The most common question I am being asked at the moment is, “Is it a good time to be prospecting?”
The simple answer is Absolutely Yes! The first half of 2020 certainly bought its challenges for most businesses. The majority of people needed time to adjust to the new ways of working and take stock of the uncertainty around them, however from the back end of the summer last year momentum has been building – slowly but surely.
What I am pleased to say is January this year on the phones has been fantastic. We had more new business enquiries in a single month into Virtual Sales Team than we’ve had for any other month in 2020 but equally, have set more appointments for our clients than we have in the last 18 months, i.e., the conversion rate within the business right now is very high.
What does this tell us?
- Confidence in B2B Marketing and Selling has most definitely returned.
- People are willing to take New Business Calls and Meetings again – albeit most meetings are made now by Zoom rather than face to face obviously.
- Technology is catching up with businesses and the receptionist can now transfer to home workers.
- People are putting 2020 behind them and are now focussing on 2021/22, getting out there with an ‘open for business message’ but also adapting their business with more flexible operational solutions to keep them as efficient as possible – us included!
- People are more comfortable with change than they were a year ago, leading many businesses to review all of their partnerships and suppliers, looking for greater efficiency and value in every area of their business
What have we done to ensure we are on the front foot?
- We’ve BLENDED our Telephone Led Lead Generation Service with Digital Marketing Solutions to make a more rounded solution (LinkedIn, Website Tracking, etc)
- We’ve cemented our Identify, Qualify, Close approach to Lead Generation – this is proving essential for this new world. This ensures that we are only pitching to the correct DM’s, at the right time after extensive research – we have different individuals to do each task as quite simply ‘you don’t want your best salespeople doing desktop research’.
- Our customers can now plug into a sales and marketing team/machine that offers lead generation through: Telephone (inbound and Outbound), SEO, PPC, LinkedIn Outreach, Webinars, Website Tracking and Targeted Emails.
- Q2 2021 will also see the launch of our new cloud-based CRM that gives our clients access to the CRM we are calling from live! Total transparency and a true partnership approach.
So, all in all I think 2021 will be a bumper one for us and anyone else that comes out of the blocks now… a decent pipeline can take six months to build and start returning an ROI, so the earlier people get in, the earlier the returns will come. It’s NOT about throwing high volume at something over a short space of time and expecting some magic. In my opinion (and we’ve been doing this for 14 years) it’s more about a targeted approach over a longer period to really allow the pipeline to develop at the right time for the prospects.
Virtual Sales Team has been operating since 2007 from our Northamptonshire head office. Please click here to see what services we offer or contact us to arrange a call or an online meeting where we’d be please to chat with you.
- Andrew Smart, Managing Director Virtual Sales Team
