Create an Effective Sales Process - Thought Leadership Leverage

Peter Winick here today with Andy Paul. Andy is the author and founder of Zero Time Selling. Just happen to have a copy here today. It is a top 3—

Surprising how that works, isn't it? Yeah.

Top 3 sales and marketing book for 2011. So Andy, there are more sales processes out in the marketplace today than ever before.

Yes.

Some are good, some are bad, some work better than others. What is it that you look for to see if, when you're starting off with a client, what is it about a sales process that you look at and say, that's working or that's not?

Well, I usually start with one particular process, which is sales lead follow-up.

Okay.

So how are they executing their sales lead follow-up? Because that is one of the processes that lends itself best to sort of assigning metrics to it, right? So you know how many leads are coming in, you know what percentage are being followed up within what time frame, what the conversion rates are.

These are things that are all fairly Well, we're also measuring the cost per lead, right?

The cost per lead.

We're comparing all our marketing campaigns, right?

Right.

Okay.

So that is one process. And really, it's a great place to start because it's a place— first of all, most companies don't do a good job. And, you know, I start— I have what I call my CEO challenge. Well, I'll go into a company and start with the CEO and say, here's a blank piece of paper and a pencil. You know, tell me what happens to a lead from the time it hits your computer To the time it gets into the hands of the salesperson that's gonna make the follow-up call.

Okay.

Tell me all the steps, whose hands it passes through, and how long it takes. And regardless of the size of the company, whether it's a small company, mid-sized company, big company, no CEO has ever been able to do that right.

They don't know how it— all the steps, all the places it touches? No.

And they don't know how long it takes. Okay. And so if you don't know how it's happening, then it's not happening.

So the first step would be to know all the steps it takes and take a look at that from a process perspective. Right.

So what I talk about in the book is I give a— for lead follow-up in particular, I give a process. How do you map out a lead? It's fairly simple. It's a little flowchart. But you do that, then at least you identify all the places that you touch and where you can improve the process, right? Well, gosh, it's sitting on someone's desk here for 2 days because they have to assign it to a territory. Well, with a CRM system, you can assign these things really quickly, right? There's lots of tools you can bring to it and just simple refinements of process to make it happen much more quickly.

So the first thing I'm hearing is mapping out the sales lead coming in from a process perspective, eliminating the waste and questioning, because it seems like we tend to add things to processes and we don't look at it holistically and take things away and say, why are we doing— we always did that, that's why. And you're slowing down that lead getting to where it needs to go.

Right. ramifications that you have that you, when you begin to encounter when you try to refine some of these processes. For instance, I had one client where the VP of Sales took a hand in assigning every lead and where it went. Well, what he's doing is favoring a particular guy because he thought he was the best salesperson. And that then, you know, had the ramifications. What it did is this person started getting all the good business and the other salespeople started, or the good leads, and the other salespeople started struggling a little bit because it was primarily an inbound lead business.

Um-hum.

They were generating leads. And their sales started suffering as a result. Because, A, the other people were capable, they could sell the product, but he favored this one guy. So when you take it, you can look at the process, you can take these refinements to it that improve it, make it more equitable, make it more productive for the company, which is really what you're trying to do.

Great. So wrap that up is, one is know what your process is. Sounds like most people don't, haven't taken the time to kind of map it out. Make sure it's effective.

Right. In general, people don't know what their sales processes are, and they don't know how long they take and how long they should take. They're not assigning goals to it, and they're not continually looking at them and trying to improve them, right?

What's ideal then? So by the time a lead comes into the system until I've touched a client, is there a magic 39 minutes and 22 seconds? Is there a magic number, or is there a range? What's good today and what's bad?

Well, what I like to say with zero-time selling is the goal, right, is to improve your processes to the point where everything happens in no time at all, right?

Right.

In zero time. So, but that's your goal that you're working for, right? You're trying to improve them. Well, what happens is, let's take sales leads as an example. I mean, there's been studies that have been done. There's sort of the seminal MIT InsideSales.com study which has shown that, you know, if you don't follow up within the first 30 minutes to an hour, your odds of ever being able to even contact the customer that, you know, gave you the lead goes down dramatically. I mean, it's like—

So 1 hour?

Well, no. Well, that's sort of an extreme, right? So what they talk about is, I think if I remember the statistics correctly, if you can respond within the first 5 minutes, Okay, you're 100 times more likely to be able to just contact that lead.

Just to make that connection.

Just to make that connection than if you wait for 30 minutes.

Got it.

Think about that. 30 minutes, what a big difference between 5 and 30. And then the difference between an hour and more than an hour was again, it was like 7 times, right? If you did it in the first hour, you're 7 times more likely to be able to contact that lead and turn them into a qualified prospect. So the longer you wait, the value of the lead drops dramatically. Because again, they're on to something else. The customer sends the lead in, you know, within the first hour they're forgetting, right? After 2 hours they're forgetting even more. Within 2 days they've forgotten about you altogether.

So leads are not like wine. They're not getting better with age.

They're definitely not getting better with age. So if you can— to me the magic number is half hour. You know, that's realistic because it has to come in through your process. I don't like automated responses to leads. You know, hey, thanks for your lead. Your lead's really important to us. We're going to call you back at some point. You know, I think that sends a really bad message to a prospect. So if you can do it in 30 minutes, get into your system, get it assigned— your CRM system— get it assigned to a salesperson for follow-up, assign a follow-up time to it, and then management, just check every day. It's not that hard. Did all of our leads get followed up? If they didn't, you go knock on somebody's door and say, why wasn't that followed up?

Great. Thanks so much. Andy Paul today, Zero Time Selling, author and founder of the organization. Thank you.