Your sales team seems less enthusiastic when making calls or doing sales these days. They don’t look excited, full of motivation and drive. They even seemed to be just making the calls for the sake of it. Are you seeing these mentioned signs? If you are, it’s time to change up.
Before that, it is crucial to note that your sales team and also the leads provided for them is your bread and butter. Both of the sales teams and leads rely on each other. We will explain further on how both points are related below.
Firstly, if your sales team is showing the signs mentioned above, we should look at how to motivate your sales team without money. Sure, money plays a crucial role but that’s not all there is to ensure your sales team are happy.
1. Recognise and celebrate success publicly
Everyone deserves praise and recognition for their hard work and effort. No one would dislike the idea of being praised and celebrated for their diligence and dedication towards the job or the company. By recognising and celebrating their achievements, this will encourage them to continue their good work. On the other hand, this will also encourage and be a motivation for other team members to achieve greater or to be set as a role model for them.
2. Encourage feedback and communication
It is important to trust your sales team but at the same time, it is also equally important to provide constructive feedback where needed for improvements. Instead of giving ambiguous feedback, pinpoint on the specific weakness they have and provide exercise to guide them to improve on it. Do encourage your team members to also communicate if they are facing any problems or issues that they need help with. This will speed up the process of learning and eliminate potential time wasted on their end and motivate them to improve on themselves.
3. Remove pebbles or any obstacle so that they can focus on what they do best and earn more commission.
If your sales team is facing any difficulties or struggling, it is your responsibility to help them eliminate it or at the very least reduce it, in order for them to focus on what they do best and fulfill their job scopes and earn their deserved commissions. You should be able to monitor and identify the problems of your sales team at any time to prevent any wasted resources. This will also make them feel like their company cherishes them and their hard work, making them feel motivated to continue doing their best.
4. Create opportunities.
Last but not least, creating possible opportunities for your sales team will also act as a form of motivation. Instead of just doing mundane tasks everyday, creating opportunities for your sales team will help them to showcase their skills and capabilities in new ways that you may not even know. This will help them grow their talent and strengthen their expertise and in return motivating them to continue their journey with you.
Ensuring the quality of the leads provided to your sales team is also creating opportunities and motivating them. We cannot stress enough on the importance of the quality of leads especially when doing Business-to-Business (B2B) sales.
Why is lead quality the most important factor you need to consider in your B2B sales? Let’s learn more about lead quality. Let’s first go through the different types of leads.
There are 3 different types of leads:
- Lead – unverified contacts: These are contacts or information of personals that have not indicated an interest in your brand or products. These are just people who potentially could be interested. For example, buying a lead database. A lead database are information gathered quickly based on the detected buying patterns and histories of the consumers through the computer system, hence, the purchase intent of the consumer to your brand or products will be low and not guaranteed.
- Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL): These are leads that have indicated interest in what a brand or product has to offer. But how do you know that? For instance, when someone registers on your website for email subscription or fills in their details from your advertisement prompts. These leads are aware of your brand or product and are curious to know more. The purchase intent is present, but might not necessarily have the purchase capability or urgency.
- Sales qualified leads (SQL): These leads have 100% interest in your brand or product and are ready to talk to your sales team. They have done their research on you and your competitors and are now reaching out to fulfill their buying intent.
Now that you have identified the difference between all the 3 leads, here is why lead quality is the most important factor you need to consider in your B2B sales over quantity.
a. Quality leads are cheaper in the long run.
The objective of your marketing team is to produce MQLs where the leads have interest in your brand or product. Buying cheaper leads now does not necessarily mean that it will be more cost efficient in the long run for your company. Not only is it not cost effective, passing a lead database and passing these leads to your sales team will demotivate them because oftentimes these leads are not interested in your company. This will cause a waste in money, time and effort.
Let’s compare these 2 scenarios for a better understanding.
Scenario A:
You buy 1000 leads from a database supplier for RM0.5 per lead. That’s a total of RM500. Since these are raw leads, your sales team will have to call and filter through all these 1000 leads. Let’s say 5% of these leads convert to MQL. It will then mean that you are paying RM500 for 50 MQLs, or RM10 per MQL.
Assuming that your sales team spends 5 minutes for each calls, and since they would have to call all 1000 leads to obtain 50 MQL, that would be 100 minutes spend for 1 MQL. (20 calls needed to get 1 MQL x 5 minutes = 100 minutes)
If you are paying your sales team RM3000 per month, their labor cost per minute will be RM0.31 per minute. So the total cost to obtain 1 MQL in this scenario is RM10 (per lead cost) + RM31 (sales labor cost – RM0.31 x 100 minutes) = RM41 per MQL. This cost does not include the opportunity cost of wasting your sales team time and demoralizing them with constant rejection.
Scenario B:
You have created and launched a lead generation ad on Facebook. Anyone who had clicked on your ad, voluntarily registering on the pop-up form is automatically a MQL; someone who indicates an interest in what your brand has to offer. From our experience and database, Peasy users usually pay anything between RM8 – RM19 per MQL on Facebook ads. Your sales team also does not have to call and filter through the long list of leads. Hence, cost per MQL is only for the ads you paid to FB which is RM8-RM19.
b. Quality leads improve your sales team morale
Imagine this, your sales team only has to call SQL, keeping in mind that not ever MQL is SQL. The duration of time spent on calls is significantly reduced.
Another common means to generate B2B leads is to use lead magnet. Lead magnet is when a free item or service is provided in return for their contact details. However, just because a prospect registers to download a PDF per say, it doesn’t necessarily mean that he/she is ready to talk to your sales team yet. Calling them too early may interrupt the sales cadence, waste your sales team time and demoralise them. Although your sales team is professional and has the capability to be adept at dealing with rejection, you would not want to erode their confidence in your lead. If they call with an expectation of rejection, that mentality will affect them even when dealing with good quality leads.
c. Quality leads protect your online reputation
Every now and then, you get unsolicited spam emails and calls. What do you do when you get them? You marked the email as spam, or if you are using an app such as TrueCaller – you can even mark the phone number as spam. This is exactly what unqualified prospects will do when they get an email or call from your company. Email servers will automatically ban emails from your domain. Other prospects won’t pick up your call. This is normal as they had zero to low interest towards your company and they might not even know who you are. Calling the right leads will prevent your online image from being known as spam.
Now that you are aware of the importance of having qualified leads to motivate your sales team, what is next? You should now learn how to qualify B2B leads. Continue your journey by clicking on the next blog post on the button below!
