Identify and Remove Clogs in Your Sales Pipeline

Lead nurturing is essential for moving dentists through the sales pipeline. With targeted emails, relevant content, and social media interaction, you can encourage dentists to take the next step in the buying process. There's a lot that can go wrong with the sales pipeline, so it's important to find the source of the problem rather than trying to fix its leaks with band-aids. Dental Lab Sales pipeline management isn't a perfect system. Even with a great strategy, your pipeline will get clogged from time to time. When this happens, it's important to identify the cause, find a solution, and prevent the same problem from happening again. In the end, you'll find that you have to do regular maintenance to keep your sales pipeline healthy. 

Keep a healthy pipeline with relevant leads 

The single most important factor in regard to sales pipeline management is lead quality. To attract new customers to your business and move them along through the sales process, you need to market exclusively to your target audience. 

Irrelevant leads are the most common source of sales pipeline clogs. Because these dentists aren't interested in your products, they just sit at the beginning of your pipeline until you remove them. 

This Business 2 Community article explains the process of qualifying prospects. According to the article, it's essential to first identify your target audience:

"Qualifying prospects is at the heart of a healthy lead generation system. First, you need to paint a clear picture of the types of prospects that fit with each of your solutions. Doing so establishes the types of buyers that could flow through your pipeline in the most efficient way. When you know who to target, you qualify by asking questions that allow you to detect whether a buyer fits well into your pipeline."

Lead nurturing tactics won't be effective if you're trying to convert irrelevant leads. In this respect, the first step of the journey is the most important one. 

Align your marketing and sales teams 

It's well-known that marketing and sales teams don't exactly mesh well together. Each team sees itself as the more important counterpart and is therefore unwilling to compromise. 

It's up to lab management to get these teams to understand that they're part of a dynamic duo. A marketing campaign would be ineffective without a sales team, and sales representatives would never have any opportunities without a solid marketing campaign. 

In this light, aligning your marketing and sales teams should be your first priority. According to this Forbes article, you can do this by creating a service level agreement between the two departments: 

"If you haven’t noticed yet, integrating your marketing and sales departments is vital if you want a contribution from your marketers in the sales pipeline. You can encourage these departments by drafting a service level agreement (SLA). The SLA should describe the lead requirements like the target market and interest, the marketing contribution to the sales pipeline, support options, and how data and content will be shared."

It's a give and take. Don't expect perfect coordination overnight, but you also want to nip bad habits from the very start. 

Move Dentists along with lead nurturing 

Once you refocus your lead generation strategy and align your marketing and sales teams, you can move on to other matters in relation to the sales pipeline. At this point, you should at least have a steady stream of dentists coming in. 

While some businesses have a knack for generating leads, it's rare to see a company naturally good at converting them. If you fall into this category, then you should concentrate on lead nurturing. 

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.