Irrelevant Leads Vs Canvassing for Prospects - Make or Break or Blame?

And so it begins... you pick up that phone, you dial a number and YES, you get an answer... at the other end of the line an angry, tired from a difficult morning at work individual, who registered on your website because he saw a promotional banner that he doesn't remember, doesn't know what it is that you do and has no interest whatsoever in spending any European, American or Japanese currency on your offering.

On the other hand, online and offline campaigns, a massive pool of media buying options, countless possibilities for lead generation... With online marketing going nuke and the cost of acquiring one lead hovering above your rise or fall, I ask "is canvassing for prospects still an option?"

The general trend is that you still have the option to canvas for prospects. But then the dreaded report comes only to show that a massive percentage of your leads are indeed irrelevant. I named these leads irrelevant, since the term is synonymous with not here nor there, non material and unrelated. Since they have no idea what they've done, why they approached you, don't know who you are, what you do or what you are offering, the term seemed appropriate.

While some people would argue that time well spent is time that makes money which reflects time spent where interested prospects rule, I will tend to disagree. With those irrelevant leads, Sales Reps differentiate themselves from the swarm.

Between these irrelevant leads and the goal of you making a paying customer out of them, lies a far thinner line than most Sales Reps think. This line includes:

- Making yourself relevant to them before they become relevant to you. 

- Spending the same amount of energy as you would on a prospect. 

- Ask questions and understand the lead's surroundings, work, interests to find a connection. 

- Provide information and educate. 

- Send material, links, videos, reading material to gain interest for further follow ups.

and what do you know... ? That report is not so dreaded anymore, is it?

We are living in the era of blaming each other and the same as in every civilized realization, we need to find someone to blame right? So if we've come to agree that canvassing for prospects is bad, who's to blame for "it" happening? Definitely not the irrelevant leads that found a way to crawl into your report and surely not the Sales Rep that has not been educated about what sales are NOT about.

Sales are not just about knowledge and skills. Through time they evolved into a new-fangled monster called Attitude. So ask yourself and determine whether your attitude is to over think and canvass rather than closing one more sale.

To conclude, if you are a Director who promoted a Sales Manager just to fill a role, or a Sales Manager who accepted this role with not enough know how to carry out the task, or a Sales Rep that despite the aforementioned still canvasses to make a sale...

Can you now say "Guilty as charged"?

Originally published on http://www.allfx-consult.com.

With almost a decade of Forex experience, allFX Consult focuses on the challenges that are present in all sales/operations departments of established and start-up FX firms.

Our product suite ranges from structuring and/or restructuring complete sales departments, career development and placement of candidates looking to progress in the Forex industry, institutional business introducer's with dozens of deals in our portfolio.

Culture: The Sales Driver Or Sales Killer

Have you ever walked into a business, looked around at the drained energy in the office and wanted to ask, "Who died?" You just walked into a culture catastrophe. Culture is one of those elusive factors of business success that most organizations can't seem to get their hands and minds around. Sales culture is even more elusive and to create it, you need everyone indoctrinated from the janitor to the CEO.

So what is sales culture? Let's look at two different stories to answer this question.

Not a Sales Culture:

Jack is the V.P. of sales and works for Culture Catastrophe. Every morning he gets in around 9:17 while he tells his team to be in at 8:00. Jack locks himself in his office and only comes out for his numerous trips to the coffee shop and then his subsequent numerous trips to the bathroom. Jack's sales people are constantly dealing with the operations group to get their orders done and operations really doesn't care about getting them done. Sally in operations constantly tells her co-workers that she is only required to process X number of orders per day and pressures them not do more because the company is going to expect more from everybody. Sally is constantly missing deadlines and frustrating sales and customers. When Jack's team tells him, Jack says there is nothing he can do because the Operations V.P. is constantly defending her team. By 4:00 jack has had it and he packs up and goes home. Consequently, so does his sales team and everyone wonders why sales are stagnant.

