Category: Sales Management

Simplifying the Deal qualification algorithm

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The latest update to the Deal Qualification algorithm

We periodically update the deal qualification algorithm to make sure you and your sales team constantly focus on the high value opportunities. The deal qualification algorithm is how Saleswah automatically classifies a deal as either Lead (early stage), Prospect (active follow up), Warm deal (this is the stage where your boss has gotten interested enough to start following up with you!) and Hot Deal- about to close and soon!

We wrote a post long back explaining the logic. It was called the Sales Funnel Stages. Look it up.

The deal qualification algorithm is our way of keeping you honest! It is our cold hard look at the deal progress. It is Saleswah’s internal algorithm which evaluates the deal progress. Based solely on the information captured. And it gives a score. That score tells you whether the deal is an early stage lead or progressed enough to be called a prospect or is a “hot deal” – about to close in your favour and soon.

You may like the score or dislike the score. You may choose to discount it or believe in it. But there is a very good reason to not disregard it. Its judgement is consistent across all sales people in your team. It has no bias.

The deal qualification algorithm is not made public

There is also another matter. The deal qualification algorithm is our secret sauce and we do not publish it. We might share a broad outline of the logic with some clients- but, we do not share the entire logic. This is simply to ensure that no one “games” the logic.

You see, we think the sales team’s job is to sell. The sales team best does the job by focusing on a target and following up on the opportunities. Saleswah should simply help in any way it can. If the sales team knows the deal qualification algorithm, they tend to second guess the outcome and log the answers that they think the machine is looking for.

We changed the algorithm

It is no secret that we count the activities and give different weight-ages to them. We added more activities to the “basket”. We also tweaked the formula. There are more factors in calculations as well.

Your team should see more hot deals in the funnel- as a result of the re-classifications that the change in algorithm has brought about.

We understand that some of you want more information on how the deal scoring algorithm works and in fact want more control on it- even modify for your own use. To all of you, we say- all in good time.

 

 

 

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales

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Who is Saleswah CRM for?

Saleswah CRM works for sales teams, small and large, who depend on getting sales leads from new customers to achieve their target.

If your organization has an ongoing marketing program for lead generation: you advertize on websites and newspapers, you participate in roadshows (in malls and in group housing societies, etc.), you participate in trade-fairs, then you should get Saleswah CRM for everyone in your sales team.

If you are relying on marketing to generate the buzz, excitement, and leads, Saleswah CRM puts the focus on bridging the gap between marketing and sales. Capturing leads and managing them thru the sales cycle is what Saleswah CRM does best.

What is the cost of missing a lead?

Let’s do the math: a classified ad in TOI Delhi for property costs about Rs 5000/-and those in online portals cost anything between Rs 1200/-and Rs 2500/-. A property dealer in hot markets like Delhi NCR, Pune, Bangalore, etc. would easily spend Rs 50,000/-a month advertising. And these are dealers that have 2-3 sales guys and perhaps do 1-4 “sales” transactions and 2-5 “lease” transactions. In order to do this level of work, he has to make sure he gets at least 400 “leads”—folks who call him up and inquire about the properties he has a mandate for and has advertised.

The trouble with advertising is not that 50% of it is useless spending; we know that. The trouble is, we do not know which 50%!

How do you get the leads, anyway?

Do your customers call you, email you, or text you? How many walk in thru your front door? And, surely, no one, no one these days ever writes in? Do they leave their details on your website?

What is your process for capturing a lead?

Once you get an sms, or a phone call, or an email, or a query forwarded from the website or newspaper where you may have placed a classified, the faster you can note it down and send it to your sales team to follow up, the better your chances of closing business.

What in reality happens is that you note down the call details or the number sent in an email and send it to the sales guy in your team. “Most of the time”. And, your sales guys will follow thru and make the connection “most of the time.” And you will remember the leads you passed on to them in the morning by the time evening comes and you can review the day with your team-“some of the time”.

Do you want to guess what happens to the leads that get missed out on? They go to competitions “all the time”!

  • Do you know what proportion of your leads got addressed, which ones were followed up on and which ones you closed?
  • Do you know where you get most of your enquiries from?
  • Do you know which sources of enquiries are normally more productive?

How do you bridge the gap between marketing and sales?

