WARNING: You’re going to generally agree to radically agree with this article and then go back to the way this business has originated for 40 years and hope for a different result or surrender to the “we don’t have time” or “there’s no money” story. Folks, really stop and think about what you’re doing for 3 minutes after reading this article and ask yourself if you really want to grow or you just like to talk about growing because it makes you sound cool in meetings. 4Q is coming. It’s game time. What are you doing?
Being a commercial lender, one of the biggest obstacles you face in creating a stable, consistent deal flow is education. For most of you, deal flow is either not enough or not accurate enough and your sales staff has to spend huge time educating and re-educating the market on who you are and what you do that makes you different. While seemingly necessary, most of this time is wasted with people that likely won’t do business with you in order to find those that will. It’s an inefficient sales process that is not always accretive to bottom line results, leads to high sales turnover or barely-make-my-quota salespeople.
Is there a way to maximize deal flow of well-prepared opportunities from a market immersed on your approach, criteria and process?
Marketing to the rescue. Here’s how:
Articles, Success Stories, Education Pieces, Ideas…in volume…delivered to your markets via email newsletter every 2 weeks. Why?
- A well-informed market sends you a larger volume of better deals with more complete packages from end users eager to work with you.
- This is a transactional business. Out of sight…out of mind is a business development problem and salespeople cannot be everywhere all the time. Consistency in the marketing approach we are describing is everything.
- Content like this adds value to the recipients job. It helps them be smarter, more effective and do more deals while keeping your brand up front as the value added partner that enabled all that. While everyone else is asking for deals, responding to RFPs and drawing their credit box…you’re solving problems
- Content like this fuels discussion. An increase in well-informed sales discussions will increase pipeline volume…period.
- Content lives on the website, so every time they are interested in an email article they are driven to the site where your expanded story lives. This deepens their connection with you as they see more content online and helps to educate the market on the transactions you are looking for, your process, etc.
- Visuals matter. The website should make you look like a $2B company, speak directly to the people you sell to and sound massively differentiated from the rest of your competitors.
- Email allows us to deliver leads. Real ones. Creating a lead report based on folks that are highly engaged with certain email topics evolves the sales process from the inefficiency of cold calling to more efficient warm calling to people already interested and familiar with your company and your approach.
- Email also creates a platform of “inbound leads”: a stream of people that are reaching out to you in order have a business discussion
Your ability to create awareness with the look, feel and message and fall into the consideration set with your thought leadership content and material across a very wide prospect universe while creating a more efficient sales process full of warmer opportunities leads to our company motto: Do more deals.
If you ever wanna talk about how to re-engineer or enhance the business development process…give us a holler.