Ensuring Salespeople Re-Engage Unresponsive Prospects

Chad Hastings, a sales manager with Alta Equipment, shared a strategy with us that allows sales leaders to hold their salespeople accountable for reaching out to all their accounts – not just the easy ones to do business with.

Salespeople don’t exist to sell our products and services as quickly as possible. Rather, they exist to sell our products and services to as many people as possible. That means ensuring salespeople are maintaining contact with all their accounts throughout the year, not just the ones easy to do business with.

Hoping our salespeople stay in contact with hundreds of accounts means they’ll likely focus on the low-hanging fruit – and that means a lot of lost business across all those harder-to-reach accounts. Those prospects will buy from someone, but if our salespeople aren’t top of mind, it won’t be our companies they buy from.

Because we’re trimming hope from our sales strategy, we’ll use the acronym TRIM to guide us through creating a system with a trigger, ensuring it’s repeatable, building in ways to improve it and of course, ensuring it’s measurable and getting us results.

T – Trigger: To begin ensuring your salespeople are maintaining contact with even tough-to-reach prospects, sales leaders should regularly check their salespeople’s CRMs – and not just for number of contact attempts made. Leaders should examine which accounts have the least amount of quality information entered over a quarter or year, and flag those for follow-up with the salesperson.  That information isn’t just ‘left a voicemail’, but entails the information that matters – confirming decision makers, budget, and buying timeframes.

R – Repeatable: To ensure this process is something sales leaders can do consistently well across unresponsive accounts, Chad recommends establishing guidelines for what qualifies an account as ‘unresponsive’. He advises we not use call activity, as that is something salespeople can easily doctor and doesn’t indicate conversations with decision makers. What guidelines can we use that flag an unresponsive account to get back into play?Chad says a lack of updating budget, quotes, and decision maker information is a good benchmark because it tells us those prospect conversations didn’t get very far – all they’re things good salespeople need to track in all their assigned accounts, not just the responsive ones.

I – Improvable: Simply nudging salespeople to get back in contact with unresponsive accounts and send a quote isn’t enough. It has to be something we can improve. To coach his salespeople to get back in contact with unresponsive accounts, Chad gives his salespeople timeframes to get an account back open and get that information from prospects/get a quote out, and of course to track how much time it takes for salespeople to re-engage prospects to set benchmarks for the rest of the team.

M – Measurable: To measure success in re-engaging accounts, Chad recommends first classifying accounts in tier of priority. This allows sales leaders to require more touches in re-engaging the higher-value accounts while ensuring even the ‘C’ or ‘D’ priority accounts still have a mandated outreach cadence. That way, sales leaders can ensure even unresponsive accounts don’t fall out of contact in the future.