People are starting to talk about the impacts of a slowing economy here in Aust.
Here’s what I know as someone who’s been around for a couple of downturns.
People (businesses) stop buying anything that is not seen as an absolute must-have.
Finance depts have a tighter focus on cost control so decisions are drawn out as alternatives are considered, including, doing nothing.
It takes longer to win deals and ghosting is more prevalent.
If you’re involved in finding new business, it’s about to get harder, more expensive (per lead) and slower to convert those into deals.
How do you combat that?
🎯 Data accuracy.
🧠 Think about it!
If you give your sales machine (people) dirty data, they will spend lots of time chasing and less time selling.
If you give them great data they spend more time talking to clients. Forget about the revenue performance for a minute. Think about the human performance benefit here.
Salespeople who have good conversations feel good.
And, they tend do more of what makes them feel good.
The more they do, the better they get, the more sales they make.
It’s a natural sales performance escalation machine.
What should you do?
Give your new business team a list of highly qualified people to interact with.
📣 Conversations (delivered across whatever channel) drive sales. You need to be talking to people who…
➡️ have the problem you solve,
➡️ are able to buy, and
➡️ are accessible.
Recently we had a Sales Development Aust client give us a list of 519 buyer roles as “people who buy our stuff”.
That shows us that either you want us to be making 1,000’s calls into a void and talking to people who don’t care about your service, OR you don’t know who is buying and for what reasons.
Either way it’s not how you do sales – “it’s not a numbers game”
I regularly hear sales leaders complaining that their sales team spends too much time chasing leads that will never close. Of pipelines full of hopes and dreams, not deals and customers.
But they refuse to understand the impacts of starting with bad data.
👩💻 Here is the reality.
In 2022, every month 3% of people moved jobs.
That’s 36% per year movement.
If you bought a contact list it has a bunch of inaccuracies built in. (NB: If your list provider bought a list, it’s even more out of date)
Do your very best to remove those inaccuracies before giving them to your sales function.
Just as point of reference, if your not squirming at the cost of your contact data, it’s probably dirty.
As a minimum, check and remove:
- LinkedIn profiles that don’t match the role.
- Bounced Emails.
- Direct numbers listed as 1300 or 1800.
- Mobile numbers not answered.
- Voicemails that are not recorded in their voice.
If you have a starting list of 1000, you’re likely to end up with less than a couple of hundred who you can really converse with.
Divide those into personas and industries and you’ll have small amounts of people who you should be able to reach out to, in a way that resonates.
Conduct mico-campaign with high levels of success.
All the work needs to be done before the selling starts.
If you’re a sales leader and you’ve let go of a team member or two. Think about doubling down on data, to give your remaining team the best chance they can at actually talking to people who are real, are in the right industry, have the right role and answer their emails or phones.
Yep, it’s more work for you or the sales ops team.
Or you could outsource it?