Log and assign all leads as they come: Saleswah helps you quickly and efficiently log all incoming calls. Note down your name, contact details (phone, mobile, email)-as much or as little as is available or useful-and click a button to send the details to your sales guy on his mobile app. Incoming call logging can be done by anyone with access to the system; your receptionist, your secretary, you, your marketing team member, or the salesman himself.

Update lead status and track thru stages online: The fact that you have done this is remembered by the software, and when your team updates the status of the follow up, you get to see it too, online! The status of the lead as it goes thru the stages can be seen by the salesman and his superiors.

Assign and schedule tasks and activities: You can use Saleswah CRM for scheduling meetings and assigning work to your team-go pick up the cheque, schedule a site visit, draw up the agreement, whatever. And, track the status of the tasks as well.

Bridging the gap between marketing and sales

If you have products and or services to sell to other companies, big or small, Saleswah CRM will work for you.

Free to try, for fifteen days!

Sales lead tracker: Never let go a sales for want of follow up

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We all want leads, but it is important to track them through the sales process

Saleswah keeps the focus relentlessly on sales; the process including keeping track of the sales cycle and progress of the opportunity through it is important. As important as the activities that the sales team performs- send literature, meet and present, demo, collect cheque.

As you grow, it is no longer possible or practical to track all individual leads manually. You need the sales lead tracker capability of Saleswah.

For small businesses, spending money getting noticed by customers and generating “enquiries/ leads”, it is important to ensure that

1. All enquiries immediately land up with the right sales person.

2. The sales person is able to log the stage and size of the opportunity, his chances of converting it into a purchase order and the customer influencers.

3. Furthermore, he should be able to log what the next action should be and schedule a task for himself in the calendar.

His boss knows it too!

Saleswah’s team management ensures that the salesperson’s manager always stays updated about

– the state of the sales funnel and the monthly forecast.

– the individual opportunities: their stage, status and chances and the actions- taken and pending.

How does the sales lead tracker work?

Saleswah is a hosted total sales lifecycle management tool. It allows you and your team to track a sales opportunity from start to finish, through all stages of qualification to close. Leads go through a process of assign, nurture and close after being captured.

Leads are first qualified and the best ones are “converted” to Deals whereas the less promising ones are rejected. The progress of each lead is tracked and any conversion or rejection has a reason and follow up comments.

sales lead tracker helps ensure nothing falls through the cracks

Who would use the sales lead tracker of Saleswah?

Saleswah is useful for all businesses, big or small – with one salesman or one hundred- who want to track the sales leads that they receive and take appropriate action to close them. This can be property dealers, insurance agents, office equipment vendors, trade-show exhibitors, companies running seminars, those who primarily get their leads from vertical portals etc.

Want to know more? Call us.

How we classify your opportunities in sales funnel stages

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The sales funnel stages

Over the last three years we have evolved a lot in our thinking about the sales funnel stages and how we should report them.

Find and surface the leads that you should focus on

We started off with a very radical approach. We got Saleswah to proactively alert the user that there was a sales lead. We used some nifty calculations to see which contacts and accounts were “active” and what more, which ones were active in a “deal-bearing” way. We had our views on which customer facing activities were more important i.e. more likely to result in a sale. So, we surfaced leads in your funnel before you recognized these as such. Pretty cool, huh? Or, so we thought. This was a blog we wrote which explained our thoughts.

About two years back we pulled the plug on this feature. Simple, we never managed to get customers to understand this. This was perhaps before its time in the market or simply poor marketing and/ or hand-holding on our part.

Next up, grade the deals in the funnel

Now, we took a fresh look at the sales funnel stages. Our earlier thought was to get to capture the marketing activities and sales activities that led to a sale and if the action was “hot” in an account, we reported a sales lead- the very earliest stage opportunity in the sales funnel stages.

As we evolved, and abandoned the previous strategy, we started concentrating on the opportunities that the salesperson had recognized as such and created a “Deal” record. We felt there is a huge scope in helping the salesperson figure out where to concentrate his efforts. Let me explain.

A sales funnel has deals which are at different stages of maturity. Some may close the next week, some may close the next month and some may never close. Also, there are various stages of probability that you will win the deal.

Traditionally, the sales review consisted of the manager and the sales executive looking at a spreadsheet with a list of these deals and arguing about the probability of a win and the timeframe of the eventuality. The Sales Executive is the optimist whereas, the manager is more pragmatic if not downright pessimistic! Having played both roles in the past, I knew there is a scope to contribute positively in this debate.

