Dave Kurlan's Blog - The Authority on Sales Force Excellence

Sales Hacks and How to Improve Your Lead Follow Up Conversions

Posted by Dave Kurlan on Mon, Aug 31, 2015 @ 15:08 PM

I just returned to the office to find around 900 emails waiting for me While purging my inbox, I found some interesting and useful items that I am sure you would want to know about.

I have previously written about how important it is to quickly and consistently follow up on inbound leads. This article from September of 2013 included two great infographics that demonstrate lead conversion statistics. However, Russ, from FindAccountingSoftware.com, emailed me a link to this case study on 63,256 outbound calls that has much more specific, useful information.

Check out the article by Adam Bluemner!

Chad Burmeister, VP Sales at ConnectAndSell.com, emailed to let me know that Sales Hack, the book he co-wrote with ConnectAndSell's CEO, Chris Beall, is now available at Amazon.com. The cool thing about this book is that Chad asked a small group of sales experts to contribute their best sales hacks to the book. In addition to my contribution, there are contributions from other well-known experts like Gerhart Gschwandtner, Lori Richardson, Trish Bertuzzi, Dan McDade, Tibor Shanto, Kurt Shaver, Matt Heinz and others.

Speaking of sales hacks, earlier this month, I hosted a different group of 20 sales experts and we came up with some sales hacks of our own! I'll be writing about them later this week, so keep your eyes open for our Sales Hacks.

Last week, I hosted about 30 sales leaders from around North America and we spent the better part of two days on the art and science of coaching salespeople. Wouldn't you know that there were some cool sales hacks that came from those two days as well. I'll share those with you next week!

You might also find some use for Hubspot's Guide to writing follow up emails. It includes a bunch of useful email templates that your salespeople might be able to incorporate and that could be useful for controlling your message, and upholding their professionalism, spelling and grammar.

Finally, check out these 11 articles that you might have missed while you were on summer vacation:

Why Inbound and Inside Sales Experts Think Sales Process is Dead Too

The Science of Sales Selection vs. the Marketing of Modern Selling

How the Right Questions Can Make up for Lack of Sales Experience

Trust and Integrity in Selling May Not Be What You Think

The Two Sides of Likable Salespeople

Bugged by the Difference Between Great and Lousy Salespeople

The Conversation Sales Leaders Must Have with Salespeople

An Ode to the Evolution of the Pipeline

Why I Was Kicked Out of a LinkedIn Sales Group

Keys to Selecting a Sales Training Company

12 Proven Sales Hacks to Increase Sales

Aligning and Optimizing Sales and Marketing to Increase Conversions

Posted by Dave Kurlan on Wed, May 12, 2010 @ 10:05 AM

Do you ever wonder how web pages help (or hinder) the sales effort? I do.

When salespeople follow up on leads their success has a great deal to do with the quality and freshness of the leads. When they fail they blame marketing for generating lousy leads!

On the other side of the coin, marketing looks at the NUMBER of leads generated for the sales force and how many of them convert to opportunities and business. When the salespeople are ineffective at converting, marketing blames it on the sales force.

When sales and marketing are aligned and optimized (lead emphasis on quality and sales emphasis on process), sales increase dramatically.

My blogging platform host, Hubspot, provides a lot of useful data on how our content performs, where readers come from, how many of them are back for repeat visits, the number of subscribers, most popular and discussed articles, number of landing page visits, conversions to leads, and much, much more.

What we don't learn about is how all the "other stuff" on the page affects you, our visitor. If you are reading this article directly on my Blog at Understanding the Sales Force, would you share, with all of us, answers to just a few questions? If you are reading an RSS feed or you are on a site that has simply reposted it - well - never mind. Your answers could help everyone with the quality of their leads, conversion ratios and what, if anything, should appear in addition to content on the pages...

The questions are about the "other stuff", the non content, that appears in the left and right margins. The "other stuff" includes article series, most popular articles, options to subscribe to the Blog, awards, badges from other sites, upcoming events, one of my books, free tools, white papers, my radio show, more information, etc.

Do you ever scroll the page and look at that "other stuff"?

Does the appearance of all that "other stuff" diminish the quality or credibility of the content?

Did you ever click on or utilize any of that "other stuff"?

What, if any of the "other stuff" was/is most/least useful to you?

Thanks!