Sales Opportunity Management – Deepen 1:1 Influence with Lead Gen
Sales Leaders can leverage Lead Generation teams beyond the top of the funnel. Lead Development Representatives (LDRs) have the capability to work in coordination with the sales rep to drive expanded influence during the sales opportunity management process. This is particularly true in a complex sale where there are multiple influencers involved in committee buying. The result is increased win rates through deeper 1:1 relations across the organization. Take a deeper look into leveraging this new capability for your sales force.
Today’s Approach to Opportunity Management
While working a qualified sales opportunity, the sales rep focuses on reaching the economic buyer. The rep also works diligently to build relationships with the user and technical buyers involved in the decision. This is painstaking work and requires the rep to meet each influencer where they are in the buying process. A-player Reps are masters at working across buying groups while keeping their focus on the economic buyer.
During the evaluation process there is a great deal of research performed online while the prospect’s organization evaluates options. This research is performed by influencers and trusted support staff who have been tasked to help in the evaluation. Through the use of technology, these online interactions are monitored and captured as new leads. What happens next is crucial to increasing your opportunity win rates.
The information about additional contacts from a live opportunity should be given to the rep as valuable business intelligence. This intel can bring to light new contacts they didn’t know about and tip them off to timing and key areas of interest. In addition to the information for the rep, there is additional firepower to bring to bear on the opportunity.
The New Dynamic of Opportunity Engagement: Sales Rep + Lead Generation Rep
As soon as a Sales Ready Lead has been qualified as a Sales Opportunity, most sales and marketing leaders make the short-sighted decision treat this like a ‘hand-off’ point. The future interaction with the lead generation team is shut down 100% and single-threaded through the sales rep. This is a huge mistake to broadly single-thread all future relationships through the sales rep.
Ownership of the lead contact, and the overall account relationship should be the responsibility of the sales rep. However, new contacts from a prospective company in the midst of a sales opportunity should not be jammed into unnatural ways of working.
New contacts from a live opportunity should be given the opportunity to build a relationship with your company on multiple levels. The main role of a Lead Development Rep (LDR) is to educate and introduce new concepts. The new contacts should be educated and nurtured the same way a brand new lead is embraced.
This can all be done in close collaboration with the sales rep. The end result is forging trust and building relationships across multiple levels of your prospect’s organization.
Best-in-Class Approach to Deep Relationship Building
The best-in-class approach is to rely on the sales rep as the field general to drive a new sales opportunity. In addition, Lead Development Representatives support the sales rep by engaging new contacts from the same company who are researching online and become new leads. Rather than turning those new contacts over to the sales rep, the LDR works with the sales rep to coordinate relationship building. The LDR’s serve as the ‘concierge’ for your sales force educating and introducing new contacts to your company and their sales representative.
The Lead Development Representative is all about 1:1 Relationships:
- Expanding contacts across departments
- Broadening the network withing prospective organizations, exploring pain impact
- Working horizontally across the organization building 1:1 relationships
- Cultivating relationships across multiple contacts while communicating insights to the sales rep
- Responding to questions from lower levels of support staff who would be difficult, impractical or awkward for the sales rep to engage
Sales Reps and Lead Development Reps complement each other well because they have completely different purposes.
- The sales representative must identify a champion to be successful
- The Lead Development Representative is NOT looking for a single “champion” to drive the sale – but rather works horizontally across and deep within the organization building contact
Key Take-away Elements for Sales Leaders
Leveraging lead generation team capabilities gives sales leaders the following advantages:
- Increase opportunity win rates with expanded influence from LDR's
- Ability to connect and build positive impressions with multiples layers of management and support staff
- Keep the sales rep from being blind-sided by undeveloped manager level and cross-department contacts who pull at the strings of a solution
- Enable the sales rep to remain focused on the needs of the economic buyer and the key influencers
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