etc

These and more are signs that you need to start looking for a fix as fast as you can in order not to worsen your already low sales.

Below are

5 Factors that May be Responsible for Poor Retail Sales

Sometimes these issues may not be noticed early enough by retailers leading to speculations as to why sales are low. Learning to identify them helps you avoid and monitor your retail site regularly for issues.

Here we go:

Tough Domain or Business Name

Perhaps they heard your name via word of mouth from their other shopaholic friends. Excited they hit Google and type every imaginable combination of what they think they heard.

Unfortunately, after several tries they give up the search for your domain url or business name, why? Because it is just too hard to spell or pronounce.

If you’re just starting out, use tools like business name generators to help you generate good business or company name ideas to avoid this costly mistake.

Next is:

Wrong Pricing

There are two scenarios here. First, high pricing, second, low pricing.

High Pricing

The ash cardigan shown LHS below is clearly overpriced in comparison with the brown one on the RHS.They’re the same product, but the price disparity between them is over N492, 500!

Imagine a first time visitor lands on your retail site from a CSE (comparison shopping engine) looking for exactly that spec of cardigan and all she sees is the one on the LHS.

You can guess her initial reaction.

Source: Pixabay

The longer that price error persists the more your visitors click the back button and hop on to the next online shop which increases your negative user signals.

And then

Low Pricing

This is just as bad if not worse than high pricing above. Back to our illustration.

Imagine this is really a name brand and the retail price is N500,000 but for some reason it is listed at N6,599.

Customer believes it is pre-Black Friday steal and orders 50pcs to resell at N400,000 each. Her card is billed N329, 950.

7 days later waiting to take delivery of 50 dirt cheap branded Gucci cardigans, she gets a text saying

“Dear Tricia, we’re sorry to inform you your order for 50 pcs of Gucci Tucci cardigans has been cancelled. Inconveniences regretted.”

Source: Pixabay

Of course she’d be disappointed and perhaps she’ll move on.

Long Checkout Process

Unduly long checkout process is a major shopper dropper, and is responsible for 27% of all shopping cart abandonment cases, according to reports.

Sometimes shoppers spend a lot of time browsing and adding products to cart. In some cases shopping cart software fails to update cart and they have to repeat process.

In any case, if the check out process is a hassle they may abandon cart especially if no guest checkout. Reduce number of form fields to be filled and implement guest checkout.

Non-Secure Payment Options

Perhaps you got lucky and some die hard shopper survives the long, tortuous checkout process and arrives at your payment page only to find limited payment gateways, no green padlock icon, plus wait for it, your url reads only “http” minus the “s” or redirects to another site.

Personally, that’s where you lose me. What you’re simply saying is:

“hey, my retail site is insecure, but it’s no biggie, ain’t nobody watching. Gimme that credit card number, PIN and pass”

Of course I’ll pass and that’ll be my last.

Safe sites look like this below with the green padlock icon in the address bar.

Source: NaijaPreneur

Last Words

Growing your retail business is not a walk in the park, especially in the face of growing competition online and off. Customer acquisition can be slow and costly, retention is cheaper. Hence, it is a good idea to monitor customer feedback.

One of the ways to do this is by setting up Google Alerts to monitor name mentions and take action accordingly in case customers are complaining about your brand.

Conclusion

Perhaps they may complain about one or more of the above listed issues. Take steps to prevent reoccurrence as you retarget and compensate identified ex-customers.

About the Author

Amos Onwukwe is an AWAI trained Ecommerce B2B/B2C Copywriter featured in eCommerce Insights, Ecommerce Nation, Understanding Ecommerce, SmallBizClub, Successful Startup 101, Dumb Little Man, Huffington Post, Floship, Result First, The Next Scoop, SABTrends, BusinessTips.Ph to mention a few.

6 Sales and Marketing Tips & Ideas to Grow Your Business

December 30, 2017 by Brooke Harper 1 Comment

To grow a business these days, one needs to understand why traditional sales and marketing strategies are failing and how to develop a sales marketing strategy that works.

What is Sales Marketing?

A well-crafted combination of sales and marketing is necessary for successful business growth. Sales entail the direct one-on-one interactions, those interpersonal connections that directly add revenue to the bank accounts. Telephone calls, networking, and meetings are all part of the direct sales process.

