A common mistake we often see rookie business owners make is getting caught up in their success.
You can spend your day celebrating sales and ignore the sales needed tomorrow.
Take your eye off the sunlight and you’ll be tempted by the easy shortcut.
If you do this, your campaign is going to fail.
The only way to move forward from here is to keep track of your progress, consistently iterate and improve upon it, and keep looking at the bigger picture.
We often like to say, “If it wasn’t measured, it doesn’t count.”
How do you know if you’re actually performing well in your campaign if you don’t measure and record the data—If you don’t keep it organized, and compare it to your previous results?
If you don’t keep track of this information, you will never be able to know what can be improved upon, and what needs to be fixed entirely.
If you’re not consistently improving your process, you’re going to remain stagnant.
At best, you won’t ever improve.
At worst, you’ll be wasting a lot of time and money.
Achieving your goals will also become a daunting process.
You might understand where you realistically want to be in the next six to twelve months, but without data, without your metrics, it’s going to be extremely difficult to understand how exactly you can get to that goal.
Because you’ve kept track of your progress, not only do you start off with relative success, but you continue to improve on every aspect of your campaign so much that it becomes as close to perfect as possible, and everything runs like a well-oiled machine.
Now, whenever you have a problem, it’s easy to pinpoint exactly what needs to be done to solve it, and when you set goals, you know exactly what you need to improve in order to reach them.
This is the only way to ensure long-term success, but it’s one of the most often missed components, despite it being so simple.
Record your data, improve your metrics, and make sure you’re prepared for the challenges ahead.
When it comes to keeping track of everything going on in your campaign, it can oftentimes be overwhelming.
It’s often easier to simply cut corners and only record the most important information, such as net profit.
That’s what a lot of business owners who fail are doing.
You will not only keep track of those metrics, but also every single other piece of information relative to your campaign, all the way from how many people you prospect to how many sales you close.
You keep your eye on everything.
If you don’t, you’ll be actively sabotaging your campaign, and ruining your future success.
At any given time, you should know (if you’re using LinkedIn ) how many connection requests you sent, how many people replied and how many of those replies were positive.
If you’re using email, you need to know how many messages you sent out, how many people opened them, how many people responded.
Doing this will allow you to see where things are going right, and where they are going wrong.
Having all this information laid out in front of you allows you to make connections and see common patterns when otherwise you wouldn’t have.
Ideally, you would want to store this information in a spreadsheet or a lead tracker (like a CRM).
This way, you have somewhere to store all of your data so that it can be easily accessed and compared.
You should, on a daily prospect by prospect basis, be getting your leads into this sheet, as well as any messages you send or receive from them.
If these leads and messages are left in their respective platforms, there’s no way to reliably track and record the data.
Keeping them all in the same place allows for common themes and topics that are brought up to be handled and addressed much easier.
Preferably, this sheet would be a live feed (meaning it’s constantly being updated by multiple people in your company).
You should be recording important data daily if you can, but at the very least, shoot for weekly, or even monthly updating.
Something is better than nothing.
Recording this information is essential for reaching your goals.
You should know, based on your data, what you have to do to make rockstar money.
Maybe you want to make one-million dollars in net profit this year. Using your data, you can figure out how many new salespeople you are going to need to hire in order to reach that goal.
Or, you can look at how many responses you’re getting on average, and work on increasing that number.
Up-to-date information is a finely honed weapon in the melee for sales.
There are many ways to go about improving your capabilities for conducting your campaign, we recommend specifically to scale laterally, meaning hiring more salespeople.
So instead of increasing the workload for your salespeople, you should figure out how many more sales you need to make, and hire the appropriate amount of people to fit that need.
If you’re keeping track, it should be easy to know how much money each one of your salespeople are bringing in, and how many new ones you need to hire in order to reach your goals.
Imagine how much smoother your campaign would run if you had a clear picture of exactly how all parts are working together, and how effective each part is.
Now, when a problem arises, you can pinpoint exactly where that problem is occurring and handle it swiftly.
Once you are properly keeping track of your results, it’s time to optimize each of your KPIs to perform at their peak efficiency.