A sales deal requires information – as the salesperson engages with the customer contacts, he gathers more information. The critical information is about the budget, timeframe and decision making. Also, knowing how critical the need is helps her to understand if the deal will be prioritised above other issues demanding management attention at the customer place.

So, the information maturity is crucial in understanding how far down the funnel has the deal come. So we started tagging deals with the calculated sales funnel stages. We called them Prospecting, Opportunity, Investigation, Presentation and Close. For more details, read our previous post on the 5 sales deal stages.

We just changed the names of the sales funnel stages

While this time we achieved a lot better customer understanding and adoption, we felt we needed to make it simpler for folks to understand what the stages meant. So, we renamed them. Now they are called Sales Lead, Prospect, Warm deal, Hot Deal and Close. The algorithm that classifies them as such remain the same with some tweaking to better reflect how Saleswah itself has evolved.

Hope this made sense. Please get back to us to schedule a one on one session if you want to understand more about Saleswah.

How we classify your opportunities in sales funnel stages 2

Sell globally with quotations in any currency

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If you are selling globally to enterprise buyers, then you might need to send quotations in any currency – not just your home country. This is either because of regulatory issues or because of your customers’ internal requirements. There are some countries that allow trade in two or more currencies- Singapore or Hong Kong for instance.

As a CRM, we need to enable two broad things:

  • Actual quotation being made possible in multiple currencies.
  • Reporting continuing to be done in a master currency- so that everyone still compares the same set of data.

It is obvious that there is currency conversion involved. 1 USD is ~ INR 70 today. So, you can’t have a master price list which is in USD and quote the same in INR. Unless you converted. Here again lies a catch.

Why currency conversion does not work in sending quotations in any currency

We have seen multiple currency implementations done by others and how they do it is simple; keep a master price list as before in your “master currency” as defined by the user and then ask him to define the conversion factor for each currency he wants to enable in addition.

Why does it not work? Because of the following reasons:

  1. Selling a product in different countries is not simply a matter of changing the price from one currency to another by the bank conversion rate. There are other markups/ markdowns dictated by market forces like competition, import duties and sales and marketing overheads. For example, a product which you retail for USD 1 in USA might be sold for INR 85 in India.
  2. Different products might have different conversion factors- depending on market forces. You might sell accessories and spares at a higher margin than main products or vice versa.
  3. These factors change frequently – sometimes quarterly.

The best way for sending quotations in any currency

sending quotations in any currencyWe implement multi-currency quotes based on prices lists maintained in as many currencies you specify. These prices are independent of each other.

Every time there is a price change – in any currency, you need to upload a new price list replacing the previous one. And while making a quote, just select the currency in which the quote should go out.

What about sales reporting?

Sales reporting, forecasting and closed deals reports will continue to be done in the “master currency”. So, at the time of specifying the additional currencies, you need to specify the conversion factors.

So, conversion factors are still used after all! But, they are used for reporting- in one central currency. As it was always done.

A few more things we did for sales quotes

We added the ability to edit prices in the quotes. And, now you can add discounts, local tax rates. And as before, you can quote with tax or without- depending on what your local custom is.

Deals be opened post closure

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A Deal record is about the progress of a sales opportunity through the funnel. A deal record culminates in a closure. Status changes to Won or Lost or Dropped. After that, we do not permit an changes to the status.

We just made it possible for you to re-open the deal.

So, if you mistakenly closed the deal, you have a chance to re-open it and work on it some more.

For example:

  • You closed a deal as won, but actually it was lost!
  • You closed a deal as Lost- but the customer just called and said you are still in consideration as a vendor.
  • You closed the deal correctly as Won; but the value was wrong.
  • Etc

So, go to the closed deals list, click on the deal value of the closed deal and click on the “Re-open” button of the Deal record that popped up. The deal will then move from the closed deals list to the Open Deals list.

To ensure that this is only done with proper approvals, the ability to re-open a deal is available to admins alone.

Sales lead management

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Lead management in Saleswah

Lead management is crucial. Sales Leads – whether from marketing efforts or from Sales efforts, are the life-blood of a sales operation.