Marketing, on the other hand, involves all those actions that a business takes to reach and recruit prospects. Examples include direct mail campaigns, advertising, public relations, and television or radio commercials.

Direct sales marketing embodies all of these strategies. The number of ‘touches’ a prospect requires to convert into a sale varies, though research suggests anywhere between three and twelve touch points. More important than quantity, then, is following and maximizing each contact so that the time, cost, and effort put into each sale decreases.

What Isn’t Working?

Some of the most tried-and-true methods of marketing still work. People still love video advertising, for instance. In fact, video accounts for 69 percent of all consumer Internet traffic, according to Cisco Visual Networking. However, many other marketing strategies are falling flat. To be sure, Sirius Decisions reports the average sales cycle has increased by 22 percent over the past five years since more decision-makers are being involved in the buying process.

According to the 2016 DMA Response Rate Report, direct mail is expected to experience a 19% decline over the next 12 months;
A mere 13% of people who read print publications report ever looking at the ads;
44% of direct mail is never opened;
70% to 80% of online users don’t look at online ads, preferring to focus only on organic search results;
86% of people ignore television commercials.

Effective Sales Marketing Ideas

As buyers become increasingly over-saturated with advertising gimmicks, it becomes even more important for business owners and marketers to devise innovative ways to target potential customers. It is the role of a business owner, then, to ensure that information is delivered to prospective customers at the right time, in the right format, and on the right platforms. This is where an inbound marketing strategy becomes crucial.

Research

There’s no need to spend copious amounts of time drudging up case studies. Instead, ‘research’ refers to time spent understanding the company and its goals, understanding the industry, and understanding the customers. This is where business owners focus on attracting customers rather than seeking leads and customers.

Clarify what the business is and ask:

What does it mean to ‘grow the business?’
How will someone know if they’re successful?
What are the long and short-term goals?
What is the sales process?

Check out the industry

Whether a person has been in the industry for two, ten, or twenty years, chances are pretty high that the industry will keep on changing. As innovations come up or new expectations are established, it’s important to stay ahead of the curve. This is where industry research comes in.

How do other businesses fare against meeting (or exceeding) the goals?
What marketing strategies are other businesses in that industry doing to attract clients or customers?
What current events and news is impacting that industry?
Is there a business to business marketplace a business owner can access?
Are there any leaders that a business owner can speak to within the industry?

Figure out your customer base

Speak to the people on the ground—those who directly communicate with customers—to better understand the customer base. These are the people who can provide the most insight into what customers want. When talking to them, here are some worthwhile questions to ask:

Which marketing tactics are most effective?
Are customers complaining about any current strategies, such as too many emails or obnoxious ads?
What are the customer demographics?
What questions are the sales teams answering most?
What pain point/s does the product or service help alleviate?

Create Effective Content

No longer is it sufficient to leave a website dormant while expecting customers to magically discover its presence. Instead, business owners should update its content consistently. Over 70 percent of marketers say relevant content is the most effective search engine optimization (SEO) tactic, while companies that blog 16 times or more per month enjoy four times more leads than those who publish blog content less than five times a month.

The most effective content is that which focuses on helping customers reach their goals and/or solve their problems. While content on the Internet often grows stale within weeks after publication, it’s best to make sure content is as evergreen as possible so that it can retain its value for years to come.

Recognizing the importance of having an efficient, skilled copywriter either on staff or freelance is imperative. Doing so can increase the company’s revenue substantially, double its customer retention rate, and create brand recognition.

Pay attention to SEO

In the world of marketing, SEO is the latest buzzphrase—and with good reason. SEO consists of all the factors that influence search engine ranking. It is like turning on a spotlight so that customers know where to find a business. After discovering what a company’s customers are looking for (see above), it’s important to weave those keywords onto every page of the website.

To optimize a website for SEO, Entrepreneur magazine suggests that business owners:

Create a priority list of targeted search terms that pertain to the customer base and market segment;
Review pertinent industry sources and competitive lists to determine what keywords should be used;
If users frequently misspell a word, include that in the webpages as well;
Track the site’s rankings every 30 to 45 days to ensure the keywords remain effective;
Determine goals ahead of time and make sure they are measurable so that it’s possible to note the return on investment regularly;
Create page titles;
Develop new sitemaps for Google and Bing;
Place strategic words and phrases throughout the content on every page;
Continually test and measure the business’s success using objective tools to do so.

