For a long time, prospecting was limited to cold calling. Sales managers who couldn't help their team improve their sales effectiveness demanded more phone calls. The only time more activity is needed is when there is too little activity. Leaders who can improve their teams’ results have an advantage in creating opportunities.
Our communication options have proliferated over time, allowing you to improve your results with a drip campaign. One of the largest benefits of a drip campaign is that you can strengthen your prospecting by using a patient, professional, persistent prospecting pursuit. In this article, we'll look at what a drip campaign is, and what you need to do to use one successfully.
What Is a Drip Campaign?
A drip campaign is a series of communications you drip out over time, creating awareness of you and your company. When a company doesn't have a value creation model, their drip campaigns miss the mark by being self-oriented. These types of campaigns work when they create value for the prospective client by providing them with insights and educating them on what's going on where their industry and yours intersect.
One reason salespeople like drip campaigns is because they can turn a cold call into a warm call, especially if the campaign is valuable to the contact. But even when a contact doesn't reach out to the salesperson, the prospecting sequence can establish the salesperson as an authority and an expert. This can increase the contact's willingness to take their call. It is how to succeed at B2B sales prospecting.
How to Use the New Sales Storytelling
The stories about your company, your clients, and your offerings are no longer interesting to your prospects. Anything you share on your website will not be valuable to your drip campaign. These messages are ignored and deleted. More still, they make the salesperson look like a transactional commodity seller.
The new stories you need to tell through your drip sequence must be about the external environment and the forces and factors causing companies to have trouble delivering the results they need. By explaining these forces and their implications, you prove that you are someone worth granting a meeting. This command of the message differentiates the salesperson from their many competitors.
The New Sales Collateral
I have never been big on sales collateral. I have never carried a brochure or some other four-color glossy printed piece. I never found these things to be anything more than something the client files in the round filing cabinet under their desk.
The new sales collateral is insight-rich, educational, and tailored to the client and their industry. Because it is more about the insights, it can be provided through electronic media. This is how you use LinkedIn for prospecting and to close more deals. Making these assets digital means they cost nothing and can be used widely.
The Sales Conversation Starts Earlier
The largest variable to sales success is the sales conversation. Now, the sales conversation starts a lot sooner than you think. You may to need to update your B2B social selling, reaching clients where they are on the social channels. This is something like smarketing. You can warm up your contacts by using your drip campaign to prepare them for a sales conversation.
Current research that suggests that buyers are online doing their own research online before speaking to a salesperson. Many don't want to talk with a salesperson until later in the buying process. Instead of allowing your contact to search for what they are looking for, you can use your prospecting sequence and drip information they find nowhere else. This will make you One-Up, you can learn how to be One-Up by reading Elite Sales Strategies: A Guide to Being One-Up, Creating Value, and Becoming Truly Consultative.
Using Your CRM as a Strategic Advantage
You will need your CRM to manage the process of your drip campaign. It’s important that you know what you have sent to your contacts and what they have not yet been provided. Because these campaigns unfold in a sequence, it's important to build a structure that leads the client down the path you are sharing with them.
Some of your prospects will take a salesperson's call and engage with them. Others will ignore the drip campaign, often because it isn't a priority. By developing campaigns that build on earlier campaigns, you can continue to communicate over a long time. Eventually, your dream client will take a call and enter a conversation.
A Long-Term Approach to Drip Campaigns
By taking a longer-term view of a drip campaign, you are playing the long game. You speed this process by including cold and warm calls where you can ask directly for a meeting. The worst possible way to use a drip campaign is to use a fully automated prospecting drip campaign. You can also ruin your drip campaign by asking the client to return a call, respond to an email, or schedule a meeting with you using your calendar link.
The drip campaign should create value for your contacts, not ask them to do your work and book a meeting with you. Before you can claim value, you must create enough of it to deserve a first meeting. If your drip campaign isn't designed to be valuable to your prospective clients, look at it again and discern whether you would appreciate receiving it from a salesperson. If you wouldn't open your emails and other communications, rework them to be compelling enough that your clients will find them helpful. This will position you as someone they would like to spend time with discussing their business.
