Sales campaigns cost time and money to launch. They often disrupt the participants' schedules and create a higher level of stress. But a good campaign can more than compensate for these issues by producing a huge boost to sales – something everyone can get behind. If your last campaign or two hasn't been attended by success, check the list below to see if you've been making any of these common errors.
1. Not Researching Your Prospects
Before you start any campaign, you need to know that your approach will appeal to your hot prospects. It doesn't matter how hard you work on your offer if you end up with something that no one really wants! Just as importantly, prospects will respond far better if you already know something about them. At a bare minimum, you should know the prospect's name and (for B2B sales) his company name and title. The more you know over and above that, the easier it will be to connect with that prospect.
2. Not Researching Your Competitors
You're probably not the only company around selling your type of product. And your competitors work just as hard as you do to get in front of prospects. In fact, it's possible that one of your competitors will run a sales campaign at the same time you do. So as you contact prospects, you'll often get questions or objections based on a competitor's offerings. You must be able to answer those questions intelligently if you want to build trust with that prospect. That means knowing not only what products your competitor offers, but also how those products stack up compared to yours. Ideally, you should come up some way that your product is better for each and every competitive matchup. For example, Company A might offer a similar product that has a higher failure rate than yours, while Company B's offering lacks certain features that are standard on your models.
3. Not Having a Powerful Offer
A sales campaign with no offer or a weak offer just isn't going to thrive, no matter how good a salesperson you are. You must come up with a good offer that will appeal to prospects just so that you can get them interested enough to listen to the rest of your pitch. Note that a powerful offer doesn't necessarily need to be an expensive one; sometimes a relatively cheap gift or deal will meet with more enthusiasm than one that's expensive but meaningless to your prospect base.
4. Not Qualifying Your List
Like the offer, the lead list can save or kill your campaign. Untargeted leads are bad enough during regular sales cycles; if you're trying to run a big campaign, bad leads are poison. So before you launch your campaign, get ahold of some strong leads. It's worth spending a little more than usual on leads before a campaign because those good leads will earn you back every penny you spend and then some. Of course, even the best lead list won't be 100% accurate, so you'll still need to do some quick qualifying during the campaign. It's a lot better to spend a couple of minutes asking questions during your cold call than it is to set ten appointments and then discover that five of them aren't actually prospects.
5. Not Setting the Right Goals
Sales campaigns generally come with a specific goal in mind. At a minimum, you'd obviously want to make back the money that you just spent on your campaign plus a little profit. A well-designed campaign can often do much better than the minimum. But if your goal is way too high, you'll just end up discouraged. And if your goal is way too low, you won't be as motivated to keep going and you won't take home as much money as you could have. Setting accurate goals is as much of an art as a science, but you can start with your regular sales numbers and set a goal that's a modest percentage above that level.
By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com/
1. Not Researching Your Prospects
Before you start any campaign, you need to know that your approach will appeal to your hot prospects. It doesn't matter how hard you work on your offer if you end up with something that no one really wants! Just as importantly, prospects will respond far better if you already know something about them. At a bare minimum, you should know the prospect's name and (for B2B sales) his company name and title. The more you know over and above that, the easier it will be to connect with that prospect.
2. Not Researching Your Competitors
You're probably not the only company around selling your type of product. And your competitors work just as hard as you do to get in front of prospects. In fact, it's possible that one of your competitors will run a sales campaign at the same time you do. So as you contact prospects, you'll often get questions or objections based on a competitor's offerings. You must be able to answer those questions intelligently if you want to build trust with that prospect. That means knowing not only what products your competitor offers, but also how those products stack up compared to yours. Ideally, you should come up some way that your product is better for each and every competitive matchup. For example, Company A might offer a similar product that has a higher failure rate than yours, while Company B's offering lacks certain features that are standard on your models.
3. Not Having a Powerful Offer
A sales campaign with no offer or a weak offer just isn't going to thrive, no matter how good a salesperson you are. You must come up with a good offer that will appeal to prospects just so that you can get them interested enough to listen to the rest of your pitch. Note that a powerful offer doesn't necessarily need to be an expensive one; sometimes a relatively cheap gift or deal will meet with more enthusiasm than one that's expensive but meaningless to your prospect base.
4. Not Qualifying Your List
Like the offer, the lead list can save or kill your campaign. Untargeted leads are bad enough during regular sales cycles; if you're trying to run a big campaign, bad leads are poison. So before you launch your campaign, get ahold of some strong leads. It's worth spending a little more than usual on leads before a campaign because those good leads will earn you back every penny you spend and then some. Of course, even the best lead list won't be 100% accurate, so you'll still need to do some quick qualifying during the campaign. It's a lot better to spend a couple of minutes asking questions during your cold call than it is to set ten appointments and then discover that five of them aren't actually prospects.
5. Not Setting the Right Goals
Sales campaigns generally come with a specific goal in mind. At a minimum, you'd obviously want to make back the money that you just spent on your campaign plus a little profit. A well-designed campaign can often do much better than the minimum. But if your goal is way too high, you'll just end up discouraged. And if your goal is way too low, you won't be as motivated to keep going and you won't take home as much money as you could have. Setting accurate goals is as much of an art as a science, but you can start with your regular sales numbers and set a goal that's a modest percentage above that level.
By Wendy Connick
http://sales.about.com/
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