Develop Podcasts

People love to receive something for nothing. In the world of marketing, the most valuable asset is knowledge. Offer this to customers through an effective use of Podcasts. Podcast listening increased by 23 percent between 2015 and 2016.

Become social media savvy

The effectiveness of social media marketing is contentious. While some people say it’s a complete waste of time, the numbers suggest otherwise. After all, the breadth of audience participation is unparalleled.

72 percent of adult Internet users utilize Facebook;
During the past two years, content consumption on Facebook has increased by 57 percent;
Instagram has 500 million active monthly users;
LinkedIn has 450 million members, with a reported 25 percent active on a monthly basis;
Thirty percent of U.S. millennial internet users use Snapchat regularly.

Stay in contact

Depending on the product or service offered, it may be that the company is on the customer’s mind daily, such as the case with a food product, or only occasionally, as is the case with expensive beauty treatments. Regardless, it’s critical to be in the customer’s thoughts as soon as they are ready to buy. The way to do that is to maintain constant and consistent communication.

Collect the customer’s information at every opportunity;
Craft email or text campaigns to stay in contact with prospects and previous customers;
Be sure the business is listed in local directories and search engines.

Effective marketing means more than relying on direct mail advertising or television commercials. It has evolved into a multi-dimensional, multi-sensory process. Keep up with industry trends, as well as the new technology available to assist marketing efforts using these suggestions.

Source: Tenfold

About the Author

Brooke Harper is a seasoned writer and sales consultant, and has written hundreds of articles and white papers covering all aspects of B2B sales, phone marketing, and advanced sales strategy. Brooke is one of the top writers on Quora in B2B and her answers get over 100K views a month, and growing.

What Is Multi-Channel Approach & How Should You Prepare a Strategy for Your Marketing Campaign?

December 19, 2017 by Brooke Harper Leave a Comment

Long gone are the days when a single radio ad would send customers rushing to a store. Instead, companies must compete with a million distractions before they can direct customers to their products. Luckily, companies also have more ways to contact customers. Often called ‘channels’ in marketing, these ways to contact customers have grown over the years. In addition to television and radio marketing, companies can now take advantage of ways to contact people online, such as email and messaging via social media.

Rather than focusing on a specific ad campaign in a specific location (such as a billboard), marketers now work to contact customers multiple times. Multi-channel marketing includes a variety of different approaches. Channels to include would be billboards, bus ads, emails, phone calls, TV ads, Google Adwords, Facebook, Twitter, websites and so forth. Any way to reach out to customers to sell a product can be included as a channel.

These repetitions or ‘contact points’ are considered essential. The customer is likely to remember the product when needed and visit the company’s store or website to purchase it; contact points enable the customer to continue the buyer’s journey toward an eventual purchase.

Developing a Multi-Channel Strategy

With so many channel options, businesses need to develop a multi-channel strategy. Without a careful strategy, companies attempt a ‘do-it-all’ approach—which Entrepreneur warns can be ineffective. A ‘focused’ approach is better by far.

A 2006 article in the Journal of Service Researchhighlights these five challenges companies face when developing a multi-channel campaign:

Integrating data
Understanding customer behavior
Evaluating channels
Allocating resources across channels
Coordinating strategies

These challenges and ways to successfully circumvent them are explained below.

Integrating Data

The only way to gauge the effectiveness of a multi-channel approach is to track customer responses. Unfortunately, this is easier said than done. Many channels do have excellent means of tracking customers. Facebook and Twitter have extensive analytics available. Google Analytics can track movement of every customer through the site. However, these bits of data do not integrate easily. Did the customer that came through Facebook initially see the advertisement on Twitter? It’s almost impossible to say. While each channel has data on customer behavior, these discrete snippets do not provide the whole picture.

