John Wall: Once you get going with a group of salespeople, it’s not just yourself selling. You’ll want to be able to do some sales analysis. You need to figure out how many deals are in action right now. Where are things going? What are the odds of them closing? And ultimately, what kind of revenue are you going to pick up from that? Many of these systems have different ways of tagging individual records. The terms may change, but there’s usually three different types of records. One is a lead, or a prospect- people that haven’t purchased from you, but they’ve shown some kind of interest. Maybe they’ve downloaded a free white paper, or you talk to them at an event, they’ve taken some kind of action to give you their contact info and make you think that they’re at least interested in what’s going on in the space.
From there, usually you have something called a prospect or a contact. The idea is that they now have engaged with the sales team, because there’s a lot of benefit when you’re going through the selling process to think about selling at a company level. Don’t just think about closing with an individual. Instead, who are the five people that are maybe involved with this purchase, or who are the five individuals where you could connect them and say, “Hey, you may not know about this other person in your company. They are looking at this too. Maybe you want to bundle this up as a project”. It can unlock doors for you, as far as larger deals, and give you the opportunity to easily prove success. Someone may not know that someone in another division is using the product and is successful. If they just connect with that person, you could close the deal instantly. So having that full account based management, they call that the ABM view of what’s going on is very important.
Then lastly, is just a deal board. Most of these systems have a report that you can pull up, and it shows you everything that’s closed this year, here’s everything that’s in the pipeline, here’s everything that sales is trying to work on. Giving you that picture so you can see at all times how are things going, as far as inbound deals, what’s happening next. It’s a great way to get a handle on your business and basically take a lot of the uncertainty and pain out of the sales process.
