Dental Lab Guide to Sales Pipeline Stages and Management

A thorough and effective sales pipeline streamlines your sales process and allows your dental lab sales team to visualize where all potential customers live in the buying process. Keeping your pipeline healthy and controlled will boost sales velocity and revenue outcomes.

Think about it – if it takes three weeks for any given deal to make it through your sales pipeline instead of four, then by the end of any given period, you’ll have closed 33% more deals. The key is building out a successful pipeline and consistently managing it.

Although every dental lab has its own process that works best for them, in this article we will cover the basics of what a sales pipeline is, the fundamental steps required, and how you can best manage your pipeline. 

Sales Pipeline Stages

What is a sales pipeline?

A sales pipeline is the sequence of steps you lead a prospect through from the beginning to the end of a sale – the pipeline helps to visualize where prospects are in the sales process.

A sales pipeline helps your sales team identify which stages need more attention so your team can focus on improving those stages to increase sales velocity. Your pipeline also helps forecast results and revenue by viewing which stages the prospects are currently in and how many will make it through the pipeline by a given time. 

What are the main stages of a sales pipeline?

1. Prospecting
2. Qualifying
3. Demonstrate
4. Proposal
5. Closing

Prospecting

The pipeline begins with Prospecting (or Lead Generation). Prospecting is the process of identifying potential customers that your product or service will benefit, and then systematically communicating with them. Lead Generation is the process of attracting and engaging prospects through marketing activities such as campaigns, events, and content marketing.

Here are 7 techniques to get your prospects to say yes.

Qualifying

Before taking the prospect through the pipeline, make sure they’re a good fit. Through research and conversation – dig into their pain points, buyer persona, company size, budget, etc. This will also help establish who your high-value prospects are and prioritize deals based on the likelihood of them leading to a sale.

A sales technique for qualifying your leads is through BANT. This is a formula used to determine whether it’s the right time to sell to a prospect and helps to separate hot deals from time-wasters through a series of questions. 

Demonstrate

This is where you demonstrate the product or service to the prospect to make sure it resonates with them. This will differ according to your product or service, but it’s important to demonstrate all the features and capabilities, emphasize the advantages of implementing your solution, handle any objections, and answer all questions.

Proposal

Once you’ve qualified the prospect and demonstrated your solution, your proposal will be much easier to personalize and tailor to the specific prospect. Your proposal dives into the details of your solution such as price and length, all while staying personalized and directed towards their pain points and why your product or service will benefit them specifically.

Here are some fundamental elements to include in your proposal:

• Executive summary
• Personalization
• Outcomes
• Pricing
• Next steps
• CTA

Closing

Whether the prospect becomes a customer or you lose the deal, closing for both is important. If you’ve won the sale – follow up, get them the paperwork they need, provide onboarding steps if necessary, and make the transition as smooth as possible. If you have lost the sale – do your best to maintain a relationship for the future, ask for feedback, and reflect.

Tip: once the sale is closed, salespeople can still follow up with the customer to make sure they’re happy. This helps with loyalty but also remaining in contact with the customer for future sales. Loyal customers can come back to the sales pipeline by repurchasing additional products or services such as upgrading their accounts. 

Sales Pipeline Management

Keep your sales pipeline healthy

Always keep track of your sales pipeline and monitor its growth and health. Your pipeline should always be growing or at least staying consistent with new deals leaving and entering simultaneously.

Another indicator of a healthy pipeline is to consistently have prospects at every stage. Make sure these opportunities maintain momentum – don’t let a good lead slip through the cracks!

Prioritize top deals

Monitoring the length of the deal to estimate the closing period can help with prioritization and sales activities. Certain deals move through your sales pipeline differently than others. And some deals you need to prioritize.

A tip is to have certain qualification criteria for each stage to determine the top priorities you need to work on first. If you’re consistently monitoring your pipeline, you’ll begin to understand patterns of length and likelihood of dropping depending on the kind of deal.

Drop deals that aren’t progressing

Deals that aren’t moving and are stuck at a particular stage are in most cases not likely to make it through the pipeline. These are a waste of time – so make sure to clean up your sales pipeline regularly to avoid clutter.

