Setup: Selling to SMBs

This tutorial covers how to set up LeadLoft for sales. Specifically, how to set up LeadLoft to sell to small and medium sized businesses.‍

This is a one time setup. After you’ve gone through this process, you will be ready to get started. It's also important to understand that this tutorial is for the large majority of B2B businesses but there are some instances when this tutorial is not right for you.

Use this tutorial if…

  • You're a business selling to small and medium-sized businesses

Don’t use this tutorial if…

  • You sell to multiple departments of enterprise businesses.
  • You sell to companies larger than 250 employees.
  • You sell to individuals or consumers. 

If you've made it this far, it means you're ready to get started so let's dive in!

What we’ll be covering

  1. Lead Stages & Deal Stages
  2. Prospecting & Segmentation
  3. Outreach & Playbooks
  4. Your Sales Workflow
  5. Tips & Best Practices

Let’s dive in! 

1) Lead Stages & Deal Stages

You might be wondering “What’s the difference between Lead stages and Deal Stages?” and you’d be asking a great question. 

Lead Stages: Handles the lifecycle of a company that you are selling to (e.g. New Lead, Potential Customer, Interested, Customer).

Deal Stages:Follow the pipeline of closing a Deal (e.g. meeting booked, proposal sent, won). In many cases, a lead will have multiple deals inside of it. These additional deals are oftentimes caused by returning customers or upsells. 

Recommended Lead Stages

You can edit them here.

For this setup, we recommend the below Lead Stages.

  1. New
  2. Engaging 
  3. Potential
  4. Qualified (Create Deal)
  5. Not Ready Yet
  6. Customer
  7. No Response 
  8. Bad Fit / Not Interested

Recommended Deal Stages

You can edit them here.

For this setup, we recommend the below Lead Stages.

  1. Negotiation
  2. Proposal Sent
  3. Won
  4. Lost

This is a very simple deal structure. We find it easier to start with fewer stages and add additional deal stages if you find your team needs them. If you start with a long deal structure, you’ll find that your team will get confused and eventually stop tracking deals. 

2) Prospecting & Segmentation

If you’re also using LeadLoft for outbound sales, you’ll want to set up the correct tags before getting started. Tags are used when saving contacts or when segmenting leads. 

Below are some basic tags to help you get started but you’ll likely want to create more as you build out more personalized campaigns (e.g. local companies, companies based in Hollywood, healthcare companies, etc.).

Recommended Tags to Start

You can edit them here.

  1. Website Leads
  2. Outbound Leads

We cover more advanced ways to use tag in the Tips & Best Practices section at the end.

3) Your Sales Workflow

Building your team’s sales workflow within LeadLoft is super easy. You simply outline the stages at which you want to engage leads and simply follow the steps. 

This is the workflow we recommend:

Step 1) New

Overview: This step shows you all of your leads who are marked “New”. In most cases, this is anyone who has not yet been engaged. 

Step 2) Go Follow Up

Overview: This step shows you all of your leads that you need to follow up with. In most cases, this is anyone who expressed interest but you have not yet created a deal for them. 

Step 3) 90 Day Follow Up

Overview: This step shows you all of your leads that you marked as “Not Ready Yet” and haven’t spoken to for 90 days. To put it simply, this is everyone that you need to check back in with. 

Step 4) Deal Follow Up

Overview: This step does not display leads, instead, it displays deals. It is your most valuable step in the entire workflow and needs the most attention. By default, it shows you everyone who has no activity scheduled and has not been spoken to for 4 days. 

Step 5) Customers

Overview: This is all of your current or past customers where you’ve closed a deal. It’s a great resource for upselling in SaaS or for selling to customers who purchase once per year. 

4) Outreach & Playbooks

Next, we’ll be covering how to automate outreach. In this set up, we recommend having 3 Playbooks built out to start. If you need help writing the copy for them, we recommend downloading our templates here

You can create and edit your Playbooks here.

Playbook #1: Website Follow Up

Use: Used to engage website form submissions and other lead form submissions from digital ads and popups. 

  1. Automated Email: Book a Meeting
  2. After 0 days - Task: Connect on LinkedIn
  3. After 2 days - Automated Email: Book a Meeting
  4. After 3 days - Automated Email: Book a Meeting
  5. After 7 days - Automated Email: Book a Meeting - Close the Conversation

Playbook #2: Lead Follow Up

Use: Used to add companies who need to be followed up with.

  1. Automated Email: Check In
  2. After 7 days - Automated Email: Check In
  3. After 14 days - Automated Email: Check In - Share a New Feature or Case Study
  4. After 30 days - Automated Email: Check In
  5. After 30 days - Automated Email: Check In - Close the Conversation

Playbook #3: Outreach

Use: Used to drive new leads.

  1. Automated Email
  2. After 0 days - Task: Connect on LinkedIn
  3. After 7 days - Automated Email
  4. After 7 days - Task: Send Message on LinkedIn

5) Tips & Best Practices

Tips and best practices are difficult to review through written word, so we’ll be creating more videos and sharing them here so stay tuned!

Wrapping Up

This is a standard outline of a powerful sales process that your team can duplicate, follow, and eventually build off of. 

In almost every case, you’ll find that you may want to alter the process to make it your own and we actually recommend this. This could be adding deal stages, creating new playbooks, and more. 

If you’d like our help setting this process up, simply sign up for LeadLoft here, and our team will be in touch within 24 hours to help you out.

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