Five Strategic Presales process steps to race past your sales targets

Saying, ‘we focus on closing more than Presales process’ is just like saying “We focus on steering, not on the engine.”

A well-tuned and strategic Presales process is like a powerful engine that drives any revenue generating sales machine.

If you have a long sales consideration period, your ability to create a could mean the difference between being a successful or failed business.

From the first point of interaction to the final closure, it needs to lead your prospects down the right path. In turn, this will increase total sales conversions.

Next, lets consider what will happen if you don’t have a presales process.

Why you need a presales process?

If you can pick-out and focus on the right presales processes, it’ll make sure that your sales team is optimally performing at a high level. In turn, it’ll be a boon for your overall marketing and sales team activities.

On the other hand, your sales team can idle without the right sales-qualified leads. If you want your sales team to consistently generate fresh revenue, your sales team need to get their hands-on high quality sales-qualified leads on a regular basis.

Without the right leads, even the best sales team would be like a Ferrari without petrol.

Next, let’s see if it’s really necessary to prioritize the Presales process.

Will Presales activity take-up too much time to close deals

Let’s look at sales cycle.

In this system, you can see that only the last stage directly co-relates to sales closures.

But most businesses focus too much on closures. They tend to closely follow and optimize everything related to the final closures ahead of other Presales activities.

In other words, Presales processes gets thrown to the backseat.

But, the ability to optimize your Presales processes is critical to maximizing your sales closures.

As per a report by Insidesales, the sales spend almost 40% of their time searching for prospects. Meanwhile, the ability to respond first can overwhelmingly tilt your responses in your favor.

Ideally, the sales team should collectively spend more time on the prospecting activity. Only, a fixed amount of time requires to be spent at the final sales closure activity.

This will help you streamline and optimize the entire sales operations.

Optimizing your Presales processes will directly improve your deal closures.

You can begin this process by taking a look at all available pre-sales oppurtunities.

Presales processes actually help you close more deals

Most sales professionals feel anxious about meeting a new prospect. Usually, they would also need to pace back and forth and try-on feeble conversation starters’ before the beginning of the meeting.

This could be avoided if your prospect is already familiar with the business. With the right presales process, you can familiarize your prospects to your business.

Five most important Presales processes or activities that you can do

Here are the five ideal Presales processes that can directly improve your sales closures.

1. Creating ideal customer and buyer persona
2. Website live chat
3. Cold calling for Lead Qualification
4. Email drip campaigns
5. Account-based prospect targeting

These presales processes will help you reinforce and strengthen your actual sales closure activities.

Creating customer personas of your ideal customer

Without due research, mostcompanies would describe their ideal customer based on hunches and guesses.

Unfortunately, most of the times, these could be wrong. And, sometimes these could lead to catastrophic results.

In the past, even well-known brands such as J.C penny has ended-up in ditch by taking shortcuts that side-steps customer profiling process.

To create a solid customer persona, you need to first relevant customer data.

This could be done through two different ways.

Method 1 –

Quantitative customer profiling –

This involves collecting your existing customer data through analytics platforms such as Google analytics.

You can begin your review by analyzing pages which were most frequently viewed by your customers. You can also test different offers with your existing customer base. This will help you zero-in on the most appropriate offer that’ll engage your customer.

In short, a systematic quantitativeanalysis will help you achieve a basic understanding of your user preferences and needs.

Method 2 –

Qualitative customer profiling –

Basically, a qualitative customer profiling involves understanding your customers on a 1:1 basis. This could be done through web surveys and polls.

The web-based survey software Typeform lets you easily run a survey based on the available information. This will also allow you to collect relevant insights based on the available data.

By reviewing the different overlapping demands and pain points, you can make better decisions in your business and marketing efforts.

This conversionxl blog covers how you can actually go about creating qualitative customer survey.

Both qualitative and quantitative methods will help you achieve a better understanding of your audience. This will also help you segment between the different audience segments. In turn, this will help you tailor better online strategies to engage with your core visitors.

2. Website presales live chat

For most businesses, the ability to drive better pre-sales is critical.

Today, most businesses find their best opportunities online. Until recently, most websites were able to use landing pages and offers to convert a good percentage of their visitors.

But today, the website visitor needs to be proactively engaged if you want to convert them into engaged leads. Providing proactive website live chat can turn website visitors into engaged leads.

On the web at present, live chat is an accommodating tool used for website engagement. By utilizing the live chat tool, you can easily engage with users across the board.

Most likely, a live agent will be able to provide personalized engagement that’ll increase your website lead conversions.

3. Cold calling for lead Qualification

If you enquire a sales person about their most significant challenge, their answers will be likely similar.

There is a smarter way to approach cold calling along with other digital channels.

“Most sales people struggle with quality of their leads across board. In this situation, it’s really hard to identify and reach the qualified leads before the competition.”

If you reach out to online leads one-by-one, your competitors could beat you at reaching the most qualified leads. Also, you won’t be able to reach any prospective lead within a given time.

In this situation, cold calling can work as the preferred method to qualify your website leads. In case, you don’t have live chat, you can individually cold call each lead to verify if they’re sales-ready.

If not, you can educate them about your business. In turn, this would make your users research about your business.

After due research, these prospects may get interested at your business or product. At this time, your sales team will have a much easier time on closing these deals.

4. Email drip campaigns to drive engagement

Let’s think about a direct lead interaction.

Your business gets a lead due to inbound marketing or cold-calling. In most cases, there’s less that 20% of these leads getting converted into customer.

These situations are likely to end with a loss of opportunity.

Instead, an e-mail drip campaign allows you to connect and engage with a lead on the long term. This could be achieved through a email marketing campaign.

In a email campaign, you are systematically sending information on a periodic basis. These emails would keep your business on the mind of customer.

Later, there could be a time when the customer actually needs the product. At the time, the prospect is likely to reach-out to your business ahead of competitor.

With this in mind, a sequential email drip nourishing campaign works great as a presales process.

5. Account based presales – Create a list of dream Clients

In the case of most businesses, they would have a list of dream clients. Closing these customers would be a big win for these businesses. But, most businesses fall short of even successfully engaging with these potential customers.

Often, they end-up on moving onto the next available opportunity. Inevitably, this opportunity will be significantly less attractive than original opportunity.

In this place, businesses need to actually plan and strategize how they’re actually going to reach these users.

This allows you to collect further details about their challenges and specific pain points. Also, you can form strategies on resolving these specific challenges.

Armed with this information, you can create specific content pieces that cater to the needs of customers.

Later, you can reach-out-to these users through Linkedin ads or optimizing for specific keywords used by these agents. You can also distribute this content through email marketing campaigns.

This strategy will help you gain a position amonbg your target audience radar.

In turn, you’ll be able to start fixing sales meetings with these target customers in your relevant niche.

6. Crafting presentations to win-over prospects

While approaching new opportunities, most businesses tend to overly rely on discovering and leveraging new opportunities.

But today, most clients are guarded when they are being pitched new product or services. This means that it’s incredibly hard to get through to your prospects.

Rather, you can start providing personalized presentation of your services to your customers.

A well-crafted presentation will help you present all relevant pain points to your customers. In the same space, you can also explain how you intoned to solve those pain points.

Later, your prospects would be much more open to your sales pitch that’ll help you close deals quicker with much less effort.

In this way, having the ability to create carefully thought-out presentations can be an important ability for your business.

Conclusion:-

In order to convert a lead into a customer, the prospect should be made aware of the value of the business. Through a well-tweaked and strategic pre-sales process, you can educate and empower your customer to make right purchase decision.

Further, the right Presales strategy will help you consistently generate leads to reinforce your sales efforts.