subject: Keys To Successful Sales Campaigns [print this page] There are some clear areas where time and investment can be made to improve the probability that your sales campaigns are successful.
1. Define target audience
One step that is often overlooked or not given enough attention is clearly defining the target audience for the sales campaign. The more effective you are at getting the campaign focused on the prospects that are the best fit in terms of needing your products and also have the best probability moving forward, the better you will be at generating leads.
When defining the target audience, you can look at characteristics like geography, industry, size, title, department, and current environment. Current environment refers to the prospect's current processes, systems, and agreements in the areas where your products and services impact.
2. Build a good list
Once we have defined the characteristics of our target prospect, we can take that information and use it to build the attack list for the campaign. There are many different sources that can be used for building an attack list. You can either pull the list from your existing database of customers and prospects or you can use external resources to produce your lists for sales campaigns.
There are subscription services like Hoovers and OneSource that can provide you with access to data and the ability to produce lists. Another option is the buy lists on an as needed basis from contact list brokers.
3. Multi-touch approach
One of the best ways to improve results from sales campaigns is to make them multi-touch in terms of how you communicate to the target prospects. Not only do you want to reach out to the prospects with multiple attempts, but reaching them with different forms of communications can also greatly improve the probability that your message gets delivered.
An example of a multi-touch approach could be to hit your prospect with an email, a cold call, and a piece of direct mail and have those scheduled to hit a prospect in a particular order with a specific amount of time in between.
One of the reasons that this works well is that not only are you hitting the prospect again and again to reinforce your attempts to connect, but many prospects have a particular way that they prefer to communicate and this can increase the chances of connecting with them in the way that has the best potential for them responding.
4. Sales messaging
At the core of good sales campaigns is fine-tuned and effective sales messaging. There is usually always room for improvement when it comes to sales messaging as we can always find better ways to get the prospect's attention.
One quick place to start is to look at your messaging and identify if you are focused more on products and features or if you are focused on value and prospect's needs. The prospect primarily cares about their problems and desires and the more you can focus and connect with that, the more likely you are to get their attention.
