There is still a lot of speculation involved in sales. While it’s possible to identify good prospects using intuition, data can help remove the guesswork.
This Harvard Business Review article details how General Electric was able to use science to improve its sales results by:
- Concentrating on the best leads;
- Assigning sales areas based on lead quality;
- Giving sales teams the right targets; and
- Building campaigns based on market segments.
These changes were part of a strategy that resulted in a 19% higher rate of conversion for the company compared to the previous year.
This article will look at how General Electric was able to achieve these extraordinary results, as well as how Red Flag Alert is the perfect tool to help you to do the same.
Concentrate on Your Best Leads
Concentrating on your best leads can improve the effectiveness of your sales team. In order to do this, you’ll need a way to accurately measure what makes a company likely to buy from you.
General Electric did this by identifying six criteria to determine that a prospective customer would have a high chance of doing business with it. Following this, it gave the list of prospects a score based on these attributes. It then continued selling from the new list.
An interesting pattern emerged. The company found that the top 30% of prospective customers — based on the new score they had been given — were three times more likely to do business with General Electric than the bottom 70%.
Of course, some of these companies were already classified as high-profile targets. However, about 50% of them were not. General Electric had found 10,000 new high-priority prospects that its sales team could focus on.
How Red Flag Alert Can Help: Using Red Flag Alert’s in-depth data, businesses can identify trends in their existing customer base that could point to a company being more likely to buy from them.
For example, 80% of sales may come from the manufacturing sector or from businesses that turn over more than £1m. The sales team can then focus their efforts on prospects that also have these traits.
Red Flag Alert’s database can be filtered in many different ways to build a profile of your best clients.
Assign Sales Areas Based on Lead Quality
Effectively managing your sales territories can increase the productivity of your sales teams. If your territories are unbalanced, sales teams that operate in areas with poor sales prospects will spend too much effort on low-quality leads. At the same time, teams with a lot of high-quality leads will not be able to spend enough energy on each individual target.
In the case of General Electric, it was able to look at its sales territories and see that some were destined to deliver poor results – no matter how talented the sales team. Based on this, the company was able to restructure territories to ensure each one contained plenty of leads that were likely to convert.
It did this through a mixture of resizing existing territories or creating entirely new ones.
How Red Flag Alert Can Help: High-quality prospects can be filtered by location to enable managers to assign sales areas based on the quality of the leads. If you notice some areas are unbalanced, you could resize or restructure the territories. If done well, this could increase the productivity of sales teams.
Give People the Right Targets
It goes without saying that giving salespeople good leads can improve their efficiency. However, General Electrics used its new knowledge about what makes a good lead not just to improve productivity, but also to get new members of sales teams on board quicker.
Having a good idea about which targets were best meant managers were able to point less-experienced employees to these ones. This helped get them up to speed faster, making them more effective members of the team.
How Red Flag Alert Can Help: Managers can identify high-quality leads based on Red Flag Alert’s data. They can then assign these leads to people in their sales team whose skills match.
Build Campaigns Based on Market Segments
Having more data about your customers and prospects can help your sales team build accurate segments based on any number of factors included in the data. General Electric used its data to build targeted marketing campaigns aimed at high-potential segments.
Whenever the company got a new lead, it would be analysed and given a tag attached to a particular campaign. This ensured the sales team was using the most effective sales strategy on each new lead.
How Red Flag Alert Can Help: Red Flag Alert’s data can help sales teams build accurate segments based on a wide range of factors. They can then build targeted marketing campaigns based on these segments. Whenever a business gets a new prospect, it can use the data to quickly identify which sector the potential customer falls into – ensuring the correct marketing and sales strategy will be used.
Red Flag Alert Provides High-Quality Data That Can Help Sales
In order to use science to help your sales, you’ll need a high-quality source of up-to-date data. Here is why Red Flag Alert is the best data source to help your sales team:
- It provides in-depth data on every business in the UK
- With data from ten leading sources, we update our database on daily basis with over 100,000 business changes, that’s 2M a month and 24 Million changes a year
- The data is searchable and filterable, allowing highly specific segmentation
- The data can be integrated with your existing CR.
- New businesses are added as soon as they are formed
For a free consultation about how you can use Red Flag Alert’s data to help your business use data to supercharge your sales, get in touch with Richard West on 0344 412 6699 or richard.west@redflagalert.com.