To counter this challenge, companies can build robust data tracking systems. Many customer relationship management (CRM) software services work to integrate customer data from social media outlets with website visits. Businesses can also be better informed of customer traffic through the site by signing up for Google Analytics which can usually display what channel the customer used to reach the company’s website. These tools provide a better overview of customer behavior across channels so that companies can make adjustments to their multi-channel approach. Thus, if no customers are accessing the website via Twitter, it may be time to divert resources from Twitter to another channel.

Understanding Customer Behavior

If the data shows how customers are contacting the business, marketing managers can begin to understand how the customers behave. For example, they may start to see patterns. It may take four points of contact through multiple channels before most customers visit the website. This could imply that more points of contact may make customers more likely to visit the website. While such insights can help multi-channel campaigns be more successful, the challenge is that these conclusions are often guesswork.

To obviate this, marketing managers should constantly experiment and use the data to see what’s working. If Facebook is sending a bunch of customers to the company website, but no one can figure out exactly why, that’s okay. While it’s better to understand why a strategy is working, sometimes it’s just not possible. The alternative is to rely on data that shows what is working and stick with it for a successful multi-channel campaign.

Evaluating Channels

Data and insights into customer behavior help marketing managers decide what channels to keep and which to remove—but some customers may come through entirely unique channels too. It’s also hard to know which channel finally convinced the customer to buy. Since the data and behavior insights won’t have all the answers, companies need to continue experimenting. A flood of customers will signal that the multi-channel strategy is working.

Allocating Resources across Channels

Another challenge that companies face is how to allocate time and money to each channel. Without knowing which channels are the highest performers, it’s difficult to know where to send resources. If a company sees a lot of traffic from Facebook, it’s tempting to adjust the multi-channel approach to direct more funding to Facebook ads. However, this may or may not increase the number of customers visiting via Facebook. It depends on many factors that may not be visible to the company or in the data.

To address this, companies should work on finding a balance of resources across multiple channels. It’s an art to find the right allocation to each channel, but the science shows that having more than one channel is a good option.

Coordinating Channel Strategies

Multi-channel approaches are inherently more complicated than selling through a single channel. A Facebook ad may highlight a certain sale. If the person clicks on the ad and lands on the main page of the company site instead of the sale item, a sale may be lost because the customer decides its not worth searching for it. Channels often have to be carefully aligned with each other for maximum benefit. Each ad for each channel may need its own landing page for the customer to make sense of the buying process. More channels usually add more complexity.

The best way to address this challenge is through careful planning. Each pathway to purchase should be analyzed to make sure it is clear and makes sense. A person that sees an online ad and goes to a brick-and-mortar store should be able to buy the item for the same price. As companies have improved at integrating channels, a new marketing approach has been developed: omni-channel marketing.

The Future of Marketing? The Omni-Channel Approach

The purpose of omni-channel marketing is to provide customers with a seamless buyer’s experience. It’s the next step in multi-channel coordination–every channel works together seamlessly. An example provided by Forbes provides insight into a successful omni-channel marketing strategy:

Channel 1 (Smartphone): The customer decides to buy a pair of shoes via his smartphone, but he’s not quite ready to go through with it. He puts the shoes in his cart.
Channel 2 (Desktop): He goes to his desktop to show the shoes to his daughter. She doesn’t like the color. He puts a new pair into his cart and waits to get his wife’s coupons before buying.
Channel 3 (Email): The customer forgets about the purchase. However, an email arrives reminding him of the item in his cart.
Channel 4 (Desktop): He purchases the shoes via the desktop.

The cart provides a seamless experience for the customer. No matter what channel he uses, he is able to continue the journey towards his purchase.

While this level of integration may seem difficult, omni-channel solutions are available to businesses. CRM software solutions can integrate various channels. For example, a CRM system may respond to a Facebook message with a reminder email a week later. These software solutions help companies develop more seamless buying experiences for customers.

Connecting with customers through multiple points of contact is an effective marketing strategy. However, the multi-channel approach should be monitored via integrated data. Combined with an understanding of customer behavior, this data guides the implementation of further strategies. The complexity of a multi-channel approach can make it difficult to make clear strategic decisions. However, close monitoring and experimentation help marketers home in on the best strategies for each company. Finally, careful coordination of each channel makes a multi-channel approach more likely to be successful. The goal of coordination is likely to be an omni-channel approach which provides a seamless customer experience, no matter what channels the customer uses.

About the Author