Sales Pipeline

Attending events is a business development investment intended to generate new prospects. Whether it is a trade show, or a monthly association meeting, any networking event you attend is an investment of your resources which you need to maximize by communicating with each new prospect generated.

You invest;

• your time researching and evaluating whether the event will attract the right target market for your business
• your time attending
• registration/booth fees & staff time manning the booth
• travelling costs

Attending events helps to raise the visibility of your business in the marketplace and generates prospect leads for your business. These leads come in 2 forms, attendees you met and with whom you started a conversation and a list of attendees you did not met and with whom you could start a conversation.

Back at the office, the questions are;

• how do you maximize your business development investment by following up with the highest number of prospects and driving that traffic into your follow up sales funnel?
• what are the next follow up steps you need to take to 
  • continue the conversation with attendees you met?
  • start the conversation with the list of attendees you did not met?

In the past, follow up consisted of mailing out literature, hope it reached the prospect and have the sales representative follow up at their next sales call.

Today, methods are changing. As a Follow Up Specialist at Executive Sales Support, I help my clients maximize their business development investment by utilizing the technology they currently have to build their next follow up steps.

First, database set up to collect all of the prospect leads, a CRM Customer Relationship Manager such as ACT, Maximizer or Goldmine. Second, set up an email blaster such as Swiftpage with ACT  to send out emails and collect statistics, for example, about delivery. (Swiftpage can also work without ACT). Depending on your follow up next steps, you may also be able to track the additional traffic the follow up drives to your website.

If you are interested in learning more about how follow up can help you maximize your resource investment in event attendance, Cheryl Scoffield, Follow Up Specialist at Executive Sales Support, can help you with Follow up – Discover Your Next Step – a 2 hour session $149.00.

Ready to move forward and take action with the first follow up steps?  Follow Up - Take Action- a 2 hour session $149.00 covering implementing a Follow Up System in your business and database set up. Database maintenance and Outbound Calling can also be arranged.

Email:  Cheryl at ExecutiveSalesSupport.com to find out about Follow Up Systems or book your Follow Up Session. 

These Follow Up Sessions are specifically designed to help you plan how you can Set The Stage For Follow Up and build a Follow Up System that manages and maximizes your follow up activities. You will save time, stayed organized and drive more traffic to your business!

Developing a Follow Up Business System will help you maximize your business development investment and get you past that 1st contact to the 2nd and beyond to the 5th contact where 80% of sales are made.

Do you have a plan to follow up the people you meet?  Need to get your business in front of more prospects?
Learn How To Maximize Follow Up & Grow Your Business Building The Know You – Like You -  Trust You Factor

Join me and a small group of Entrepreneurs, Professional Service Providers and Business Owners for 2.5 hours of hands on training at Set The Stage Follow Up Training - Learn strategies guaranteed to connect you with your prospects beyond the 5th contact where 80% of sales are made.  Follow Up – The Bridge Connecting Prospects To Sales.

Check out what others are saying about Follow Up

Set The Stage For Follow Up  -  2.5 hours of hands on training includes an overview of the 10 Step Follow Up System. 

Training will be in Oakville ON. Reserve your seat early, this training is limited to 10 participates in each session. Email Cheryl at ExecutiveSalesSupport.com

2 sessions for  ’Set The Stage For Follow Up’          Cost  $89.00

Session #1        Saturday  April 10,      9 am – 12 Noon  
Session #2       Monday    April 26,       6 pm -  9 pm

Join me and a small group of Entrepreneurs, Professional Service Providers and Business Owners.
Reserve early – Seating is limited.

Third annual Small Business Showcase: a Bridges to Better Business event taking place on Wednesday 7^th October, from 2pm – 9pm at the Waterloo Inn Hotel,Waterloo ON features small businesses from Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, Guelph and beyond!

The details as posted on their site;
The 2009 Small Business Showcase is made possible by the generous support of our sponsors. We’d like to take some time to recognize their contribution and helping to make this year’s event more successful than ever!

Firstly, our recently announced title sponsor, Scotiabank, will not only be sponsoring the event, but hosting the Bridges to Better Business seminar for Showcase exhibitors. Scotiabank is a proud supporter of small business and promise to share some insight from their “Get Growing for Business” initiative.

Tibor Shanto of Renbor Sales Solutions, Inc. is sponsoring one of the Showcase Seminar sessions. As a widely recognized sales expert, Tibor will be asking, “What’s in your pipeline?”.