When a prospect is at a standstill, either decide to remove them or focus on picking up momentum with this particular deal. A key indicator is if they’ve surpassed the average sales cycle length.

Monitor pipeline metrics

Monitoring your metrics is a key indicator of the growth and progress of your sales initiatives. Focus on metrics that indicate pipeline health such as the number of deals in your pipeline, the average lifetime of a deal, the average size of deals, and the percentage of deals that make it through the pipeline.

It’s also important to monitor your pipeline to identify opportunities or areas in the sales process that need improvement. Your sales pipeline can also indicate barriers and identify blockers that your sales manager needs to address.

Reflect and improve

Which sales techniques are working and which are not? 

What stages are taking longer than others? 

It’s important to regularly review your pipeline and the progress of your sales team. Indicate barriers and what is slowing down the momentum, then work on and improve your sales techniques accordingly.

Establish and execute

Establish your pipeline, execute, measure, and reflect.

Your sales pipeline is essential for growth in not only your sales team but your business as a whole. Establish what each stage of your pipeline entails and your team’s plan and techniques for each. Use the data and metrics your sales pipeline provides to improve your sales process.

From prospecting to closing – keep the stages in a sequence and maintain a process-oriented visual dashboard of your pipeline to avoid any opportunities from slipping through the cracks.

For more information about Sales Pipeline Stages and Management, call 888-715-9099. or visit DentalLabSupport.com

So why do dental lab sales departments need a CRM?

Without fear of oversimplifying, the biggest challenges that sales people face are 1) how to qualify and follow up on leads and 2) how to prioritize sales activities.

However, CRM is a tool that not only solves those key problems. In fact, it is able to handle other, no less pressing issues.

1. Enjoy a safe storage space

CRM helps sales people to safely and centrally store their contacts, sales opportunities, activities and scheduled plans in one place, and have uninterrupted access to the database from multiple locations. Rest assured that your data won’t just get lost.

2. Plan and time-manage like a pro

CRM helps sales people to optimize their daily schedules and prioritize tasks to make sure customers are not ignored and the key prospects are contacted on time. In fact, CRM allows sales people to spend more time with customers, which leads to more deals closed and a stronger customer base.

3. Activity reports? – No brainer!

CRM helps sales people to easily prepare their weekly or monthly reports for management. The process is automated and transparent, and takes just a few clicks to inform others about what sales are currently in progress.

4. Stop surfing, start targeting

CRM helps sales people to segment data and identify valuable opportunities via criteria based selections. This prevents you from hours of cutting and pasting from various documents, or surfing in the disorganized lists of data.

5. Stay up-to-date on what’s happening

CRM offers shared calendars, document templates and e-mail integration, uniting all team members and keeping everyone up-to-date. Sharing selling patterns and processes allows sales people to see what works best. CRM also increases communication between the sales force and sales management.

6. Show up in time for the new sale

By tracking all communication with the customers, CRM helps sales people to know exactly when customers need to be contacted; for example, for product replacement, contract renewal, or for an upsell to a new product or service. This all increases your chances of closing a sale.

7. Rationalize your sales moves

CRM helps streamline the entire sales cycle, which results in closing deals in your sales pipeline and helping everyone in the team to reach targets faster. Since order processing and preparing quotes is automated in CRM, sales teams are able to reduce production costs and increase sales revenue.

8. Know what your customers really want

Since all the customer-related data is stored in CRM, it helps sales people to analyze the needs of customers and even anticipate their problems – all at the right time. All this increases customer satisfaction and ensures loyalty, as well as higher profit margins.

9. Cut down on admin tasks

CRM releases the sales teams from the majority of admin tasks by reducing and even removing some of the repetitive actions that take a lot of time, but yield little profitability. CRM stores product and price details, triggers reminders for activities, and takes sales people through the sales pipeline step by step.

10. Save money

Even though CRM systems are not cheap, they actually help you save your money! With sales people, it is the reduction of errors (for example, in orders or quotes) that CRM can help with. Effort and cost related to correcting those errors may be much higher. Finally, it also boils down to such trivial things as saving money on those cluttering and often vanishing Post-it notes, since every new information can be safely stored in the system.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, sales people and CRM is not an immediate “match made in heaven”, but the more time these two spend together – the stronger the attraction between them becomes.

