Typically, sales counselors and rely on their interactions with prospects, their ability to build relationships, and gut instinct to gauge how ready someone is to move to their community. After months of work, phone calls, tours, and discovery, the prospect disengages, and the sales counselor is left to wonder why.
Bring Marketing and Sales Together to Understand Readiness
To elevate our understanding of prospect behavior and the buyer’s journey, we need to go back to basics. Enter our Marketing team! Marketing people are used to scoring leads on demographics and sometimes psychographics, to deliver the highest quality prospects (new leads) to sales counselors.
Along this same line, Continuum CRM™ has taken lead scoring to the next level with our built-in Prospect Readiness Score. More than Lead Scoring, the Continuum CRM Prospect Readiness score highlights the actions prospects take prior to choosing a community. Scores are generated based on key components of readiness: Education and Awareness; Fit; Need; Desire; and Means. You’ll capture important milestones in the buyer’s journey. This reveals the readiness of your prospect to join your community and whether they are a good fit.
Easy as Checking Off the Boxes
Sales counselors are delivered specific data fields related to the buyer’s journey to use in discovery, further assessing the readiness of the prospect. As each item is completed, such as touring the community, determining whether your community offers the lifestyle and amenities the prospect seeks, and a multitude of other discovery points needed to effectively guide your prospect, a score is generated to let you know how ready your prospect may be to make a decision.
Custom Data Fields, Algorithms, and Weighting
Because the data fields and algorithm are fully configurable, you can even include discovery points specific to your community or culture as well as dictate which items should be weighted more than others.
Never again do you have to wonder whether you have checked off all the boxes with discovery, information gathering, or suggestions for next steps. Because the score is part of the prospect’s profile, you can easily see in real time things that have not yet been completed.
Prospect Readiness as a Coaching Tool
Managers and Sales people alike are always looking for ways to improve their effectiveness and communicate clearly regarding each prospect’s readiness. Using the prospect readiness as a coaching tool to dissect the buyer’s journey, the conversations on suggesting next steps, and coaching on data collection and discovery is easy. Each person involved can clearly identify gaps or opportunities.
Use Dashboard Reporting to Encourage Discovery
Data is great, but only if you use it. Scoring prospect readiness is a great way to understand any anomalies between where a prospect is in their buyer’s journey vs. the assigned score. Reports and dashboards make it easy to detect these anomalies.
This also gives us another opportunity for creative coaching and communication with our team. We can have deeper conversations about the which prospects require more work and which ones should be ready to give a deposit.
Incorporate Additional Scoring Models with our Open API
Are you currently using another vendor’s lead scoring tool? Continuum CRM’s open API allows you to integrate other systems. You can incorporate one or all of your current lead scoring methods into the CRM to reveal a holistic picture of Prospect Readiness.
At the end of the day the Prospect Readiness Score provides exceptional value to the team. It delivers to the sales counselors the ability to self-assess and guide discovery with their prospects based on an objective scoring model as opposed to subjective good feelings derived from the satisfaction of interaction.
If you want to learn more about the Continuum CRM™ Prospect Readiness tool, visit our website at www.continuumcrm.com or call 800-570-6030 for more information.
