One of the most important things in increasing sales and growth is to use your CRM at its maximum capacity. At every stage of your sales pipeline, you should be very persistent, keep attention to details (make notes after negotiations and attach them to every deal), plan your next steps with clients (create tasks and use follow-ups to build trust and gather more requirements).
Usually, we divide the sales pipeline into a few steps, please feel free to check further here. Now let's discuss the situation when you have deals in the Commercial offer and Stand-by stage and the clients are not planning to go the next steps with you.
1) Commercial offer stage. Previously we did an amazing call with the client, presented our company and services which are potentially interesting for him, we even clarified some specific questions from the client and sent a commercial proposal. But a few days passed, then weeks … still silence. Most of our sales colleagues do 1-2 follow-ups and give up. Unfortunately, the key thing for success here is to recheck the client’s requirements, analyze the conversation, review your proposal and prepare a new offering, or start asking questions to make an offer more precise and define the key main points where your solution can be required. Again if your channel of communication is only e-mailing, do more, try to call clients, send a message on WhatsApp or LinkedIn.
2) Stand-by stage. Here you will see a lot of deals which tell you “Please contact us later”, or maybe “Your service is interesting but there is no request now”, or even the client tells you “We are OK, let’s start in a few months”. 90% of the salespeople will create a task to follow-up in a month or even worse - on a date that was discussed with the client. If you want to deliver more value for the client and have more chances to get the contract we recommend regularly sending messages with your updates (it can be relevant articles, updates from the product feature lists/service offering, trendy important news in the client industry, etc.) It allows you to gain more trust, build a better relationship and even if your competitors will appear at this time you will have more scores.
To sum up.
Your sales targets are important to you, your client doesn't care that you have a sales plan, limited time for closing the deal, etc. Always play on the client side, be professional, persistent, pay attention to requirements, spend time on building relationships. Money is important but a new delivered contract with a good testimonial will make you unstoppable and finally, your clients will recommend you and you can ask them to share results of your work with your future clients. P.S If you see that there is a huge amount of deals that are still inactive we are here to rebuild the engagement process and develop an actionable plan for improvements. Wishing you new wins!
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