Martin Buckland of Elite Resumes is sponsoring another of our Showcase Seminars, where he will be talking on the topic, “Help Build Your Business and Your Brand in a Competitive Environment”.

(Just a reminder, Showcase Seminars are FREE to attend, for both exhibitors and the visiting public!)

Last, but my no means least, Adam Smith of My IT Guy is sponsoring our refreshments–that’s right, he’s keeping the exhibitors running strong throughout the day!

The July August 2009 issue of this great regional business information publication features Southern Ontario’s Mayors Speak Out. Tom and Wendy Peters do a great job of publishing this long standing newspaper that promotes business in Mississauga and the surrounding area. The circulation is 30,000 – from Mississauga to Windsor..

For this issue they also sent a copy to the Prime Minister and the Ontario Premier’s Offices as well as to all the MP’s and MPP’s located in the distribution area of Southern/South-western Ontario.

As a result of my association with HAPPEN (Halton and Peel Professional Executive Network) and Hugh Black of HMB Communications, my article “Build Your Business With Networking In An Economic Downturn” was included on Page 16 of this issue.

If you are interested in advertising in the Mississauga Business Executive for October 18 – 24, 2009 which is Small Business Week, please contact Tom Peters, t.peters at busexec.com. He mentioned that this website is averaging 100,000 requests per month which is excellent for a B2B publication.

Trying to bring in more sales to your business? Find out how you can get into your clients’s head and heart without going out of your mind!

Join my business coach, Michel Neray from The Essential Message, for the next Essential Message Workshop Sales Telepathy –  April 22 - 4pm EST. You can still get the Early Bird pricing $27.77 which includes the workbook. Michel always gives great content and value for your money.

If you’re a coach, consultant, financial advisor, business owner or if your livelihood depends on sales in any way – and that probably includes everyone except government workers – then register for this teleclass now. This is going to be fun and a great way to build your business!

Are you a reluctant blogger? I was.

Recently a business friend of mine Boris Mahovac over at Your Ezine Coach, published a blog post about this topic and asked several associates to comment on this topic. Boris mentions in his post that he was a reluctant blogger and I have to admit, so was I.

As my business has grown, I have started to write articles on my area of expertise, sales support, more specifically follow up systems. I publish those articles in my newsletter which is branded with my website.  I consider articles more of a long term thing, something that I research and construct sequentially from a premise to a conclusion. I guess you could say, my articles are written more like the essays we were taught to write in school. I would say they relate information about the how and why of sales support. But I wasn’t too sure how a write a blog post which I consider more about what I think about the whole area of sales support.

As I have previously mentioned here and in my newsletters, I am a researcher. Therefore my first foot forward is to check out articles written on this subject and also read how others are navigating this new medium.

Of course the big one was, how often do I have to post? If it is often, then I have to change my articles to snippets. If I can post my already constructed newsletter articles, than that is a fairly easy way to begin. You probably have heard of repurposing your content.

During my search for answers, my research took me to a more in depth study around the whole idea about the path that communication is taking. On that subject, I am currently reading the book Join the Conversation by Joseph Jaffe. His blog is JaffeJuice. Although the book starts outs for my taste, a bit brutal in delivery, (I am not one to like being pounded over the head), I realized as I progressed that the book is written to an advertising audience, so maybe they do need to be pushed from their beds! Anyway I am about half way though and I would recommend this book.

In closing, I would agree with Boris’ blog post “Finally, blogging makes it really easy and fun to connect with other great professionals in the wider blogosphere.” It also allows me to share with my readers some of the great contacts and resources that my research has uncovered.

Here is a person I’d like to see write a quick blog post on this topic:

Dale Campbell, Website Design

Blogging has also given me, not only an opportunity to help my clients and myself get in front of more prospects, but also to extend my knowledge of how communication in general is changing. There is no doubt times are changing, so I better start swimming or I will sink like a stone.

Therefore I am currently progressing from simply posting my newsletter articles to this blog to more of a conversational style. Wish me luck and I invite you the reader to please add your comments so we can begin the conversation for ourselves!

How do you maintain sales momentum during tough times?
Do you step back or step it up?
Have you been listening to the news and feeling the emotions around you? Maybe, like other business professionals, you have started thinking about ways to cut costs. Decreasing the dollars spent on marketing is often one of the strategies considered. Is this really the wisest choice?

