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Take Positives from your Lost Prospects

Did you lose one of our most interested lead? Are you disappointed of slipping out some of your most potential prospects!!! Though it’s not easy for one to recognize, but losing a sales deal teaches the most crucial lessons to win. Microsoft Ex-CEO Bill Gates says ”your most dissatisfied customers are your greatest source of learning”.

Lost prospects is a common term in any business model. Many a times are the circumstances when you get to know at the last moment that the customer has given order to your competitor. How do you react? Some of the sales persons are found to react very abruptly and show their dissatisfaction towards customers. This as per the sales is a filthy reaction. Your deal with customers is not the one time game, a positive and healthy reaction even after such a disguise and invite customer back to you later. Try to find out the pits and falls in the process you are following and analyse your lost and won deals simultaneously. Below are some of the steps that you can follow.

Steps for positive reaction towards Lost prospects

Organised system of lead and data tracking

Many organisations find themselves in a situation where the leads collected are either bogus or not really interested in our products. As service providers, our first step towards organised lead management and tracking should be to implement a sales management software like SalesBabu CRM which can not only organise each business process but can collect and manage each lead in an organised manner.

SalesBabu CRM automated sales force management features allow businesses to integrate with third party vendors to collect leads over the internet, social media and other source of communication. Once these leads are collected they are recorded in a cloud based common repsority which can be accessed by different stakeholders to filter out bogus leads with initial discussion and then nurture only interested clients so that they can fetch better sales deals from the list of prospects.

Also, with initial discussions, we can record every point discussed during meetings in the cloud based entries for leads so that every requirements scrutinized during the appointment is well understood and tracked by every stakeholder in the lead tracking process.

If a prospect is lost and we have complete information on the lead interests and other details on the reasons for lost deals which can be added to the ‘Add competitor’ section for the lost client. This feature helps us the gaze our lost deal details in further and use it for better competitive bargains in future deals.

Fetch the exact requirements of customer

You may lose because you failed to fetch the exact requirements of your client. This also is one of the most common reasons among the sales people to lose a hot opportunity. You need to understand with all your endeavours what the client expects from the interested product. This will make a positive impact of yours and bring customers back to you in future.

Exact requirements can be understood by either following up with prospective leads on a regular basis, sending them demos, targeted presentations, having follow up meetings over phone or personally which creates a bridge between the client and the business deals which can help in better sales conversion or understanding exact requirement of client who might come back to our deal if we provide them exact service that they are looking for.

When Customer Responds with straight rejection

It’s a big setback. But try to maintain your calm and ask where he felt the short. It might be that customer is also not happy to tell you so. Who knows if you become a supplementary vendor at need of hour. In many businesses bogus leads are usually a major setback. The sales team spend a lot of money and time in constructive followup with some leads which ends up into a rejection without any specific reasons. In these cases, we need to make sure we have complete information of clients duly recorded in our automated sales force management software and send them regular emails and messages with our latest products and features which can give them a good view of the latest development in our business models and latest products.

Make Proper Analysis Of Lost and Won Deals

Don’t just let it go by. It is important to identify where the flaws were. That might be because of inappropriate follow up, inefficient competitor study, incompatible prices, etc. Find out why you are losing and at the same the string reasons behind your win. This will help you make a proper strategy for the forthcoming deals.

Sales Management softwares act as the best way to record, report and analyse every aspect of sales deals with historical data recording. MIS feature in SalesBabu CRM uses various inbuilt and custom reports to generate statistics on which products are being sold most or if some products are being outright rejected by prospects. These reports can also help us to understand most sought out features by customer and also understand any particular reason for which many customers have rejected our sales deals.

Targeted quotations and sales orders

In many cases, lost prospects might have been unhappy with unorganised quotations and sales orders deals which might lead to losing sales deals in last phases of sales conversions. SalesBabu CRM provides an efficient way to organise this process by automated quotation creation and sales order tracking. Every stage and amendments done to each sales order and quotations can be recorded in the cloud based sales management software database which can be used to track the issues and problems in the quotations and sales order creation which lead to lost prospects.

Keep Interacting Even After Refusal

Don’t leave touching base with your customer after the lost. It shouldn’t be the end of the relationship. Ask your sales manager to have a meeting after the lost deal regarding the major. Keep sending greetings or any useful information. This also has been fruitful in many of sales deals and tried and tested method of regaining the old potential prospect back in your pocket.

Some Ways to recover the lost prospects :

#Create a sense of urgency
Sometimes people know that they must make a decision, but they are not feeling so much pressure or they are not fully aware of the benefits of a given product or the service which is provided for them. If you get the feeling that your lead is not yet fully convinced about whether they need to make the decision and the advantage it will provide, then make sure that you dig deep into the deep advantages, explain to everyone the advantages of it. This will create a sense of buying urgency which will shorten the decision-making time.

#Use trigger events or promotions to get the attention back
Triggering of the events and promotion, these two are great ways of not only attracting the new leads but also to get the attraction of the lost leads and prospects. This will also create new momentum. Trigger the events which include the launching of the new website, new offices, new products or also any other company. Promotions include flexible contract terms, discounts on the products, free ads like training, etc.

#Follow-up
If you notice that after some days your prospective clients have not responded to any of your emails, follow-up with another, making sure that you are including all the important information and also you are including the call to action. If, after the follow-up emails you still have not got any responses from them, one last time email them asking if they are interested in your product or services. Include a sentence in which you politely ask them to please let you know whether they still want to move forward or not, also include a request for feedback that will help you to move in the right direction.

These three strategies will help you to get the leads and prospects back. If the lead nevertheless is lost, you will have gained more valuable insight which will help you for the future prospects.

Conclusion

SalesBabu CRM is an efficient tool to organise and manage the lost prospects situations in business and yield positive results out of them for productive sales lifecycle in future.