Empower your team with airSlate SignNow to capitalize on leads prospects opportunities for teams

How to create outlook signature

the most common terms used in sales meetings are probably leads and prospects and often i hear these terms being used interchangeably or incorrectly and frankly that drives me nuts so i wanted to clear that up with you today [Music] sales is a process in fact it's actually lots of little processes stacked up together in a row so that any sales person can reliably convert a total stranger into a customer over and over again i mean there's the prospecting process there's the discovery process there's the presentation process the convincing process the closing process the onboarding process and on and on so how do we know where people are in this overall sales spectrum and which of these micro processes to focus on next well that's an important question because if you can understand that decision you know where to focus your energy and you have the power to convert these strangers into customers it starts at the most basic level understanding how you can organize all of those people out in the world that you could be doing business with and that's what brings us back to leads and prospects we're also going to be talking about targets and deals and customers but let's start with these two foundational building blocks a lead is any person that you can confirm these two things for number one is that you have their contact information now this can be as simple as their name and a phone number or it can be as sophisticated as several dozen fields and a database that someone else has researched and teed up for you number two this person has expressed interest in what you sell or do in some way now this interest could be as shallow as them downloading a white paper or a resource on your website that's somehow related to a problem that you solve or it could be as explicit as them picking up the phone and calling you to ask about a service that you provide and how they can buy it from you and that's when we can truly consider somebody a league we have their contact information and they've exhibited interest in our product or service in some way now as a salesperson when you encounter a lead like this your priority is to uncover two additional pieces of information so that you best know how to categorize this new lead the first thing we want to understand is are they qualified do they have the kind of problems that you solve do they have the ability to spend money solving those problems are they located in the area that you serve are are they at the stage or do they have the type of business that is required for you to actually be able to do business with this person not everyone who's interested in what you do is qualified to do business with you and if you go all in and start the sales process with an unqualified person you're going to be wasting a lot of time at this point if you can check off all three of these items you know that you can advance this lead to a full-on prospect voila the difference between a lead and a prospect has been illuminated and you now never need to use these terms incorrectly in a sales meeting again thank you very much but backing up in this same conversation once you know that the prospect is qualified you now have the ability to uncover an additional key piece of information that can shape the entire sales process and that second key piece of information is their timeline now their timeline could be as concrete as a deadline where current vendors contract is expiring and they really need a replacement or it could be as loose as the admission that they actually have the kinds of problems that you solve or they're looking to hire someone just like you and if you can uncover positive intent on the prospect's side to want to make a decision solve a problem acquire your goods and services or make a meaningful change in their life or business then you can advance this prospect into a deal and in sales this is where the real fun starts a deal is any decision that the prospect needs to make that will end in a clear yes or no a yes being a closed one aka new client our new sale for you and a no being we've gone with somebody else or the dreaded we're doing nothing now here's a really important detail in these five phases that i'm sharing with you a prospect could have any number of deals with you over time now for example let's say that you're a local it provider that helps small businesses the first deal with a new prospect who you know is qualified and interested might be to set up some workstation management and data backup service that they pay monthly for that will be driven to a yes or no decision let's say that that customer signs up with a yes decision and you win that deal now eight months from now they may come back to you and ask for a proposal for upgrading all of the hardware in their offices which would actually turn into a second deal for the same prospect now perhaps down the road in the future they may decide to open a satellite office and you may have a third deal to outfit this new office with the workstations the networking and all of the it requirements that they need so in this case you would have three deals with the same qualified prospect now as a side note after they sign the first deal you may actually internally refer to them as a customer rather than a prospect for simplicity's sake for the buckets of this pipeline we still refer to them as a prospect because there's still more that they can buy from you second side note if you use salesforce deals are actually called opportunities if you use hubspot zoho or many of the other modern crms they will be called deals i like to use deals because i find that my clients just natively understand what it means more than opportunities but both are technically correct and everyone knows the number one rule of making videos is not to have more than two side notes in a row so let's get back to the main content if you understand the natural progression of a lead turning into a prospect and then a prospect ultimately spawning off one or more deals and you closing those deals then you can effectively manage your sales pipeline and becoming adept at knowing who goes where and developing the skills and how to move people and advance them from bucket to bucket is fundamental to becoming an effective salesperson but wait there's more there are two other phases i want to introduce you to today and they actually go on each end of the table that i showed you the first is related to outbound prospecting now if you're creating opportunity for your business rather than just sitting around waiting for the phone to ring are those sexy inbound leads to hit your inbox then you're gonna need a way to manage the people that you're targeting i actually call these targets which is simply a list of people that you believe might need what you sell so you're going to reach out to them this might be on a phone call might be over linkedin or you may be working the secret back channels of mutual contacts with this target it doesn't matter you just need a place to store them in the crm and keep track of your progress it's also common to use the term suspects but i really like the outbound nature of using targets and i find that that's more native and intuitive for the businesses that i work with but technically either is correct the act of prospecting is identifying new targets and consistently reaching out to them with the goal of actively generating the equivalent of a new lead or to learn enough about their business to make the decision that they're either unqualified or a misfit for what you do which means you then remove them from your active target list either way you want to be prospecting this target list with the goal of generating leads and then you want to be processing your lead list with the goal of identifying the prospects that you should be selling to okay last phase of managing all the people in your sales life what happens when you lose a deal to a competitor okay i know it doesn't happen to you very often i'm not pointing any fingers but inevitably as you scale and talk to more prospects it's going to happen or even more commonly what happens when the prospect does nothing either due to lack of budget or just not prioritizing a need for what it is that you do anytime in the near future well here's what i know not only do you know this person but they know you and you certainly knew that they were interested and qualified for a period of time so what we're not going to do is kick them over to the endless abyss of closed lost deals never to be heard from again while we're going to acknowledge that we lost this deal this time we're not going to acknowledge that the prospect is lost forever so we're going to kick them over to our nurture list so that we have a place to maintain these meaningful relationships and follow up and continue to sell to these highly qualified prospects over time now i can make a whole video just about the strategies for following up with people in this bucket but for now and in this video i simply want to ingrain the habit in you to maintain the list of your lost deals and continue to stay in touch with them because you never know when a major life or business event is going to happen in their life that will drive them right back to you and there you have it the five basic stages of turning a total stranger into a customer and never again will you confuse lead with prospect or be uncertain about where to put somebody in your crm we'll see you out there sales team