5 Ways to Ensure Your Sales Reps Register Leads with Vendors
Effectively managing sales reps has never been simply a matter of having sufficient knowledge and technical proficiency in your field. It also requires a high degree of specific soft skills to shape effective habits and practices through interpersonal insight, and not simply haranguing reps over quotas. As 80% of new leads in any industry never result in sales, sales managers need to take advantage of every tool in the kit to mold successful sales teams. Developing a work cycle that ensures that sales reps register leads promptly and consistently is one such tool.
Lead registration starts the process of lead nurturing in a sales organization. Unnurtured leads – however promising they may seem at the outset – stand little chance of conversion and ultimately translate into wasted hours and resources. On average, 50% of the leads your reps generate are not purchase-ready. Organizations with systems in place for rapid response and lead nurturing garner 50% more sales while spending 33% less in the process.
With 35-50% of sales ultimately going to the vendor who responds first, getting leads registered in your organization and with vendors is critical to effective sales cycles. In this guide, you’ll learn about the importance of lead registration and how to habituate your sales teams to reliable and timely registration as a high priority in their regular activities.
What is the Importance of Lead Registration to Effective Sales Performance?
In any organization – technology, resellers, system integrators – registered leads become nurturable leads. Nurtured leads convert at higher rates across the boards, and having them in your system enables reps and marketers to work together on a full-court press with the most sophisticated and up-to-date tools available.
Because most leads enter your system unready to purchase – yet simultaneously most receptive to the organization that reaches out first – you want to begin the lead nurturing process as soon as possible. Building deeper relationships with potential customers that ultimately lead to purchases and customer loyalty takes multiple interactions. Most first-time purchasers have received an average of ten marketing communications at the time of purchase, yet fewer than half – 49% – of marketers reach out in any channel more than 2-4 times.
However, with today’s martech toolkit, rising above average in lead nurturing implementation has never been easier. With marketing automation tools for dynamic advertising and email personalization, reps and marketers can now reach out to registered leads more effectively and with less manual work. Among polled marketers and sales reps, 56% of respondents report an increase in conversion rates after just two to three months of implementing marketing automation processes and 57% see improvement in lead nurturing.
Gaining an edge in lead nurturing and aligning marketing and sales for optimal performance in converting purchase-unready leads depends entirely on having those leads registered in your system and with vendors. Lead registration is the key that unlocks the most reliable path to conversion.
5 Ways to Enable, Encourage, and Incentivize Lead Registration with Your Sales Reps
Establishing lead registration as a core task in your sales teams’ work cycles involves a combination of providing the right tools and communicating effectively with meaningful metrics.
1. Emphasize Lead Registration in Training and Onboarding
As new sales reps enter your organization, you need to instill in them the importance of tasks that – though they may seem small and perfunctory – represent significant potential value at the bottom line. Effectively communicating along these lines begins in training and onboarding.
2. Give Your Reps the Tools They Need with a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Platform
The easiest and most reliable way to ensure team members perform tasks is to give them tools that facilitate those tasks. For tasks such as lead registration that set cross-functional processes in motion, having an integrated one-stop-shop that records all interactions and contact information across departments reduces the necessary steps to a few mouse clicks and minimal data entries.
Adopting customer relationship management (CRM) platforms such as Salesforce delivers an increase in sales 87% of the time. Among the many contributing factors to this high performance rate are the platforms’ ease of use and simplified collaboration.
3. Incentivize CRM Use
Although 82% of organizations now use a CRM platform in some capacity, that hasn’t always been the case. For more seasoned sales reps accustomed to traditional lead handling practices, CRM-related tasks may initially seem like busy work. Clearing this hurdle may involve creating incentives for consistent adherence to CRM practices while you continue to demonstrate the real benefits in the long term.
4. Communicate the Importance of Sales and Marketing Alignment
Sales reps work in an environment of uncertainty. There are good quarters and bad. Communicating to them the data-driven certainty that collaborative efforts with marketing drive higher lead conversions puts registering leads within their understood self-interest. Companies that align marketing and sales on average exhibit 19% faster growth and 15% increased profits.
5. Track Progress and Measure Team Efforts Periodically
With reps using CRM, you have access to all relevant data concerning lead registration and follow-up. Over time as you accumulate more hard data, you can incorporate this data into periodic meetings to demonstrate the effectiveness of having everyone on the same page.
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