Where Do You Get Your New Business?

When your sales team has difficulty hitting their targets, where do you look to find the culprit? Stale sales incentives and unqualified hires are easy places to start, but consider the last time you examined your prospecting sources. You may know that your sales reps are regularly acquiring new business, but ask yourself these questions:

1. How much of your new business is acquired from your reps reaching out to potential clients compared to potential clients finding your business online?
2. How much of your new business is acquired from what source or effort?
3. How up-to-date and where exactly is your prospect list coming from?

The answers to these questions are essential to the growth of your sales. As a sales leader, you need to track where and how you acquire new business in order to learn from your past and improve your future.

Without knowing where your sales are coming from, it would be quite difficult to pinpoint where to focus your energy, where to improve your efforts, and where to reallocate your resources.  Most of your sales could be coming from an under-targeted market; what once was a source for easy sales may have been lacking of late; or you may be spending a lot of time on a market that simply needs to be accepted as a loss. You need to know when these situations occur, or else sales opportunities may vanish or losses may grow to be too great. It is vital that your sales reps document the source of each sale and frequently relay that information to you.

Understandably, sales likely come much more easily to your reps than recordkeeping. If this is the case for your team, consider using a B2B call center to qualify, monitor and follow up with prospects. At York Consulting, we can acquire and assemble new lists–or supplement your existing lists–and follow up to determine how interested they are in your company by

• Learning about their needs, purchasing authority, budget, and timing;
• Responding to their information requests; and
• Staying in touch with longer-term prospects as their interests and needs develop.

Every sale gets you closer to your quarterly targets, but to go above and beyond, look for the source.