Last year you almost reached your sales quota; you finished at 80% of your target. You worked hard and got great feedback, but that’s not enough for you. This year you want to go all the way!
However, focusing so hard on closing deals at the end of your budget period took your attention away from your prospecting activities that would have filled your pipeline with new opportunities. As a result, now you don’t even have enough to reach your monthly goal.
All the same, you are determined to hit your target this year. So you have a big goal, but where do you start?
How do you balance creating opportunities with closing activities to fill up your pipeline? Here are 5 simple steps that will get you closer to achieving your goals:
1. Break down your big goals into activity goals
To easier manage your way to success, break your big goals into smaller weekly, monthly, or quarterly ones and turn it into actionable plans.
To do that, look back at the previous activity records and review the number of phone calls, e-mails, appointments it takes to generate a certain amount of revenue.
For example, to reach a certain amount of revenue you need to close 3 deals. To accomplish that, you need 9 opportunities and to get that you may need 18 meetings. To get in front of those 18 prospects you may need to make 70 follow-up calls.
The main goal is not to focus on the revenue you need to reach by the end of the year, but on the daily activities that will bring you there.
2. Group and prioritize your customers
All your customers are not the same. Some customers will make small purchases, some will make big purchases, and some a lot of small ones.
To keep your efforts profitable it is recommended to segment customers into groups with the same needs and strategic priority, and treat them accordingly.
It is likely that you want to focus most of your time and efforts on the customers who generate the most revenue. Therefore, companies often segment customers by size or other indicators of value.
When you have segmented your customer base, it’s time to decide whom you want to target. Simply ask yourself this: Which group of customers is more likely to give you the biggest results for the time you invest and is worth your biggest effort?
There are many ways to segment your customer base, and you can use any field or combination of fields in SuperOffice as criteria.
Learn how to create selections
3. Plan your customer activities
Once you have figured out which customer segments you want to focus on, it’s time to consider the tactical plan for each of your customer groups.
More specifically, you need a plan on how to nurture your customers, which type of activities to include, and how often you want to perform them.
Here’s an example how such a customer program might look like:
- A customers (or VIP customers): status meetings every 6 months
- B customers: quarterly status meeting by phone
- C customers: follow up with e-mails
Creating a customer program is often done at the company level, aligned with your business goals. Now your job is to plan how to keep up with the program over the next year. So when it’s decided how often and in what way you should follow up on your customers, you can start booking activities and registering them in SuperOffice.
Here’s an example of how to distribute activities: If you have 12 large customers, and you need 2 meetings with each yearly, you’ll need to distribute these 24 meetings throughout the year. And if you have 48 medium customers, you know you have to call them all each quarter. Here you create a selection of all medium customers who have not yet received a status call and use this list to call your next week’s appointments.
4. Make your sales efforts measurable
Another good tip is to take into account what performance indicators you are going to be measured against, and then make your sales efforts measurable. For example, you might be measured on the number of a certain activity type (like status meetings), opportunities registered in SuperOffice, or your closing rate.
First, you need to make sure that the relevant activity types are available in your SuperOffice diary. You do so by adding or editing activity types in lists.
Edit list items (for administrators)
5. Get started building your pipeline
a) Create call lists
To kick off, start by creating call lists. You can extract any group of customers from your database using the criteria that fit your target group with SuperOffice Selections. We suggest you start out by creating a list of customers that you claim “ownership” of. Create call lists using selections
b) Register your opportunities
The best way to keep track of what’s going on in your pipeline is through the CRM system, so make sure you register all your opportunities in SuperOffice. When you create them, make sure to choose the action required, contact name and the date of the estimated completion. Create a sale
c) Schedule follow-ups
Always register your follow-ups in your diary to ensure you remember what to do next. Even if your customers say they are not ready to make a decision yet, add a follow-up on the date that they are willing to discuss the purchase again. This way you will always have a good reason to interact with your customers. Create appointments
Conclusion
In short, if you follow these 5 steps thoroughly, you will have a plan in place to ensure you hit your targets this year.
SuperOffice can become a powerful tool while planning as well as implementing your actions to achieve your sales goals. The data in the system can drive your business decisions, as well as assist in planning how to reach your budget and prioritize your opportunities.
To really benefit from SuperOffice, make sure you consistently register all your sales opportunities and keep updating them with relevant data. This way SuperOffice will help you manage your opportunities, next moves and set reminders, so you can just focus on your most promising deals and hitting those sales numbers.