If adopted and used correctly, CRM is going to boost the performance of any sales team, and will help sales people to excel in 4 areas that are critical for them:

• better search, sort and qualify leads;
• follow up on sales opportunities systematically and on time;
• prioritize and rationalize follow up activities; and
• increase target reach rates faster.

The improvements that CRM brings, however, don’t come without effort, understanding and determination from the sales people’s side. Sales reps have to unanimously understand that updating CRM is central to their success.

Also, sales teams need to synchronize their activities and base them on best practices. This will enable a better sharing of information and will secure more effective work with CRM.

More so, sales teams should embrace the idea that by registering all activities and following the established sales routines they are more likely to reach their sales goals. It is also important to realize that sales people are going to benefit a lot by being able to update and share the newest information on prospects and customers – all in one place that is easy to access.

Finally, CRM enhances sales people’s mobility, as the database and all your work-related activities can be accessed on multiple devices and from different locations.

So, what are your experiences in getting sales teams on board with CRM? Do you have any other reasons as to why sales people need CRM? Please share your thoughts in the comments below.

If you’d like to learn more contact us today DentalLabSupport.com  call 888-715-9099 info@dentallabsupport.com

How to Use Your CRM to Keep Your Sales Team Accountable

Your dental lab customer relationship management (CRM) platform may be your solution for marketing automation, but are you fully leveraging the tracking and team management capabilities of your software? In addition to helping you engage with prospects, organize contact information and manage email marketing, your CRM can help you manage and monitor your sales force.

Here are three of the most useful CRM features for tracking sales metrics and holding your team accountable:

1. Task Tracking

A good dental laboratory CRM offers the ability to create to-do lists and activity tracking so all tasks and reminders can be accessed from a single view. Task tracking gives you the ability to see how quickly and efficiently team members complete assigned activities. You can also run reports for a high-level view of how individuals and teams are performing in regards to specific tasks.

2. Synchronizing Team Calendars and Contacts

Calendar synchronization in your dental lab crm is another efficient way to organize tasks and track meetings for all team members. Managers can easily access data to determine their direct reports’ workload and day-to-day experiences. This way, you can engage and follow up with them appropriately.

3. Opportunity Tracking

Sales manager tracking allows your team to monitor prospect activity via email, social media and sales engagements, which gives everyone the ability to understand how prospects interact with your business. Also, your dental lab CRM should allow you to build a custom sales pipeline to align with your marketing funnel with your sales goals. This alignment allows your sales team to closely track prospect activity and deliver the most appropriate offer and sales communication at the right time in the buyers’ journey.

4. Steps to follow

To ensure these CRM features can help you keep your dental lab sales team (and your business) on track, you must first define what you want to measure. Get started by defining the specific metrics or performance indicators you want to track with your CRM solution:

• First, define what’s important to the dental lab. Whether it’s increasing market share, product knowledge or daily sales, understanding business goals will help you focus your resources in the right place.
• Second, determine which sales metrics support business objectives. Key performance indicators may include total dollar sales, closing ratios, pipeline accuracy or daily activities. Every business is different; therefore, the way you track and measure success will depend on your company, products and sales management style.
• Third, identify a system for real-time, ongoing tracking and measurement. If you’re already using a CRM to track and measure customer service and engagement, determine which sales performance metrics—such as daily tasks, sales and opportunities—can be tracked within your CRM as well.

Knowing which metrics are most important and how to measure them for your sales force will help you leverage your CRM in a manner that’s impactful to the business. These metrics, in turn, may be incorporated in your CRM so you can measure sales and marketing performance in the same platform for ongoing success.

To learn more about how customer relationship management software can help you hold your dental lab sales team accountable, contact us today! DentalLabSupport.com - 888.715-9099

The 5 Types Of Direct Mail Campaigns

David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Direct mail has been always been an essential marketing tool here at DentalLabSupport, and I suspect it will continue to be effective for a long time coming. In this post, we’ll explore why it’s so popular and how to take advantage of direct mail to increase marketing alignment with sales and more importantly, close more revenue.

Why is Direct Mail so Effective?

