Customers today are not only informed, they are actively engaged with brands at multiple levels; making it critical for companies to manage highly engaged consumers effectively.

One of the most important factors is timing of marketing and sales outreach. Stay quiet too long and a customer will forget. Send an e-mail when a customer spends more decision-making time on social media and the message is lost. Provide testimonials, third-party research and product information upfront; the customer may be overwhelmed.

Here are eight tips to improve the timing of sales outreach to boost results.

1. Develop a calendar including all events that would impact a customer’s buying process. Critical dates such as holidays, seasonal buying spikes and lulls, and national events like tax season or earnings announcements should be included.

2. Analyze current sales outreach timing. Is there a strategy behind e-mails and flyers going out or is a shotgun approached used each time more sales are needed? Look back at old campaigns and rank which campaigns were the most effective. Identify core commonalities.

3. Organize sales collateral. Not knowing what is available to send to potential customers greatly inhibits a business’ ability to time outgoing messaging properly. Create categories for sales messaging and assign each piece of collateral a category. These should include general sales/product messages, special offers, customer testimonials, case studies, third-party research and newsletters.

4. Once sales collateral is categorized, it needs to be assigned timing. Developing a standard operating procedure for when each piece of messaging is appropriate to send to a lead, based on that lead meeting certain criteria, will help take the guesswork out of the sales process.

analyze trends

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5. Next, review past sales to identify the average buying process timeline for customers. By reviewing how long it took for past leads to make a purchasing decision, a sales team can better align current outreach efforts to match typical response times and interest levels of leads that are now in the pipeline.

6. Begin building the master sales calendar. Once a business has identified key dates that will impact its sales cycle, organized and categorized sales collateral, and reviewed past successes, it is time to merge the information together. Put events and past sales wins on parallel timelines. If successes in the sales cycle are not aligning with key dates as they should be, further research needs to be done on why a campaign was a success (or failure).

7. Map out on a third parallel timeline the buying process of the average customer. Create buying stages for the sales funnel. For example, name Stage One, “Awareness.” This is when the lead is first learning about a business and evaluating its offerings and benefits. Stage Two is “Consideration.” This stage is when a lead is reviewing and contemplating a business’ offerings versus competitors and seeing what options are out there. Stage Three is “Short Listing.” The lead knows what it wants and what businesses best fit that need. Now it’s time to make a decision.

8. On the timeline for the average customer’s buying process, overlay the collateral materials available to send to the customer in each stage. It is crucial to create a campaign that builds and leaves no doubt about the superiority of your company’s products or services. Use past sales data to determine the average length of each stage for a typical lead.

In “Awareness,” leads should be interacting with news stories, banner ads, white papers, social media communities and receiving a newsletter. In this stage leads are being made aware of a business’ capabilities and are being alerted of their need.

Once a lead has entered the sales cycle and is made aware of a company’s offerings, the pressure is on. During the “Consideration” stage, leads need to be consistently reminded of the superiority of a business’ product or service through third-party verifications. At this stage, sales messaging should focus heavily on analyst reports, case studies, references, testimonials, third-party research reports on the industry as a whole and media coverage, balanced with selective messaging about product/service benefits and competitive advantages.

Only at the point when a lead lapses into the “Short List” stage should a business begin to deliver special offer sales messaging to a lead. During this final stage of decision-making, a lead should be well enough known to a sales team to identify any additional collateral materials that need to be sent to push the sale over the edge.

As the president of OptifiNow, John McGee leads the company’s vision, strategy and growth. He founded the company to solve a common problem of enterprise customers – the shared struggle of managing national and global sales teams with brand and legal compliant messaging.

Special Reports /

Timing is everything: 8 tips for improving customer communications

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