You may have already given your sales manager and your sales
people the quantitative and qualitative goals for the current year . Among
other things, increase the number of customer visits by 10% before June,
increase Q1 turnover by 10%, place or list two new products with your major
accounts, increase the average basket by 5% through a price increase or not
etc.
Among them, another is essential: activate or reactivate new
accounts and therefore prospect for new customers , which as we mentioned are
part of the bases for increasing its turnover . In this article, I give you my
six tips of the moment to fill your commercial “pipe” and prospect new
customers !
Every year , companies lose an average of 10% of their
customers , or 50% every 5 years, according to a study by the Harvard Business
Review.
It is therefore essential to retain customers but also to
win new ones.
Historically, there are indeed two lungs of turnover :
prospecting and loyalty . This is still the case today, but the methods have
changed dramatically and continue to evolve. Change "is always" and
it is clear that the customer has changed more in 20 years than in 20
centuries.
Your contact has indeed changed the way they buy in B2C (80%
of consumers check the internet before buying according to IFOP) as well as in
B2B (where on average 6.8 people are involved in the purchasing process
according to Gartner) . The two profiles now have the choice of a
"planetary" offer at your fingertips andin 61% of cases ,
decision-making is taken from the online information consultation phase .
“ If the customer is digital, so must the salesperson . What
about your salespeople? ”
Your own website or how to generate a flow of appointment requests in a
predictable way
Why
?
Buyers make an average of 60% of the buying journey alone.
In industry , 80% of the purchasing journey is even done online , even before
the first contact with a salesperson (Forrester Research).
Not investing enough in a high- performance website is
tantamount to not investing in its goodwill , and especially not offering
services adapted to today's customers.
And if you do not meet the new expectations, your
sustainability is threatened in the medium term. No more no less.
How? 'Or' What ?
• By
stopping wasting your marketing and sales budget on non-ROI tactics from
another era (but which have worked well and sometimes still work), you should
be able to free up the necessary funds and this on a constant budget. We give
you the tips in this article .
• By
investing in an optimized website :
o well
referenced ,
o armed to
generate leads and meetings
o backed by
solid tools, as explained in point 6 (CRM, Marketing automation)
o supported
by a real digital strategy based in particular on attraction marketing (
inbound marketing )
o your
website must be built to be your best business provider . If so, you are
building a clear competitive advantage step by step . Otherwise, you give way
to your competition.
This is the case of Teralta, best digital strategy France
2020 that we support but also other
customers.
Get recommendations or version 2.0 of good old word of mouth
We used to talk about reputation obtained through word of
mouth. I assure you, this has never been so topical .
It is obvious that a prospect recommended by a satisfied
customer has a very high probability of becoming a customer in turn.
The recommendation , the modern word for word of mouth is
the best way to generate new leads . In addition, your sales cycle melts like
snow in the sun because your customer , as a true ambassador and promoter, has
already done a lot of the work .
Have you ever asked your customers to see if they were ready
to recommend you ? They can do it orally but also on social networks, on your
Google My Business page or on your website.
If they like your services, try collecting their customer
experience and impressions and inviting
them to leave a comment on Google , Facebook or Linkedin .
These online reviews are valuable because they allow you to
develop your company's online reputation and visibility , and generate new
prospects and therefore business opportunities.
This last step which comes to "close the loop" is
the virtuous circle. A flywheel that the software publisher Hubspot (world
leader and best sales marketing software according to G2crowd, Editor's note)
calls flywheel, or the Inbound methodology.
It's as old as the world. With satisfied customers , you
should therefore have no trouble activating this lever to prospect for new
customers. Recommendations have the formidable power to reassure a prospect
upstream.
Social selling: the art and the way to be influential online
In B2B, social selling consists of using social networks as
well as techniques from inbound marketing to generate leads. The two also form
an effective tandem .
Like the good old traditional prospecting, this process of
research , mutual aid and interaction with your potential prospects is quite
time consuming but remains today an essential source for finding new customers
.
Note, however, that this does not happen on its own or by
simply creating your Linkedin profile . You won't get appointments with
qualified prospects overnight. It is necessary to sow before reaping .
The objective of social selling (now also called digital
selling) is to:
• know how
to detect business opportunities
• accelerate
a sales cycle
• develop
your expertise and influence online
It is used in all stages of the sales cycle and remains very
suitable for prospecting new customers.
In B2B, Linkedin is essential , even if Facebook and others
can also generate leads. Here I share my good habits for finding customers on
Linkedin , where there are now nearly 120,000 profiles locally and over 700
million worldwide.
Conferences and interventions to transmit
In our lectures, we like to repeat that "we have
nothing to sell" .
Note that as with the social selling process above, it is
about being more interesting than interested .
As we are more and more called upon to give conferences in
business schools, at the University, in professional or union organizations, we
can filter, segment and choose our interventions and also animate workshops (eh
workshops) for our personas (our target prospects in the jargon, see below).
Why ?
First of all because its a pleasure to be able to discuss
the subjects and challenges of digital transformation, sales and marketing.
Because people are essential to convey what a blog post, a
webinar or a video cannot totally convey: emotion .
How? 'Or' What ?
We focus on business challenges and present quantified
solutions and results through case studies, while evaluating whether the same
methods can solve the problems that entrepreneurs encounter.
These informal exchanges are at the origin of B2B meetings
and constitute a source of rather very qualified prospects.
ABM: Account Based Marketing or the art of targeting only interesting
customers and potentially interested in your offer
ABM stands for Account Based Marketing is defined as
"strategic account marketing". This method consists of consolidating
the marketing and sales "departments" of companies by targeting only
target key accounts .
The objective is to define a different and differentiating
commercial approach by targeting only interesting prospects to increase your
turnover. It is therefore not a question of trading with your entire prospect
portfolio but with potential customers for whom your solution (service or
product) could solve one or more of their problems.
The advantage is that these "interesting" and
interested prospects really contribute to the growth of your business and the
increase of the turnover, while maintaining your strategic vision and preserving your values and your
philosophy.
To know them, you must define the personas , your ideal
target.
Tools for prospecting new customers:
There are thousands of them .
In our opinion, Sales Automation and CRM ( customer
relationship management) tools as well as marketing automation seem essential
to us :
• so as not
to lose opportunities
• to save
time in time-consuming and worthless tasks (email templates, sequences, etc.)
• to
optimize the quality of the customer / prospect relationship
• to
maximize turnover (Recency, Frequency, Amount and upsell / upscaling +
cross-selling / cross-selling)
• to
revalue the margin per customer , in particular by increasing productivity.
• to fight
with the same weapons as the big companies
Know that to prospect more new customers and better manage
your sales force and have an informed eye on the commercial pipe (visits,
quotes, opportunities ...), you must equip yourself.
The must is to add marketing automation software to be able
to bring your prospects to maturity , thanks to the technique of lead nurturing
. You all have dormant prospects in your portfolios, not ready to buy and
others in the buying phase. A tool of this type allows you, among other things,
to prioritize and focus on hot prospects .
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