insight : madeleine macrae
Focus on Outbound Sales to Help Your Clients and Your Business
When times are good, it’s easy to focus on in-bound sales. But when the economy slows down, redirect your attention to outbound sales and follow-ups BY MADELEINE MACRAE
C
OVID-19 has forced us both to modernize and go back to the fundamentals of sales and marketing. Essentially, it has challenged
us to find better ways to reach our clients and conduct business with them.
When in-bound lead flow dries up, it forces us to evaluate our outbound activities. During economic highs, it’s easy to lose sight of our follow-up processes. There are so many new opportunities cropping up that we don’t necessarily mine each and every opportunity to its full potential.
Early on in the coronavirus crisis, many of my window covering
clients reported a huge drop in their lead flow. Some reported a decrease in excess of 80 percent in in-bound lead flow. During times of lean in-bound leads, we have to be diligent in every aspect of follow-up. We have to follow up consistently with all prospects and clients: those who reach out to us for our expertise, those who have open quotes, those for whom we have recently installed and those who are part of our past client rosters.
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JULY + AUGUST 2020 | wf-vision.com
Each of those four categories is a rich source of increased revenue. Improving your standards in follow-up and holding yourself or your team more accountable for their outbound activities in each of those categories can drive significant business, especially in a time like this.
If you had 100 open quotes in front of you (or, if you are a much smaller business, maybe 10 or 25), would you know exactly how many times, on average, you would need to dial the phone in order to transform that stack of quotes into cash? If not, this is the perfect opportunity to find out. Of course, running these numbers through a CRM would be the most ideal way to track this, but good old-fashioned pen and paper can work just as well. On your paper or Excel sheet, create three columns: calls made, closed sales and dollar value. Set aside two full hours every single day. Make the calls. Put a tally mark in the first column every time you dial the phone. When you speak with a client and convert an open quote to a closed deal, put a tally mark in the second column and then jot down the sales amount.