Leads have a very limited life-span. Customer may not be looking at you alone but at other vendors as well. So, getting back promptly is important.

A typical lead follows the following stages through the sales process (before it is “closed”-hopefully as a win, of course):

Sales lead management 3

We are today going to discuss the first two stages of leads management – the marketing lead and the sales lead.

Marketing lead management

Marketing leads are most often nothing more than a name and a contact number- phone or email.

More information is welcome, of course. But typically, we get nothing more than the bare minimum.

The main idea is to get a number and start calling them to qualify their interest. So, after the leads are “captured” in the CRM, it is imperative to get it to the right sales/ telesales person as quickly as possible.

Leads can be added to Saleswah one by one.They can be also uploaded from a spreadsheet.

Lead management: assignment, conversion, rejection

While adding/ uploading we check for a match with an existing contact, based on email address and if found, we attach the lead to the Contact record. Now, this contact may already exist in the CRM but under a different Sales Exec. So, tough luck! The assignment will happen to the person who already has the Contact ownership (and thus Account ownership).

This could be tough for the guy entering the lead but good for the company for whom the executive works.

After the lead is entered and assigned, the responsible user can then reject it (after recording a reason), re-assign it to someone else or work on it. If she finds it valuable and worthy of further follow up, she “Converts” the lead to a Deal. By default all Deals start off as a Sales Lead– the earliest stage in the funnel.

Sales lead management

At this very early stage of the funnel, the accent is very much on trying to “qualify” the lead – find the genuineness of the interest, see if there is budget, start identifying the decision makers and the purchase process.

How do you like being able to upward delegate?

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Tasks can now be assigned to your boss and his boss too!

The most used feature in Saleswah CRM is the ability to create and assign “Tasks” to your own self or someone who works for you. Every Saleswah CRM client account (through their admin) can define the Task types that make sense for them.

Tasks in Saleswah are more powerful than in other simple calendar type of applications. A Task in Saleswah is linked to a “Contact” – a person who works for an Account (Client). It can also be optionally linked to a product type and can be updated, rescheduled and tracked till closure.

Tasks can also be re-assigned.

So, if a user is overloaded, he could always re-assign the task to someone in his team.

Let’s see a typical sales user hierarchy.

Task upward delegation

Who is a sales co-ordinator?

A sales co-ordinator has a valuable role- she provides back office support for her team of field sales persons. He/ she may free up admin time for the boss. It is also common to see the sales co-ordinators perform inside sales functions; that is follow up with clients of their team members.

Sales Co-ordinators can see all Account and Contact details for the level at which they are “attached” to the user hierarchy. So, the Sales Co-ordinator 2 can see all accounts which her boss – the Sales Manager 1 can see (his own and those of his reportees- Sales Exec 11 and Sales Exec 22).

The new enhanced task assignment/ re-assignment functionality

The biggest enhancement is that now while logging a task or assigning/ re-assigning it, the user can select any person below OR ABOVE him as well.

Why did we do this?

There are multiple situations where you may need your boss to intervene with a client. Or, during a meeting with a client, you might get a request to – “ask your boss to meet my boss”. Instead of noting it down and waiting to get back to office to inform your boss, you could now log it in Saleswah CRM.

So, earlier the Sales Manager 2 could only assign a task to himself or his two reportees: Sales Exec 21 and Sales Exec 22. But, now, he can assign the same task to his boss, the Sales Head as well.

Take another example.

The Sales Co-ordinator 1, who has visibility to the entire database- by virtue of being attached to the same level of user hierarchy as the Sales Head, can assign any Task to anyone including her boss, the sales head.

Hope you like it. Go ahead, enjoy the freedom to upwardly delegate!

Visit management: spoofing your location in CRM

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Using location data in visit management for convenience and productivity

Visit management on our mobile app depends on the GPS coordinates reported by the phone hardware. The location is used to query Google maps and it makes your life simple. We wrote a fairly detailed post on the technology some time back.

Using location data in visit management in CRM

Let’s say, you are meeting a client for the first time- let’s say a retailer who you are visiting. Since he is not in your database, you would have to go through a lot of hassle to first add the retailer in the database, and then log the activity.

This wastes time.

So, on our Android app, we allow you to add an account (a customer/ dealer etc) from the mobile app – straight from logging a visit. If the account exists already, well and good- the app will simply log a visit. If the account does not exist, then Saleswah automatically fetches the street address (where you are standing) from Google and goes through with logging a visit.