First of all, it stands out and makes a great impression. In the world of cold emails and auto-dialers, direct mail shows a high level of commitment (financially) and breaks through the noise. In other words, it gets noticed more than other marketing tactics.

Second, it scales linearly instead of with diminishing return like ads. In other words, the cost per box is the same as you send more, but for ads the next click costs more than the last one.

Finally, it aligns marketing with sales. Sales teams love direct mail. They see how it benefits them more than some other marketing channels and it’s much easier to integrate into sales stages and processes.

Why is Direct Mail Gaining Popularity?

In addition to being an effective marketing channel, it’s getting more popular because of increased interest in account-based marketing (ABM) and technologies like PFL that help marketers (including us at DentalLabSupport) scale direct mail.

Having a service and technology for direct mail has been crucially important at DentalLabSupport. Not only can you tap into existing expertise, but the technologies integrate deeply with LabCell CRM, an exclusive marketing software developed for dental labs, for automated sending, task follow up for sales, and simple tracking in attribution solutions.

Marketing attribution helps us measure the effectiveness of running ads, sending direct mail, and follow up outreach by sales teams all in one attribution model.

Another added benefit is that services like DLS provide better economies of scale for assembling and sending boxes. Internally, we wouldn’t be able to do this cost efficiently.

Five Ways to Take Advantage of Direct Mail

After a few years of experimentation and deep discussions with other marketing leaders, I’ve learned there are 5 distinct direct mail “plays”  and campaigns to execute. They are awareness, appointment, shareable, closer, and advocacy plays.

Awareness mailers are designed to make a positive first impression. The call to action is light (if it exists at all). Think of this as a billboard or TV ad. For example, we’re sending printed versions of our DLS magazine.

Appointment mailers, or sometimes called “meeting makers,” are the bread and butter of direct mail. These have strong call-to-actions, often times come with an incentive, and are used to convert warmer leads into opportunities. We’re sending chocolates along with an Amazon gift card.

Shareable mailers are designed to get more people involved in the deal and help you grow the number of champions at the receiving company. This can be something simple like a box of cupcakes or something clever like a popcorn machine for their office.

Closer mailers, or sometimes called “clutter busters,” are sent to the decision maker of the deal. Closer mailers can also be used to help accounts and opportunities that have stalled. These are highly branded and personalized. It can be something physical like a bottle of wine with a Forrester report on your product, or an experience like tickets to join you in a suite at a sporting event.

Advocacy mailers are for new customers. They are designed to help turn customers into advocates who spread your brand both internally at their companies and externally to others. We’re sending branded boxes with branded swag, a custom letter, and handouts for the champion to share with the rest of the marketing team.

Conclusion

If you haven’t experimented with direct mail or account-based marketing before, feel free to contact us to learn more.  DentalLabSupport.com 1.888.715.9099  info@dentallabsupport.com.

The Role of Your Dental Lab Marketing Department — And What You Should Expect From It

Marketing vs. Sales in Professional Services

One of the first steps is to be clear about the language we use to describe a marketing department and how it differs from a sales function. The reason that this distinction is so tricky is that many firms do not use traditional language to talk about these concepts. Sometimes the term dental lab business development is used to refer to the sales function. In other firms, business development refers to both the marketing and sales function. In this article, we are going to use the traditional definitions.

Marketing is the process of understanding your marketplace and competitors, defining your firm’s market positioning, pricing and services, promoting the firm to your target audience and explaining how they might benefit by working with you. Put another way, marketing is about offering the right services with the right benefits to the right prospects.

Sales is the process of qualifying your prospects and convincing the right ones to buy your services. It’s about turning business opportunities into clients.

While this difference seems pretty simple on the surface, there are a few areas that can cause confusion. In some organizations, for instance, the sales function is also responsible for generating and nurturing leads until they become viable business opportunities. As you will see below, we have some strong opinions about this practice.

Dental Lab Marketing Department Functions

So what exactly should be the role of your marketing department? What should you expect from your marketing team?

Whether your team is in-house, entirely outsourced or a combination of the two, your marketing team has five core functions.

1. An understanding of your target market and competitors

Marketing should always start with the market. You should expect Marketing to be able to give you detailed and specific descriptions of your target markets and your key competitors in those markets.

