Building a sales pipeline needn't be expensive or difficult. In fact, if you take a systematic approach, and start by going after the low-hanging fruit, you can have a healthy list of prospects and opportunities in no time. A Sales Machine reader writes:
I'm the owner/operator and lead programmer of a small software company, basically me, a couple part-time programmers, and a 5-6 person technical implementation team.
When I launched in 2004, I made some direct sales myself to some prior clients and over the years have added a few client a year … now I want to really focus on sales because I had stoppedl selling for the past year with the economy because people seemed to stop buying in general (obviously not the smartest thing to do .. but that's water under the bridge).
Now, I'm going to invest in a targeted list to do some emailing and cold calling. So the question is: As the owner/president of the company, can I use all of your techniques the same way a pro sales person would? Should I do anything different because of my role as “president” of the company?
Well, the answer to your first question is Yes. Sales techniques are universal. In addition, since you're the “president” of your company, you're going to find it easier getting access to decision-makers than you would if your job title was sales rep. However…
Your challenge is more likely to be time management. Since you wear so many hats, you're not going to have all that much time to spend selling. And you've shown that you're easily distracted and would prefer not to sell when it's difficult to sell.
So your long term goal should be to “outsource” the sales function to somebody who can do it better than you. However, if you're determined to pursue this course, what you really need to do is to build a sales pipeline, because you let your pipeline run dry.
What's more, you're going to need to build that pipeline quickly, and without spending too much of your precious time upon it. The place to start is with the low-hanging fruit rather than prospecting far afield, which is what you'd be doing if you started with a targeted list.
Here are the four steps to building a pipeline on a shoestring:
- Step #1: Upsell your current clients. It's always easier to sell to people who already trust you and know that you can deliver. Unless every one of your clients has purchased everything that you have to offer, your quickest sales will come from existing customers. Recontact all of them and find out if there's anything else you can do for them (i.e. sell to them.)
- Step #2: Get some referral accounts. After you're revisiting your existing clients and confirmed that they're delighted with your offering, ask them to provide you with at least two referrals. Have THEM call or email the referrals and set up (or at least suggest) the initial meeting. It is much easier to sell to referral accounts than to completely new prospects.
- Step #3: Get some more referrals. Once you've exhausted your client base, list out every person you know who's in the business world and who trusts you (perhaps because you've worked with them previously). As before, ask them to provide you with a referral and have THEM call or email the referrals to set up the initial meeting.
Chances are that, by this point, you'll have more prospects in your pipeline than you know what do to with. If not, then move to:
- Step #4: Get a lead generation system. Rather than buying a “targeted list” (which will probably contain many dead lead), I recommend something like Insideview, which lets you build lists on the fly and prioritize them based upon events that have happened in that company and industry.
Remember, the key to turning a lead (regardless of the source) into a real prospect is to research the lead before the conversation. You also must be able to communicate very quickly (as in a couple of sentences) why your offering is important to that prospect. (And that's not a list of features, my programming friend.)