I research a lot. Sometimes I laugh at myself for being an information junkie. I read everything; newsletters, newspapers, books and magazines. Lately, I have noticed two differing thoughts. Some businesses are focusing on the outcome, staying the course and continuing to implement marketing activities and develop the relationships critical to building and maintaining sales momentum. They may also be proactively ramping it up to cast the net wider and bring in more prospects to fill their pipeline.

Other businesses are reactively cutting back on marketing activities in an effort to lower costs.
The activities within your marketing plan are designed to play out over the course of time, keeping your business top of mind within your target market and generating leads for your sales pipeline. If you implemented activities last month when you thought the economic times were stable but not this month when you may think they are not, you are tampering with that consistency and therefore the flow within your pipeline.

Another factor is the length of your sales cycle. When times get tougher your sales cycle may be lengthening by an extra 30 – 90 days. Your marketing strategy may change slightly to take into account this extra time. However long your sales cycle may be, you need to stay in contact with your target market for the duration. I recommend to my clients, who are looking to maximize their follow through, to stay the course, maintaining the current level of marketing activities and also proactively implement more ideas rather than be reactively implement less.

Now is the time to change the game and do more with what you already have. Help your prospects and customers choose your business by adding more value. Look for ways to demonstrate this added value and ways to let your target market hear about it.

Below are several ideas you could implement to demonstrate added value.

• Highlight your great service with success stories. Do not just say you have great service, go one step further and demonstrate by gathering testimonials that showcase your service. Why keep it a secret. Interview your current happy customers. When you write the resulting story talk about the longevity of your business and the mutual benefits of the partnership you have with customers. If you can, demonstrate your positive impact on your client*s business with statistics or example of specific problems solved.
• Identify good, better, best solutions and why the chosen solution worked for that client*s problem.
• Look for client businesses within your target market that are doing well. Find out what they are doing to drive sales. Gather information about what they are doing through spotlight interviews or surveys. Use the information to build a story to send to your target market about how your industry adds value.
• The process of collecting the above information could lead to joint ventures and cross promotions within your existing customer base or bring to light opportunities for new ways to support clients with your current products.
• Reward your customers with a gift card at various sales volumes. Always nice to thank customers who give you a testimonial or an order. People not only love to receive a free gift but they love to pick a gift. No one returns a gift they choose for themselves.
• Run a sales promotion for your team and reward sales volume and testimonials collected. Gift cards are great and very timely with the holiday season approaching. Added bonus, they fit easily into an envelope and you can include your business card!
• Highlight the cost of the lost opportunity if your customer does not use your product or service. Contrast this with an example from the above testimonials.
• Go back and dig out those business cards from the last trade show or networking event that you may have lost in a folder.

The world will stand aside to let the people who are focused through.” – Unknown

Are you interested in implementing these ideas – or similar ones from your marketing plan – but you are getting bogged down by the details without the time, knowledge or expertise on staff to move forward? You will need a system that keeps warm leads in your sales pipeline long enough to develop from prospects to clients.

No problem. Contact Cheryl or call now at 866-642-5145 to book your “Get To Know You” appointment. We can explore ideas to leverage your prospect and customer relationships, build a plan to implement your marketing activities and help sustain sales momentum.  Flexible support is available  “as needed”.

If you would like to reprint this entry, please ensure you include a bio box to linked to  Executive Sales Support .

Consistently communicating your message is an essential part of your marketing and a key element of sustaining momentum within your sales pipeline. Everyday your customers and prospects are become busier, therefore your message would benefit from being delivered on multiple channels. You may not know which channel will reach through and deliver the message that tips the scale, bringing your business to the top of their mind.  Increasing the channels you communicate through and the frequency of that communication, increases the chances that when your customer is on a burning platform and looking for solutions, your message will be there to solve their problem.

Email, phone, direct mail letters and email campaigns can all play a part within your communication package. Last newsletter I mentioned I use ACT as my contact database and SwiftPage to deliver email campaigns. For example an email campaign was used to deliver this newsletter message. You may have considered sending a campaign for your business. This newsletter, we will look at email campaigns and how analyzing the statistics they generate, can help sustain sales momentum.

We might think of email campaigns as the direct mail of the internet, although there are several added benefits when you utilize email to deliver your message. Benefits such as delivering your message to more customers and prospects and delivering it faster are some of the first I think of. These benefits alone help sustain sales momentum simply by increasing the number of customers and prospects that hear your message.

