As a business owner or sales manager, the success of your company lays in your hands. Your sales force, no matter the size, is your responsibility, and should always be your first priority. The success of your company, its future and the security of its employees depend on competent sales leadership. It’s important that you let your expectations be known, and more importantly make your expectations part of your sales process. When we talk about expectations, this isn’t just about making a monthly or annual sales quota, this is about following a variety of daily, weekly and even monthly disciplines that will help you, the sales manager, have clarity into your team’s sales activity, at all times.

Getting your sales reps to follow your instruction and include your processes as part of their sales routine will strengthen your sales force, ensure consistency with your sales data, and make analyzing your sales data an intuitive and more accurate process. You can make adjustments to your process from time to time to accommodate evolving markets and new technologies, but always be consistent. Your expectations should apply to everyone and everyone should meet your expectations.

Of the thousands of companies that we’ve served and worked with since 2009, those who have been successful and grew in annual revenue were the ones who were disciplined in their sales management processes and had consistent expectations of their sales teams throughout their organizations. Those companies that saw either zero or negative growth had no centralized sales processes at all and were managed by undisciplined sales leaders. In the end, they paid the price.

If you’re looking to build a solid foundation to nurture a world-class sales team, then the following are best practices consistently used by successful sales organizations.

Be a leader, not a friend

One of the most important responsibilities of a sales manager is the ability and willingness to assist their sales team whenever asked or whenever you feel is necessary. Whether you’re assisting with pricing, participating on a sales call, discussing strategy, helping reps get back on track during tougher months, the sales manager is a leader, and successful leaders support their teams. While it’s natural to form relationships with your reps, their first duty is to produce for the company and the sales manager’s priority is always keeping that top-of-mind. Everyone deserves help, so be a mentor, and support them when they need it. Don’t let friendship get in the way of making tough decisions. Be a leader first.

Set goals for your sales team

We’ve all heard you can’t manage what you can’t measure. This begins with establishing reasonable and precise sales goals for your sales reps to achieve on a monthly, quarterly and yearly basis. Setting goals gives something everyone can work towards. Sales reps have a target to meet and sales managers know when to step in and help their reps when they spot any struggles or shortcomings within their team. Establishing sales goals is a key component of your sales matrix, and regardless of if they are being met consistently, it’s the number one criteria every sales leader should pay attention to.

Have weekly sales meetings

Hold a sales meeting every Monday morning. This will help you accomplish a few important things. First, it will add discipline, structure, and accountability to your sales process.  Having a sales meeting consistently reminds your reps of their responsibilities and is helpful for keeping them in tune with their own sales activity. By simply talking about their activity with their sales manager on a weekly basis, the likelihood of opportunities falling through the cracks becomes fewer, resulting in a more natural flow within your company’s sales funnel. Second, the discipline and consistency of a regular sales meeting will ensure that your sales rep’s activity will remain current and up to date. Get your reps in the habit of updating their opportunities in their CRM prior to your sales meeting. This will make your meetings more efficient and productive. Good opportunity management is a key component to successful sales management.

Run Reports – Weekly!

Pay attention! Just like paying attention while driving can prevent a fatality, you need to stay on top of your sales activity and forecast accordingly so you can make the necessary adjustments or take action. Whether you’re looking at KPI Dashboards or running reports, stay on top of your data. Running reports regularly can help you spot trends, gains, and losses in different areas. A good sales manager can use this data to tap into new territories or quickly shift from failing ones. Include all or some of your reports in your weekly sales meetings. This will help your reps understand the information that’s more vital to your analytics and decision-making processes, so they can be more disciplined in keeping this data accurate and current.

Routinely review sales activity

Whether at a glance or in a report, stay on top of your team’s sales activity to make sure everyone has consistent momentum or updates with each opportunity. A CRM will offer a centralized location that makes staying on top of sales easy and practical. CRMs can include event notes, calendar appointments, emails, next follow-ups and so much more. Having sales reps keep their opportunity records up to date with the latest activity will not only help them remember where they last left off when interacting with their prospects (which is especially useful when dealing with a high volume of opportunities or longer sales cycles), but it will also give sales managers real-time insights. Regularly reviewing your team’s activity will also help you prepare for your upcoming weekly sales meeting, yet another way you can optimize your meeting time.

Conclusion

A well-organized sales process and sales team require discipline. But like every sustainable regimen the results can be rewarding and in this case, profitable. Adding structure and discipline (in the right areas) can provide you with a healthy foundation for sales success. If you’re looking for a CRM that can help you achieve your sales management goals, check out Mothernode CRM and request a demo.

