KLA Group’s Weekly Sales Tips and Business Advice

Top 10 Business, Lead Generation and Sales Prospecting Tips

The best tips solve real-world business issues. We base our advice on problems we’ve helped clients solve, challenges every business leader eventually encounters and submissions from other industry leaders. Here are 10 of our all-time favorite tips. How many are you following?

1. Don’t Get all Your Leads from a Single Source

If you’re getting all your leads from one new business development activity, you’re missing out on some great opportunities. You’ll see a significant dip in your sales funnel as each lead source has its own natural cycle. Mix it up with email campaigns, Google AdWords, events, social media, referrals and prospecting to build a more robust pipeline. 

2. Who’s Talking Now?

If cold calls make you feel like you’ve activated your inner robot or are reading from a script, then it’s safe to say you’re doing all the talking. Cold calls are a key opportunity to listen to the prospect and understand what their challenges are. Add in open-ended questions and get the prospect engaged and talking.

3. Stop Expecting Results, Start Expecting Performance

Sometimes results aren’t always in your sales rep’s control. But their performance is, and that’s what you should be tracking through the sales cycle. Are they making the calls and are they following up? If they are not meeting your performance expectations over a period of six or more months, that’s where you have a problem. 

4. Wine and Dine Your Prospects

If calls aren’t working, your LinkedIn invitation wasn’t accepted, and your tried and true prospecting is greeted with silence, it’s time to get creative and try some old-school strategies. Drop in for an in-person meet and greet, send a handwritten note or send something lumpy. It takes 9+ attempts to gain access. Don’t accept silence as rejection.

5. Connect with the One That Got Away

You might hesitate to reconnect with prospects who slipped through your fingers, but they can be a massive source of future income. Think about it. An email to former prospects lets them know that you care about more than the sale and offers you a chance to continue showing your company’s value. Especially if things aren’t going as well as they’d hoped with your competitor.

6. Give Free Advice Often and Freely

When you offer to share your expertise freely, you’re not shooting yourself in the foot, despite what you might think. Few companies you speak with will be able to implement your suggestions without your company’s help. Instead, they’ll begin to value your expertise. You can even give them a few steps to take themselves while suggesting future actions that you could help them with. 

7. Stop Selling on Social Media

Most people, your prospects included, don’t go onto social media to be sold to. As a sales rep, if you ignore that protocol, you’ll very likely lose credibility and connections. Instead, social media is a tool to build relationships and share your expertise. To do that, start with one platform (LinkedIn is great for B2B) and start connecting to your current clients and prospects. Share content that’s relevant to the problems they’re having and add your own insights. They’ll eat it up!

8. Two Tricks to Smarter New Business Development 

When new business development focuses only on prospects who will close within the next 90 days, while ignoring everyone else, lots of real opportunities are lost in the shuffle. Instead, use a CRM to keep track of when you should call prospects back. And then be sure to do it! Stay top of mind by adding them to your lead nurturing campaign.

9. Bid with More Oomph! 

Prospects are looking at more than your price. They want to know who will meet their needs, and they won’t just take your word for it. They need to hear from someone else’s mouth why you’re the best provider for them. By adding a testimonial or two to your bid, you can share real results with prospects and keep your credibility intact.

10. Don’t Dump Prospects Who Aren’t Ready

You meet. It’s a perfect fit – but your prospect just isn’t ready to take the next step. Don’t dump them and move on to the next prospect. Make sure you tell them when you’ll follow up – and then do it! Between now and then? Send them interesting content from time to time to stay top of mind.

About Kendra Lee

Despite starting her sales career in accounting, failing IBM’s entry level sales exam and being told she couldn’t sell without an engineering background, Kendra Lee entered sales and proved those nay-sayers wrong. 

She turned her knowledge of numbers into a lead generation approach that propelled her to the top 1% of sales professionals in each IT company she sold for. She founded KLA Group, a sales and marketing agency, to consult, train and “Do it For You” so others could beat the odds and get more customers. She is the author of the books The Sales Magnet and Selling Against the Goal.