Getting the most out of your marketing budget may start in your sales department. The linkage to marketing ROI and improving sales performance is powerful. If you are looking to increase revenue and decrease marketing expense look to tuning your sales processes and team.

Lead Capture and Distribution

The top inefficiency - and fastest route to improving sales performance - in most sales organizations is the process of capturing and distributing the right lead to the right sales person.

Sales leads will originate from a variety of sources (i.e., Internet, referrals, conferences, etc.). Design a process that quickly reduces each of those sources into fundamental contact and objective data. Then immediately get them into your sales database.

Once in your database, if you have a medium to large team, distribution becomes your next challenge. The modern sales force is increasingly mobile and distributed. Meanwhile consumers increasingly expect immediacy. This requires technology and methods that will immediately connect new leads to mobile devices. The trick to improving sales performance is determining who is available and making that connection to the customer as immediate and local as possible.

Sales Process and Disposition

Once a sales lead is in an agent or representatives' queue it is time to turn your attention to managing them to convert. Sales is as much an exercise in persistence as it is art. The key is defending against burn-out and track performance. Improving sales performance can be effectively achieved by simplifying and automating the tracking of process points and disposition.

Build a detailed, yet flexible, sales process flow with logical measurement points. Once documented this workflow can be tracked with simple and discrete disposition codes. Make sure that you reduce these tracking codes to quick annotations or selections within your sales database.

Automating Lead Nurturing

Of course not all leads convert immediately to sales. That is where lead nurturing becomes the secret weapon to improving sales performance. Design blended campaigns of email and contact that continue to add value and keeps you top of mind.

Unlike most sales processes adding lead nurturing will create a disciplined process of engaging the customer on a long-term basis. Your strategy should include topical and educational content as well as routine check-ups on their status and objectives.