Delivering by email campaign gets your message working overtime in several additional ways. Most importantly, email campaigns generate statistics. Let us take an overview look at how analyzing these statistics can improve the effectiveness not only of your message but also your follow through.

One way to start utilizing campaign statistics is to implement split testing to improve message targeting. Split testing is a method that sends your message with two slightly different wording and uses statistics to determine which message drew more attention. Another important factor about email is that it enables you to highlight words within your message. The highlighted words, called hyperlinks, take the reader to places such as your website where more information about your business and the products you offer can be found. As these links are followed, statistics are generated. Analyzing this statistic, gives you insight into generally which products interests your customers and prospects and specifically who is interested in those products.

In summary, email campaigns improve your ability to sustain sales momentum by not only delivering your message to more customers and prospects and doing it faster, but also by producing statistics. Analyzing these statistics, gives you insight into what interests your contacts, enabling you to target your message more effectively and improving your follow up by equipping you with statistical knowledge.

While you are out seeing clients and closing deals, do not forget to ask how your customers and prospects heard of your company. Their answers will enable you to track which communication channel is providing impact.

If email campaigns are an initiative you would like to investigate or implement for your marketing and sales cycle, but time or knowledge has been holding you back, take this opportunity and learn more on our dime. Email today for your consultation Cheryl at ExecutiveSalesSupport.com

If you would like to use this article please include this bio box – Written by Cheryl at Executive Sales Support.com

At Executive Sales Support I use the ACT 6 database to hold contact information and details about interactions with my contacts. For my newsletter I utilize SwiftPage as the integrated email marketing program to deliver my message. These two software packages integrated seamlessly, save time and track the details of every campaign by contact.

SwiftPage is a great service I have used for several years and recently they started a newsletter. Below is a recent article from the SwiftPage newsletter  . . .

You’ve taken the time to be sure to segment your list properly, have expertly crafted and highly targeted copy with the most relevant imagery and consistent branding in your email template. You are expecting great results and will be able to take the numbers to your boss to receive rave reviews. So, just send and watch the numbers speak for themselves right? Well, it is important to have taken all of the steps listed above, but if your message never makes it to the inbox in the first place, all your time and effort is for naught. Here are a few tips to avoid spam filtering and a little insight into the behind the scenes of email marketing deliverability. Read the full article

In a recent poll conducted by the Canadian Professional Sales Association, CPSA members identified one of their top challenge as “Sustaining sales momentum throughout the year”. 32% said this was their toughest challenge.

Get into the marketing game and stay in by building an Implementation Plan that consistently keeps you in front of your clients. A strategic or marketing plan aims you at the right target and an Implementation Plan builds a system of support that gets the wheels turning and keeps the show on the road without your having to do everything yourself. It is this consistency of effort that keeps the flow in your pipeline even and steady, minimizing peaks and valleys and increasing your productivity.

One of the weak links in the chain of events that leads to sustained momentum has always been consistency of follow up. The week after the trade show, you follow up with the hot contacts but the following week you get busy and the other leads start to go cold. If you are working without support, you are juggling to cover all the bases to stay top of mind with new prospects and your current pool of customers.

You can stop the frantic juggling by collaborating with Cheryl Scoffield, Support Specialist at Executive Sales Support to develop an Implementation Plan customized for your business. Whether you choose to load your contacts into a database as simple as an Excel spreadsheet, or utilize a contact management software program, a streamlined follow up process will get you back to seeing clients and positions you to take advantage of breaking opportunities. The results? Consistently staying in front of your customer results and even flow in your pipeline. Staying in front of your customer helps sustain sales momentum that generates results throughout the year. Click here to get the details.

If you currently do not have the necessary expertise, no problem, your support specialist will work by your side collaborating to develop a customized Implementation Plan to launch the activities within your marketing calendar and get your business consistently in front of your customer. Available on a flexible “as needed basis”, one day or several days, at your office or virtually everywhere, Cheryl will get the job done. Click here to read what other Senior Executives have to say about this specialized support.A year from now you will wish you had started today to put in place a system that enhances your efforts, maximizes your results and supports your business growth to the next level. Click here to arrange your first step consultation. The good news is, you get to pilot your own future. You will rest assured that a reliable system is in place while you are out seeing clients and closing deals.

If you would like to use this article in your newsletter you can. Please make sure that all the links are live and you include this bio box.

Written by Cheryl Scoffield, Sales Support Specialist, www.ExecutiveSalesSupport.com