But you already know all about your competitors and clients, right? Wrong. Unless you are already doing systematic, structured research, you are kidding yourself. Anecdotal experiences can lead you astray.

Our research shows that internal staff almost always inaccurately perceive their market and their clients’ true feelings and priorities. In fact, firms that do objective research on their markets and clients grow faster and are more profitable.

A professional marketing function can commission this research and allow you to make decisions based on marketplace reality, rather than hunches and wishful thinking.

2. A strategy to drive growth and profitability

Once you have a research-based understanding of your firm and its place in the market, your marketing department should be able to help craft a compelling strategy to drive growth and profitability. That strategy may require adjustments in your target market, service offerings (see the next point, below) and marketing plans.

Your strategy should clearly identify compelling competitive advantages (your differentiators) and a clear market positioning (are you the premium-priced leader or a value-driven alternative?). Think of these as tools to describe your brand. How do you want to be known in the marketplace? As you wrestle with your options, expect to be challenged with new thinking and bold choices.

You will also need a marketing plan. This plan will map out exactly how you are going to build the visibility of your brand and generate the new opportunities your business development (sales) team will convert into new clients.

3. Which services to offer and how to price them

Historically, many firms have left the key decisions about what services to offer and how to price them to individual operating executives or the finance and accounting function.

Decisions about service lines and pricing are important elements of a growth plan. They should be informed by an overall research-based strategy, not individual client requests. Why? It is too easy to get over-extended trying to be everything to every client. You will soon lose focus and experience, increasing costs as you struggle to provide an ever-expanding array of services.

Innovation and client responsiveness can all too easily become undisciplined dabbling. A strong marketing department plays a leading role in maintaining that balance.

4. A steady flow of new leads and opportunities

More leads! Better opportunities! Who doesn’t want a steady flow of well-qualified new business prospects? Fortunately, that is exactly what you should expect from marketing. While some firms assign lead generation and nurturing to the sales (business development) function, we think that is a bad idea in most cases. The time horizon for lead generation and nurturing can be long. Nurturing leads can take months, even years. Sales are almost always placed on a much shorter operational cycle (“what can you close this month?”).

Your marketing team should turn your overall strategy into a formal plan to generate new leads and nurture your existing prospects until they become well-qualified opportunities. This plan should look ahead at least a year and be guided by clear, trackable metrics (more on this below).

Be careful that you do not continually add new “marketing ideas,” underfunding campaigns or other unplanned initiatives that may derail the plan. If you fall into any of these traps, you cannot expect the plan to work, nor can you hold your marketing team accountable.

Also, be patient. Lead nurturing can take time — sometimes a very long time. Don’t focus only on immediate results. You will need new clients next year, and the year after as well.

What you need to provide

At this point, we have identified what benefits Marketing can provide to your firm. But what do they need to be able to deliver these results? The answer is straightforward. They need four basic things:

1. Talented people. Your marketing team must include people with the right skill sets and experience. If you don’t have these talents in house, you may need to outsource parts of the process or do some hiring. We’ll discuss these options when we cover how to structure your
   marketing department, below. A word of caution here: marketing professional services is its own specialty. Don’t expect someone with general marketing expertise to understand the unique rules and dynamics of the professional services marketplace.
2. Adequate resources. Your team must have sufficient resources to do the job right. Underfund the effort and you will not get the results you deserve. The requirements are not excessive. Our research shows that high-growth firms spend no more than average on marketing — and yet they are still able to deliver outstanding results. But don’t expect superior results with stingy resources.
3. A seat at the decision-maker’s table. The kiss of death is investing in your marketing then ignoring your team’s advice. It happens more often than you would think, especially in flat organizations, such as partnerships, where decision making is diffused over many people. If your decisions are broadly consensus-based, you may be better off delegating marketing decisions to a single partner or a small committee.
4. Patience and cooperation. Once the previous three considerations are in place, you will see impressive progress. But there is a catch. Just like any other functional area of your organization, Marketing needs cooperation and a bit of patience from the firm. Support your marketing team’s efforts over time and you will reap the rewards.

