9 Essentials for Converting Sales Leads

A bird carefully chooses its prey. It has the ability to see from distance, connects to the movement of its prey, calculates its speed of flying, waits for the right moment and pounces on to its prey.

No, I am not saying that your lead is your prey. I am saying that we can learn from the way a bird hunts and apply in your sales worklife. You need to have few essentials as you go on hunting for your customers.

Presuming that the identification of the lead is done well, these are the 9 essentials you need to grow for converting sales leads to customers. Please note that they are not prioritized nor are these exhaustive. I also suggested some books to explore further.

1) Listening: Being open minded and listening are 'no substitute' skills and they complement each other. To develop this skill, please read the book 'Just Listen' by Goulston and Ferrazzi and 'Power Listening' by Bernard Ferrari.

2) Influencing: Influencing is no more an art alone. You can learn how to influence others. Traditionally, influencing in sales was carried out by using incentives (Positive or Negative) and information (Providing or Withholding). However, these two mechanisms change the situation by changing the structure or incentivize the customer; both unwarranted and costly.

I strongly recommend a book by Robert Cialdini 'Influencing' wherein he identified six principles on the so called ‘compliance professionals’ like salespeople. These principles leverage the psychological biases and heuristics to frame ideas or proposals so as to increase their appeal. 

3) Story Telling: A complimentary skill to influencing is the ability to tell stories. It helps in building persuasiveness of your appeal. Several sources are there but my favourite is the book by the Chip Brothers - 'Made to Stick'. Another favorite book of mine is 'Talk like Ted'.

4) Self Awareness. Probably the most important ability to develop in this hypersensitive world. Ayn Rand in Fountainhead mentions 'To say I love you, you need to know how to say I'. Knowing yourself is one part and knowing yourself in relation to the context and customer is critical. A tool to know yourself and how you interact with your customer is Social Styles. Please read 'Social Styles Handbook' by Larry Wilson. Other book you can refer is by Jeb Blount 'Sales EQ'.

5) Delayed Gratification: Do not rush. Just because lead conversion is a metric you would be evaluated, do not think of ticking the box. Lessons from the famous Marshmallow experiments indicate the benefits of delayed gratification include; ability to grow vigilance, intelligence, results in higher achievements, happiness in life, and effective decision-making abilities. For details please refer to the book 'The Marshmallow Test' by Walter Mischel.

6) Grit: Developing Grit (passion + persistence) as a skill has been pioneered by Angela Duckworth (read a book by her called 'Grit'). It certainly helps in good stead to convert leads.

7) Questioning: Your ability to ask right questions. This has been one of the most widely recommended skill for salesperson to convert and close sales leads. A book you need to read is 'SPIN selling'. Also do not forget to do the workbook that accompanies the book.

8) Differentiation: Many a time conversion gets stuck on the issue of price. Hence cultivate the ability to differentiate. Unless you are in the top three or four of the consideration set of the customers in this technology era, your voice is unheard. I suggest you to read Lee Salz's book on 'Sales Differentiation'.

9) Understanding Dashboards: Another skill you need is identifying patterns from data, reports and dashboards you get from sales support systems. The whole debate of sales enablement or digital transformation that is currently at its peak now, is for this reason. Research strongly supports that sales enabled organisations have better productivity from their salesforce.