Learn more about how Mothernode CRM can help automate your business processes. Schedule time with an advisor today.

With the construction and manufacturing industries back on the rise all over the U.S., Mothernode CRM has just released a new integration with ConstructConnect’s Insight service. ConstructConnect, a service that provides detailed project information to construction companies, gives its clients access to construction projects throughout the United States and Canada. This information includes contacts, companies, specified products, and other details that help construction companies tailor their sales process to each project they want to bid on.

Gain Insight into Critical Construction Industry Data

ConstructConnect’s Insight service gives building product manufacturers access to a huge pool of construction pros—over 1.1 million active contacts at last count. Its project leads database is the most accurate in all North America.

ConstructConnect clients can also limit their searches to a specific region within the country, or specify other parameters, such as project size, location, total value, and more, that fit with their company’s focus. A collaboration of four construction industry leaders, ConstructConnect enhances its clients’ success by providing a user-friendly service through which they can access information about projects.

Manufacturers who specialize in building products can use ConstructConnect’s Insight service to access forecasting tools, historical data, and construction activity to analyze their company’s performance against that of their competitors. They can use this data to engage with companies that specify the products you and your competitors provide, as well as to understand the shifting trends and drivers that shape the construction industry and the manufacturers who supply it.

Yet for most companies who use standard CRM services, that information, though highly beneficial, is disconnected from their sales processes.

Mothernode-ConstructConnect Integration Eliminates the Need for Two Lead Lists

Mothernode CRM, however, bridges that gap. When ConstructConnect clients subscribe to Mothernode’s CRM service, they can connect their Mothernode account to their ConstructConnect one, allowing them to download new projects and updates on a daily basis. These projects are the same ones that have been qualified within their ConstructConnect account, giving them a seamless integration for a decided edge over their competitors.

When clients download project updates from ConstructConnect into Mothernode, Mothernode notifies the company’s sales representatives through email or in-app notifications about updates to projects they follow within their lists of leads and opportunities. With the Mothernode integration, sales reps can stay on top of the projects they are interested in, gaining critical news that can help them land the sale.

This integration allows users to choose which projects they want to download as new leads, adding them to their already-existing sales process so they can pursue them as active leads. Once added, these projects will update automatically when the project does. The Mothernode CRM integration with ConstructConnect includes all of the projects’ details except for some supporting documents, such as plans, specifications, and similar information.

With this integration, users no longer need to rely on their ConstructConnect access to see their project leads. When they integrate their ConstructConnect account with their Mothernode CRM, they need only to access their Mothernode account, freeing them from the challenges of managing two separate lead lists.

To discover how Mothernode can help your building trades manufacturing company leverage ConstructConnect’s data without having your hands tied with two lead lists, contact Mothernode’s sales team today.

Learn more about how Mothernode CRM can help automate your business processes. Schedule time with an advisor today.

Building short-term and long-term engagement campaigns are instrumental to your lead nurturing strategy. There are an infinite combinations of campaign strategies you can create, but in this lesson we’ll focus on common types.

Short-Term Campaigns
These campaigns should be designed to convert quickly. While the autoresponder sequence is used as a personalized approach to connect with your prospect, the campaign, on the other hand, promotes your products, services, brand and expertise, and usually does so in general terms.

Long-Term Campaigns
Simply put, longer term campaigns should deliver content, less frequently, over an extended period of time. It’s purpose is to passively keep your brand, products and services in front of your buyers by dripping content to them at a low frequency. Popular content includes, promotions, new product announcements, holiday sales and seasonal related messages.

5 Truths about your Marketing Campaigns

Before you get started and if you’re new to digital marketing or building campaign sequences, there are a few things you should know before making your first campaign.

They require a small investment in time to create
Creating a campaign sequence in Mothernode CRM isn’t hard at all, but planning and designing your campaign content and messages is something that will take a bit of time. It will be time well spent! Think of each campaign template as a message you are writing to one person, except you will be able to reuse it again and again.

They will continue to evolve
Of course they will change and evolve over time. That’s because your business, ideas and strategies are evolving. The moment you begin using Mothernode Marketing Sequences you’ll be able to measure your results. What’s interesting, what’s not. As your product and service offerings change, your marketing message will change too. This is ultimately a good thing, because it shows you are monitoring the performance of your marketing campaigns.