In the process, it creates a new account record,complete with street address.

Saves time. And, that was all we wanted to do.

Control, convenience and spoofing

We recently got a call from a client and then we had to relook at the visit log method. Because, some folks, who did not want their whereabouts known, or worse, wanted to pretend to be on tour or in the field – had found a way to fool the app.

So, what we thought was for convenience, was being used by management for control. And the users were finding ways around it.

Apparently there are tens of such apps in the Playstore- all can spoof your location and help you pretend you are in Georgia where you might be in Georgetown.

We stopped it of course!

Many of our functionality depends on careful logging of GPS data and accurately querying Google maps. Finding distances, directions. We could not afford uncertainty over actual location data.

Guarding against exuberance: Deal scoring in CRM

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The role of deal scoring in CRM

All salesmen are optimistic- it’s their nature; that is why they are in sales.

They honestly believe till the last hour that their deal will close. Even when the evidence piles up against them. This creates problems for the manager and of course the company.

Okay, so what deals are valuable?

Having talked with hundreds of customers across industries – my only answer is that it depends. It varies from industry to industry and even within the same industry, it varies from company to company. And, I am talking of companies who have actually invested the time to define the threshold of information and interest and how they measure both before passing it on to a sales guy.

All deals are not the same. All customers are not the same. Purchase procedures differ. Even different salesmen have different judgments about the same deal.

Deal scoring in CRM helps everyone evaluate deals using the same parameters.

How do you evaluate your win chances in a deal? How optimistic are you about your funnel?Guarding against exuberance: Deal scoring in CRM 4

How do you know the person committing to close a deal this month, is right about his optimism? Or the other salesperson, who equally vehemently argues against including his deal in the monthly forecast, is right?

Multiply the problem with 10- the number of your reportees. And another 10, for your reportees have reportees too. It’s a huge problem. Sales forecasting is a big problem.

Interest in the next step

Interest shown by the contact in being contacted it seems is a big factor behind the deal being taken seriosuly. Also, the nature of interest matters too. Some would simply want more information to be mailed, while the others might want a visit from a sales person. I know at least one company where professed interest in meeting a sales person is ruthlessly scrutinized because the sales people are so senior and their time, expensive.

Where telecallers inevitably falter

Almost all companies have a script for the their telecallers. But I have seen most falter in sifting through the tyre-kickers and the door-keepers. Sales does not like information gatherers- though in some B2B enterprise sales processes, information sharing is mandatory as part of a long sales process. Sales also wants to talk to decision makers- and most leads tend to be from folks who are merely gathering data for their bosses. You do not want to be at the mercy of people who are not able to represent your case in from of decision makers- though sometimes you may not have a choice.

Action, level and logical fit

Sales love leads where there is clear action plan and it is obviously set up at an appropriate decision making level at the customer place. If the lead is from a customer or industry segment which is a logical fit- that obviously helps. If it is not, the telecaller should try and establish the need or the pain-point of the lead.

To summarize, valuable sales leads are where meeting is set up at a decision making level where a logical product fit can be established. After this is done, the lead can transition to the sales person and who will have a lot more confidence in accepting it.

We can now legitinately call it a sales deal.

Qualifying a sales deal through the sales funnel

Sales deals have been subjected to “qualification” for a long time. The most popular and long tested method is BANT. 

B- Budget, A-Authority, N-Need, T-Timeframe: are key parameters that are used to quickly sum up the chances of the deal progressing in the right way.

Now, every organization probably looks at BANT a little differently and that is okay. With Deal scoring in CRM, what they get is a method for standardization of the parameters. So, all deals get a standard score. That makes forecasting easier because that takes individual subjectivity out of the equation.

This totally makes sense especially when the team size is large. And the experience levels are vastly different. And that brings us to the next point.

Focus on key opportunities

Another key area where deal scoring in CRM helps is helping the salesman focus.

When you are new to sales, it can be hard to know what to focus on. The bigger one or the one down the road or the customer who always picks your phone or agrees to a meeting?

A CRM deal score helps achieve the objective- your rookie team member has his priorities set for him.

What do you think?

Do you think it makes sense to demand that your CRM gives you some feedback on the funnel which you can look at objectively.