True Sales Culture:

Mike is the V.P. of sales and an integral part of Culture Nirvana. Every morning he gets in at 7:30 and tells his sales force to be in at 8:00. Funny enough, the entire sales force shows up at 7:30. By 8:00 they already went through their email and are ready to start selling. About three times a week, there isn't a sales person in the office by 9:30 because they are all out on customer appointments. The operations team processes orders on time and understand they are an integral part of the sales process. In addition, they consistently bring sales opportunities to the sales force that they uncover while working with the customers through the order process. The sales force loves Mike as he assists them to close sales and helps clear hurdles. Mike usually doesn't leave until about 6:00 but creates a culture of accountability and respect where everyone is free to come and go as they need to, as long as they are hitting their numbers. The revenues of Culture Nirvana consistently climb year over year.

These may seem like to fairyland tales but they are being played out in tens of thousands of businesses each and every day. An integrated sales culture is what separates success from failure and in many cases, growing businesses from what we call, a "thready pulse." In medical terms this means a pulse that is very fine and scarcely perceptible; or in other words, you could die at any time.

So create a sales culture in your organization where everyone has their eye on the importance of selling and generating new sales. Make sure that you have:

Spent the time to train every single employee on what it is the company does/offers.

Continue to put the entire organization's eye on the prize when it comes to revenue targets.

Make the entire organization accountable for a sale

Create a healthy atmosphere of "It's us against the world, and we are going to win together."

Some of these may sound glib, but they aren't. They are powerful drivers and once you start, you will watch the sales culture take on a life of it's own. However, be aware that culture is set from the top(CEO/Leader) and flows through the entire organization. If you are a leader of a business, you need to inject a ton of enthusiasm into the culture to get your employees engaged. So, get up, get rolling and get your sales culture kicked in and watch it fly.

This article was written by Dominic Mazzone, Managing Partner of Smashbox Consulting.

Improving Customer Attrition Requires As Much Heart As Smart

Headline: Three years of misses on both the top and bottom lines, customer churn exceeding $56 million annually and continuous market share losses result in the break up and sale of another industry leader. Approximately 1,500 employees received their pink slips as the Company closed it doors today!

If a firm's revenue growth is unimpressive I recommend that leaders first look to how they manage current customers for clues to the solution. More often than not customer attrition is the canary in the mine, a harbinger of poor sales growth. Not surprisingly many leaders opt for the sex appeal of new sales to solve their growth problem. They often conceptualize that a focus on customer attrition is too defensive, too demoralizing for their "hunters". In this exciting technology led world we live in let me remind you that an idea always precedes action. Your idea or philosophy about where the customer fits in your business determines everything about you as a company and ultimately what strategies you decide to implement.

In no particular order of offense let me describe how customer attrition philosophy is often actualized in real life. When faced with customer attrition challenges one group of managers will take a deep dive into spreadsheet management. All in the name of accountability they start tracking everything imaginable. They will assign task forces for task forces and even measure the number of project teams working on the problem. Sometimes they schedule conference calls before they know why. Very often marketing functionaries are wrongly obsessed with measuring outbound emails, outbound phone calls, scheduled presentations, and face-to-face sales meetings. This group clamors incessantly about how effective managers track activity and measure everything. I so want this group to re-read Deming's book, "Out of the Crisis" to get a sense of what the father of quality had to say about this phenomenon.

A second group of managers is marginally more thoughtful and tends to use lean process, six-sigma, and continuous improvement initiatives to kick start customer attrition improvement believing that process drives everything. Their teams minimize the kinds of data previously mentioned in favor of critical service incidents, order form errors, call center wait times, and a host of other process variances. Unfortunately this faction often draws conclusions from an exclusively internal perspective. This unit's findings mistakenly become the customer's in a very "we know best" kind of way. Although this cluster usually extolls the virtue of the customer's voice very rarely do we hear that voice in the final analysis. This crowd still finds its growth strategies de-railed because their perspective about customers is too fragmented. These managers tend to see customer attrition issues as quantitative exercises and often miss the human side of the customer's decisions.