Are you feeling the pressure of dealing with a leaky pipeline? During the sales process leads pass through a series of hand-offs through multiple stages, and having a jam anywhere in that process means a sale can get stopped in its tracks and stuck in the pipeline. And if you’re not careful, you might not […]
Are you feeling the pressure of dealing with a leaky pipeline? During the sales process leads pass through a series of hand-offs through multiple stages, and having a jam anywhere in that process means a sale can get stopped in its tracks and stuck in the pipeline. And if you’re not careful, you might not even realize you’re jamming up more sales than you’re bringing to a close.
If you’re like many people in charge of sales processes, you’re probably too busy patching up the holes in the pipeline process to do much else. How can you get your head up from under the proverbial sink and keep things flowing smoothly when all your systems are basically held together with some gum wads and string?
Trying to improve processes so they’re more efficient and less messy can be enough to make anyone lose their mind– especially if you’re one of the unlucky ones dealing with legacy processes that were not well-planned to begin with.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. And we’ve got even better news: fixing the mess on our hands doesn’t have to be hard.
Go ahead and breathe that sigh of relief.
Here’s how you can streamline your steps and create a process that you can continuously evaluate and improve.
1. Take the guesswork out of lead management.
One of the hardest parts of the sales process is simply figuring out what to do with leads once they land in the pipeline. Which ones are the hottest? And who should do the follow-up? Without a set strategy for this, valuable opportunities end up falling right through the cracks in your pipeline. And the right data can help you remove some of that subjective bias at every stage of the journey: when you have more info, you can easily identify the best opportunities instead of relying on gut feelings.
Intent data makes prioritization easy
Having too many leads sounds like a good problem to have, but that’s not really the case. Some are hotter than others – just because someone downloaded a report, it doesn’t always mean they’re ready to talk. It makes sense for your sales team to focus their efforts where they’re most likely to have success. So, how do you do that?
Intent is your secret weapon for prioritization. Buying signal data like Lusha’s Intent gathers up the breadcrumbs prospect companies leave all over the web when they’re searching for a solution like yours. That way, you can see who’s most likely to convert and start there instead of wasting time on leads that are just kicking tires. It’s a powerful extra layer to lead scoring so you can hyperfocus your messaging and outreach efforts.
Data enrichment simplifies lead-routing
A lot of times, leads come in with very little information. A lot of times you’ll get just a name and email address, maybe a company if you’re lucky. That’s not a lot to go off of. But if a lead signed up for a free trial or a webinar, then they’re a hot commodity. You’re gonna want to follow up…but who do you even give those leads to?
By using an automated enrichment tool, you can squeeze water out of a rock and get those extra details you need like industry, headcount, and location. Then with that added insight, you can distribute the leads to your reps based on your territory plan.
2. Make sure you can trust your data with the keys to the kingdom.
Everything is based on data these days, especially when it comes to sales activities like prospecting and juicing your pipeline. The success of your sales – which ultimately means the fate of your revenue – is in the hands of the data you’ve got in your CRM.
Kind of a big responsibility. Especially when you consider that 75% of CRM users say bad data costs their company customers (and hurts the bottom line). Enter stage right: data enrichment again. It’s not just for giving you more data; it’s also key to keeping that data up-to-date. If you’re going to be making decisions based on data – and duh, you’re definitely going to be doing that – it’s got to be reliable data.
Using a data enrichment tool is the way to get your CRM data looking fresh and clean again in no time. And the best part is, it’s essentially hands-off.
Just don’t forget that enriching your data isn’t just a one-time thing. To keep all your data in shape, you’re going to need continuous enrichment. Your B2B database decays at a rate of 2.1% per month. That might not seem like much, but if you let it go for a year, that means a whole fifth of your data will no longer useful.
3. Automate what you can.
A lot of time ends up being spent on manual, repetitive tasks. And when you’ve got tools that can do those things for you, why waste that valuable time? Maximize the amount of time that your reps spend doing the whole “selling” thing by putting as much on autopilot as you can. You probably don’t need more convincing, but if you did, here’s a stat that might change your mind: companies that don’t use automation end up spending 71% of their time just defining and planning business processes. And it turns out that a lot of people are wasting that valuable time. 1 in 3 B2B companies still use manual processes to do things like move data between tools.
Automating processes can look like a lot of things: scheduling meetings, setting email cadences, and responding to inbound leads. And speaking of enrichment, that’s not a thing you want to be doing manually. You could go through every contact in your CRM or on a spreadsheet and manually update them. But why would you want to? You’ve got more important things to do.
Set up automated CRM enrichment so you can set it and forget it – and focus on everything else on your plate.
4. Turn your data into actionable insights to find hidden opportunities.
The average sales funnel is riddled with missed opportunities. Part of having a streamlined sales process is uncovering those hidden gems and guiding them through the funnel instead of leaving them stranded in no-man’s-land. There are a couple of ways you can do this pretty easily: data enrichment and job change tracking.
Better identify your ICPs with enrichment.
The concept here is simple: when you enrich your CRM data, you can find out more details about the companies in your funnel. This is especially valuable if you’re following an ABM strategy.
If those target companies undergo changes in funding, revenue, location, etc., then you’ll want to know. Or if your CRM is missing headcount data, and you only target companies of a certain size, then using enrichment to get that much-needed information will help you chase after the right opportunities– with minimal work on the front end.
Job changes can reveal opportunities.
When someone steps into a new role or switches jobs entirely, that’s something you wanna know. There are a few reasons for this. If this person is already a contact in your database, then you’ve got a prefab relationship ready to build upon – and they’ve likely got new buying power.
On the other hand, you might never have interacted with this person before, but they just stepped into one of your target roles. Well, that’s a great opportunity too – people in fresh positions are often bright-eyed and ready to explore potential changes. Jump on that opportunity while it’s fresh and before they get settled into a role (and solution).
You might be thinking, “ok, this sounds good, but how am I ever going to know when that happens?” Well, if you hadn’t already guessed, we have an answer for that too. Lusha has a couple ways you can take advantage of job changes. To keep up with current contacts, sign up for job change alerts so you can get notified whenever key leads switch roles. And for new opportunities, you can use the job change filter in our prospecting platform to search for people who are new to their roles.
5. Increase visibility into your sales funnel.
If you want to keep your conversions high at every stage of your funnel (and of course you do), then you need to keep that data fresh and well-organized. That means you don’t just want to enrich your data to make sure it’s accurate, you also need to make your tech stack play nice.
This is also a huge part in automating processes like we mentioned earlier. It’s super important that your tools integrate with one another so you don’t have to manually transfer all that information. That’s a surefire way to make mistakes and potentially lose some valuable information. Instead, use a sales intelligence tool like Lusha that integrates smoothly with some of your favorite sales and marketing tech (and has an easy-to-implement API to cover anything else).
With these 5 tips and the right tools, you can smooth out the bends in your pipeline and get a streamlined path to success.
Key Takeaways
- Tools like data enrichment and intent data can help you better prioritize and route leads.
- The data you use to draw insights about your sales process needs to be up-to-date and continuously refreshed. This is achievable with job change alerts and data enrichment.
- To streamline your sales process, automate as much as you can and make sure that every tools integrates smoothly into your tech stack.
