Scaling a business requires a scalable sales marketing strategy. This article will explore methods of Scaling your sales process of qualified leads
Methodology:
There’s a good chance you have a goal to grow your business this year. But how do you actually do that? How do you figure out what to do that will successfully help you hit your targets?
When planning to scale your business, how do you avoid the trap of just randomly chasing sexy new sales and marketing tactics at random?
A powerful framework for diagnosing the pitfalls in your current sales process and identifying the highest yield areas of input is called limiting factor analysis.
The simplest way to understand this methodology is to visualize a simple linear manufacturing line of some widget. There’s a series of linear steps which all need to happen, likely in a particular order, in order to get to the finished product. Let’s say there are five steps, and each step can finish one widget per hour. You hire double the people for the final step in the process… How much does the speed up your production? Unintuitive answer: none whatsoever, because step four is still only going to be providing step five with one widget per hour to work on, meeting the extra staff would just be waiting around with nothing to do.
Instead of a widget on a production line, you have a prospect going through however many steps in your sales and marketing pipeline. Analyzing the pipeline for bottlenecks and speeds relative to one another will show you where to invest for growth so that your investment doesn’t go to waste in the form of unused capacity due to the bottleneck.
No more using the approach of: wow cool that sounds like an interesting idea that I heard on this podcast. Seems like it could really work, maybe let’s give it a shot?
Instead, using the approach of: what’s the biggest bottleneck in the sales and marketing pipeline right now? Is there some area that would hold back our progress even if we double our input in other areas (such as ad spend, number of sales staff, number of leads)
Tools and Tactics:
Email Outreach Tools
64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach customers. At the end of the day, few marketing strategies can beat a well-executed email outreach lead gen campaign.
While it’s possible to scale the sales process by hiring more and more contractors to prospect for you…a much better approach is to first see how much you can scale simply by implementing tools that enable a much smaller team to scale email outreach campaigns very quickly.
Some great tools for this:
- Mailshake
- Woodpecker
- Findthatlead
- Snovio
- Lemlist
(It’s important to note that these are different than email newsletter type of tools, like MailChimp – although some platforms do both)
Instead of hiring a bunch of people to manually do outreach to hundreds of prospects a day…you can run hundreds of campaigns to thousands or even tens of thousands of prospects, with a much smaller lead gen staff.
Automation Tools
Important note: it’s important to bear in mind that some of these tools can break the TOS (terms of service) of certain platforms when used in particular ways. Use these tools cautiously for this reason and ideally Do some research on whether the tool you’re interested in breaks the TOS of the platform you want to use it on.
Similar to automating much of your email outreach to enable you to scale more with less, two other popular categories of automation tools are tools like Zapier, and tools like Phantombuster.
Zapier automation tools
This refers to the types of tools that lets you connect different apps together and create customized automated workflows between them. The clear category-leader here is Zapier.
You can use Zapier to do an almost infinite variety of things such as:
- Automatically add Facebook leads to a spreadsheet
- Send an automatic email follow-up in 10 days to people who’s first name starts with the letter “G”
- Add info for newly scheduled calls to your calendar
- Add your Twitter DMs as leads in your CRM
- Send a thank you message to everyone who follows you on Instagram
- Automatically let your project manager know when a client emails your customer support desk
(this shortlist is to give you an idea but is 0.001% of what it can do)
Slidecast also has a Zapier integration letting you sync your data and automate workflows between Slidecast and your CRM and other tools you use.
Phantombuster automation tools
Tools like Phantombuster, by contrast, actually run little specific automation scripts (that come pre-loaded, or you can create). There are also several alternatives for this category beyond Phantombuster that are also solid.
While these tools are also extremely versatile, here are some examples of how you can use them:
- Automatically send Linkedin connection requests with a list of customers downloaded from your CRM
- Generate a list of prospects based on people who follow your competitor on Instagram
- Follow/unfollow a list of Twitter profiles
- Scrape a list of Quora posts in certain categories
- Export all Google maps info that matches certain search criteria
Slidecast to Scale Your Presentations
Aside from streamlining your processes for generating sales leads, it’s important to look at the other side of the coin by optimizing your sales presentation processes. You don’t just need qualified leads, you need an efficient and reliable method for creating and delivering great sales pitch presentations too!
Many businesses still use PowerPoint delivered over a Zoom call for their presentations, or something similar. This type of set-up is often a limiting factor in the scalability of your sales process, with some stats showing that the majority of people creating presentations take over 8 hours to create one presentation. Not to mention scheduling and rescheduling Zoom calls, troubleshooting the lead not showing up on Zoom, or them not being able to see the presentation…the list goes on and on.
Start using Slidecast to create and deliver your presentations in a fraction of the time by doing things like…
- Create new presentations in a fraction of the time by using our intuitive drag and drop editor, or through our native integration with Canva’s design tools.
- Instantly deliver a presentation in several different formats, directly to their email or phone, which they can open through a single click on the link.
- Create self-guided presentations that prospects can go through on their own, as they listen to pre-recorded audio clips that correspond with the slides of the presentation
- Use our CRM integrations to save hours on data entry into your CRM, or by using our Zapier integration to create custom automated workflows
At some point, most businesses will find that they have plenty of prospects, and the limiting factor is how many sales calls and pipeline deals you can handle. In some cases, it’s easier to 2x your sales presentations by switching from PowerPoint/Zoom to Slidecast, than it is to 2x the qualified leads going into your pipeline.
When looking to scale, identify and implement the highest-yield strategies first.
Make sure you’ve gone to www.slidecast.com to create your free Slidecast account and immediately start streamlining your sales presentation process.