These four basic requirements lay the foundation for marketing success. But what does an effective marketing department look like?

Marketing Department Structure

Structuring a modern professional services marketing team is not easy. At many firms, marketing is a relatively new function — one, regrettably, that is not always highly regarded. In addition, many firms are working in a very competitive and rapidly evolving marketplace. When they lack marketing agility, firms put themselves at risk.

To keep things simple, let’s focus on the three aspects of departmental structure that are most relevant to professional services firms: the Role of marketing, selecting the right Resources and Reporting Relationships. 

1. Role of Marketing In The Dental Lab

At different firms, marketing comes in different guises — from a low-level support function charged with basic implementation responsibilities to a comprehensive team of specialists who deliver the full spectrum of strategic and operational skills. In our experience, the more comprehensive its marketing function, the more success a firm enjoys. (Keep in mind that marketing expertise does not necessarily need to reside in-house. See Resource Requirements below for the details.)

At many firms, a key decision revolves around lead generation and nurturing. Do these functions belong to marketing or sales? We believe that marketing is their proper home.

Why? Many, many firms today employ the Seller-Doer Strategy, so their busy professionals lack the time and focus to carry out a long-term program. Better to leave these tasks to individuals whose attention is not divided between business development and project delivery. Make lead generation and lead nurturing a prime role of the marketing department.

2. Resource Requirements

Where will you find the people with the specialized skill sets and experience needed to pull off the comprehensive vision we believe is so important? Well, you have two choices: staff up your in-house team or outsource the skills you need.

The in-house approach is appealing from an accessibility perspective. And if a person is fully utilized there can be some cost savings. Of course, no single person is likely to possess the full range of skills you need to implement a modern marketing program. So you are faced with the challenge of filling in the gaps. But how?

One avenue is training. This is, or should be, a given. Technology is always evolving and new research findings continually challenge our long-held beliefs and assumptions — what worked five years ago may not be what is most effective today. That means ongoing education is a must.

But even if you scrupulously train your marketing team, you’ll still need outside help on occasion. In fact, our recent research has shown that high-growth firms tend to spend more on outsourced resources than their slow-growth peers.

How do you decide whether to outsource a marketing function? Ask yourself a series of five questions about each function that is a candidate for potential outsourcing (see Figure 1).

Some dental laboratories outsource all of their marketing so that they can concentrate their internal resources on core functions only. However, most dental labs employ a mixed model in which some functions are handled internally and others are outsourced. Specialized services that are not used on a regular basis are often the best candidates for outsourcing. Examples include research, strategy development, analytics or the development of a new website.

3. Reporting Relationships

Whom should the marketing department report to? Many firms struggle with this question. The answer may depend on the role and resources choices you make.

At firms with limited marketing personnel, it makes sense to have the department report to the head of Administration or Sales (Business Development). The latter situation works particularly well when Marketing’s primary role is to support Sales. In neither of these cases, however, is Marketing in a position to make a major contribution.

As the marketing Role increases in sophistication, it should be allowed to influence major strategic decisions. This can be accomplished by having Marketing report to a senior partner who has responsibility for both Marketing and Sales. Having a single point of decision making minimizes conflict and makes it easier to align goals and priorities. It also gives Marketing a seat at the table when major decisions are being made.

A variation on this theme is to have the Marketing leader report directly to the CEO or Managing Partner. This gives him or her visibility into the firm’s strategy, which can only make marketing more effective. This reporting relationship is also well suited to our vision of Marketing as a key function that can drive growth and profitability of the firm as a whole.

Learn the best techniques and strategies to market your professional services firm with Hinge University

A Final Thought

In many consumer-facing industries, marketing is a core function that the rest of the organization is built around. These companies evolved in that direction because it gives them an advantage in financial performance. Perhaps there was a time when professional services firms did not need the perspective and discipline that marketing offers. No longer.

With the rise of digital communications, the collapse of geography and the proliferation of new competitors and business models the pressure is on. The advantage will go to the firm with the greatest marketplace visibility and the best value proposition. And that is exactly the promise that marketing can deliver.

What role is your marketing department playing in your firm’s success?

For more information about Dental Lab Marketing and Dental Lab Sales, visit DentalLabSupport.com.