Lasso Consulting: Automating Sales Processes for More Effective Follow-up

Finding a sales methodology that’s right for your business is a great first step in helping your sales team succeed.

The next big step is implementing one.

An important—but often overlooked—part of that process includes setting up your CRM to support your new sales methodology. You need to turn the theory into practice in order to fully leverage your new sales training.

Great customer follow-up is the foundation to building a business–and building good customer relationships is key. In this blog, we walk through an example of how the Lasso Consulting team set up a homebuilder’s CRM to match their sales methodology in order to more efficiently follow-up with prospects.

Background

Our client is a very active home builder and land developer in the Florida area, a Top 50 builder with over two dozen communities.

Challenge

The sales leader for this builder is a big proponent of the Jeff Shore 4-2 Formula, but they knew that to implement this successfully, they needed the proper tools in place. However, the builder didn’t have the resources to design and set up the follow-up processes for each community.

The builder didn’t have an OSC in place, so they needed to make sure their processes were useful for walk-in leads as well as online, and they needed to be simple to get sales agent buy-in.

Solution

The builder engaged the Lasso consulting team to help implement a solution. The Lasso consulting team leveraged their extensive experience building sales processes for online sales counselors and adjusted it for the builder’s on-site agents so they could be as successful with their online leads as if they had an OSC.

Step 1: Setting Goals and KPIs

If you’re not tracking it, you can’t measure it. And without a baseline measure, how do you know if you’ve reached your goals?

The first step in the process involved the sales team entering their activities and marking off what was completed. This tracking is essential because sales management needed to review a few key metrics:

• The number of activities being completed by their agents compared to what was done before
• Engagement with emails
• General amount of communication the agent has with each prospect

Step 2: Setting up the Sales Process:

Two sales processes were created for one community – one process for walk-ins and one for online. Sales processes were also created based on the prospect rating depending on where they were the buying process.

Each follow-up process had up to 15 sales activities and included 7 automated emails that started on Day 0 and went to Day 60. This process was then customized to each community.

By engaging with Lasso consulting, it gave the builder the opportunity to put a system in place that they wouldn’t normally have the resources to do.

Incorporating the Jeff Shore 4-2 Formula

The builder was able to incorporate the Jeff Shore 4-2 Formula, a series of questions that need to be answered for each registrant in a community and incorporated into the sales process. The builder created activities that mapped on to the 4-2 formula that agents needed to complete.

When setting up the process, it was important to understand the desired outcome for each community, the content needed for each process, as well as determining what could be replicated for other processes. The final step included testing the process on one community and, based on those results, rolling it out to all their communities.

Advantages of Automation

After implementing the process, the builder sent more than 58,000 emails. That’s follow-up that they wouldn’t have done without the automated emails and customized sales processes. With almost 60% of leads coming from online sources, the automation was essential to making it a successful program.

Step 3: Setting Up Reports

Using the Lasso Data Export and Google Data Studio, the builder created reports to review sales agent activity and the results from the new sales processes. Sales managers used these reports to manage and coach based on the data entered by their agents.

Step 4: Training

In addition to setting up processes, the consulting engagement also included training existing and new users on how to use the processes so the sales team could get the most from the CRM. Sales managers were also trained on these in order to coach their team. Training provides both the sales team and managers with the additional skills to ensure a successful consulting engagement.

By working with the Lasso consulting team, the builder was able to create sales processes that enabled them to follow-up with prospects that otherwise they would not have been able to reach and drive more sales.

If you would like more information on how Lasso CRM can help you, contact us to get started.