You cannot simply remain stagnant and expect the results you desire, you have to constantly be iterating and optimizing your process, and the act of doing this is what we like to call “KPI Optimization.”
Even if you follow our CLOSER System perfectly, and everything seems to be going good for you and your campaign, there's still going to be some aspects of your process that can be improved upon.
It's important to look at all of your KPIs (key performance indicators), and look at what you could be doing to improve them.
Your key performance indicators are the results and measurements you've tracked during your campaign, such as response rate, positive response rate, and your close rate.
It's a good idea to keep all of these metrics in a spreadsheet so that you can take a look at the bigger picture, and compare your KPIs to each other.
You see that you're receiving a response sixty-five percent of the time, but over half of those responses are negative.
This could mean you have a targeting problem, or even a positional problem.
You are either targeting the wrong people entirely, or maybe the way you're reaching out just isn't what's best to reach these people.
You see that a majority of the time, your prospects are responding with the same objection.
Using that information, maybe you could start addressing that objection in your messages as to avoid that problem.
It's up to you to come up with specific solutions to these problems, and fix them when they arise.
At LeadRoll, we try to keep our information updated daily and we keep it all organized.
We recommend to take time each week to work on one KPI, and focus all of your energy on improving it.
Then, you move on to the next KPI the following week.
This will allow you to improve your campaign as a whole without overwhelming you or your salespeople.
One week you’re looking at your close rate, and even though you’re getting tons of people to the call, you’re having a hard time actually closing the sale.
Perhaps there’s something wrong with your sales script? Or maybe the salespeople.
Figure out the problem, fix it, and then move on.
Once you make the rounds, you should go back and do them all again.
The only way to know if one of your KPIs is off is by measuring, and if you aren't constantly keeping up with—and optimizing your metrics, you'll end up with a sub-par campaign at best.
Things change rapidly in the world of sales.
It's up to you to measure the data, identify the problems, and make data driven decisions.
You just have to keep pushing and moving forward, and continuously iterate and improve upon your process until you're where you want to be.
Then, improve some more.
There will come a time in your campaign where a prospect tells you that they are interested in your offer, but for one reason or another, are unable to do anything at the moment.
These people will give you a timeframe for when you can reach back out to them.
This is a good indicator of a quality client, as they are communicating positively and they are interested enough to try again when the time is right.
Ignore this prospect to your detriment.
You want to be careful to not lose these leads, and the only way to avoid this is by proper follow-up and nurturing.
You need to know how to handle your follow-up, and come up with a plan for what you're going to do in the meantime to keep them interested.
This comes back to proper tracking.
You want to ensure that you know when you need to follow up with specific people, and make it so you don’t forget.
That can be as simple as placing these leads into a separate file or folder away from your current leads that you're chasing.
What you do next is up to you.
You could message them every few weeks.
You could put them in a special drip sequence.
Alternatively, you could leave them with a bunch of links and information to go through on their own time in your messages.
This will give them something to look forward to without seeming too pushy.
The only thing you don’t want to do is nothing.
It's also important that when you agree to reschedule, you try to get them to agree to a specific time on the calendar.
This will make it much more likely for them to remember and actually commit, as opposed to a general timeframe.
If they tell you they aren't available for six months, you say, "Okay, then how does this day sound?"
If they agree, great.
If not, offer a different day.
No matter what happens though, you have to make sure you actually follow up with them.
Do whatever you have to to set a reminder to reach back out.
At LeadRev.ai, we have a specific system for this.
We have separate groups for three month, six month, and twelve month clients that we track, and we establish how we are going to follow up with them.
We have it all planned out ahead of time, and it's what we recommend you do as well.
Before you ever come into contact with this client who isn't ready yet, you should already know what you're going to do when you eventually meet.
Nurturing is the act of developing and building relationships with potential buyers.
People are more likely to purchase from you if you can solve their problems and you can think of the timeframe you were given by the client as the window for which you have to convince them to purchase your offer.
You can send them links to marketing material, send them personal emails, or send them educational content, anything to remind them that you're still interested in them, and hopefully through the content, convince them that they still want to work with you.
If you just ignore them, you lose them.
Ensuring you follow-up, and follow-up properly is the best way to guarantee you won’t lose clients due to lack of action.