You will see results!
How could you not? If using campaigns increases your touch points with your audience, it will increase your sales. This doesn’t mean that website visitor you engage with using campaigns will be your next customer, but what it does mean is that the increased abundance of communication increases your odds of increasing your conversion rate, because you are keeping your brand and message(s) in front of your buyers.

Content Ideas

Not sure where to begin? Need some ideas? Here are a few content ideas that you can include in any campaign. You can mix and match the concepts or stick with a consistent message, like sales and promotions.

Current Offerings

The easiest way to stimulate a sale is to make an offer. Limited time offers give your buyers a sense of urgency that can persuade them to act quick.

Sales and Promotions

Create savings offers for special occasions, such as Holiday Sales, Black Friday, Cyber Monday. Using promotions is also a great way to liquidate stock or incentive a sale.

Services | Portfolio

Nothing communicates confidence in your brand more than well put together portfolio of your work. Share your expertise with your buyers. Raising their confidence level in your brand will increase their likelihood of buying.

Customer Success

Customer service and your expertise is always a key consideration in your buyer’s criteria. Nothing can defuse doubt more than sharing testimonials and case studies from existing customers.

Quick Tip: Build at least one short-term campaign and one long-term campaign. You can repurpose content to use in both. Executing these campaigns will give you more opportunities to market and sell to your website visitors than you’ve ever had before.

Depending on your business and how well your SEO is working, your products and services might be stimulating a lot of interest. That’s great! But the more interest in your content, the more questions you’ll receive.

Most often this means your visitors are completing a web form, better known as lead capture forms, to effectively submit their inquiry. For your visitor, this is their gateway to connect with you. For you, this is the way you capture their information and an opportunity to turn your visitor into your next client.

While simple responses are easy to facilitate, when faced with a volume of requests, daily or weekly, communicating with your audience can become an administrative burden. This is especially true in smaller organizations and can become a barricade to addressing other pressing needs in your daily activities. The problem is that not everyone interested in your products or services is interested in buying from you. By the time you reply to their request for more info, their interests may have shifted or they might have decided to purchase from a competitor.

There’s no magic formula to change the behavior of your visitor, but there are a few things you can do to manage your inbound requests. You could hire someone else to manage web leads, but naturally there’s a huge cost that comes bringing on another employee. The most economical way to communicate with your prospects is by creating email automation sequences that correspond with their interests.

Here are a few suggestions to help you automate your communication with your inbound leads. By automating the communication sequence, you’re staying engaged with your customer long enough address their interests and hopefully sell to them. The time savings are best recognized with prospects who never intended to buy or who don’t follow-up with their initial interest that led them to complete the web form in the first place. Automating your follow-up sequences eliminates the administrative communications required for traditional follow-up.

First Email

Your first email is the initial response to your prospects inquiry. In this example the counter-request is to engage the visitor in a 5-10 minute phone call. In Mothernode CRM this sequence can be triggered by the web form, by the type of lead or manually by the user once the lead is qualified. Increase your response rate by keeping your emails short and to the point.

Hi %contact_first_name%,

Thanks for visiting our website and checking out some of our content.  I wanted to connect briefly to understand what was driving your interest and to see how I can help. When is the best time to connect for 5-10 minutes?

Thank you,

Sharon Jones

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Second Email

The second request is based on no response to the first email. This second email assumes a reasonable buffer that would have given the recipient a sufficient response time. It’s authored as a follow-up with the same call to action as the first, gauging the prospects interest at the same time.

Hi %contact_first_name%,

I’m following up on my previous attempt to connect, because I saw you did some research on Mothernode CRM earlier and that you’re the contact at %customer_company_name%.

I’m not sure where your interests lie but I would like to set up a time to find out so that I can provide some relevant resources and answer any questions you may have. When would be a good time to speak for 5-10 min?

Thank you,

Sharon Jones

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Third (Final) Email

The last email in the sequence is sent when enough time has passed from the initial inquiry and no response has been received to both previous emails. The message lets the prospect know there will be the final attempt to contact them, and gives them one last chance to respond.

Hi %contact_first_name%,

I’ve been trying to reach you for the past few weeks, and haven’t had much luck in doing so. At this point I’ll assume your CRM search is no long a priority, and close out your file. If I’m incorrect in this assumption, please let me know the best date/time for an initial conversation, and I’ll send over a calendar invite directly.

Best regards,

Sharon Jones

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Benefits

Automating this follow-up sequence eliminated any time wasted with a prospect who wasn’t serious about buying, and allowed your sales reps to spend time working with more qualified leads.