In the competitive world of trade and commerce, how is one company helping businesses actively close sales?
According to the book “The Conversion Code” by Chris Smith, an online lead contacted within five minutes has 8 times better chances of qualifying compared to an online lead contacted after thirty minutes. This is only one of the many factors that ultimately determines a sale.
Of the biggest hurdles people in sales often come across, lead management takes the cake. While there are existing platforms that cater to sales and marketing management, there isn’t a single one out there that enables salespeople to effortlessly capture and respond to enquiries that come through various digital platforms, and to respond to them at the same time they are submitted in order to improve chances of closing sales.
In a traditional sales and marketing environment, when a digital marketing campaign is launched, sales managers will consolidate the enquiries from various gateways and distribute them to salespeople manually. This process usually takes days to complete and when the leads finally reach the salesperson, the golden hours of qualifying would have already passed.
Salespeople on the other hand, upon receiving the leads, are expected to carry out the first contact immediately and update the lead status in a separate system.
Due to the inconvenient and tedious nature of the traditional sales and marketing environment, coupled with a lack of incentives for salespeople to promote transparency, tracking efforts for leads are often delayed or end up incomplete, making it difficult for sales managers to effectively manage the sales process and ensure productivity.
Without getting sufficient insights from the sales data to accurately measure the effectiveness of each advertising effort, marketing teams miss opportunities to improve the return of investment for their advertising campaigns.
Pictured above: Stanley Chee and Jeffry Chan sharing exclusive sales & marketing insights for effective digital marketing at the inaugural CandyBowl
Having experienced and witnessed these issues first hand from their clients, Stanley Chee and Jeffry Chan decided to create SalesCandy: a mobile app that picks up leads generated through multiple traditional and digital channels and routes them instantly to the salespeople’s mobile phone the moment they submit an enquiry, allowing them to be contacted immediately.
How SalesCandy provides solution to a common pain point in businesses
SalesCandy operates primarily around the sales, marketing, productivity and lead management space. Stanley and Jeffry, who both ran performance marketing agencies, realized that in a company, there is often misunderstanding between the Sales and Marketing departments.
“The Sales department would blame the Marketing department or agency for generating leads of bad quality, while the Marketing department would blame the Sales department for not being prompt enough with their follow ups,” said Stanley and Jeffry. Such frictions are products of a flawed and inefficient lead management.
The solution? An Uber-style lead routing system. What SalesCandy does is instantly connect online leads from any lead source directly to salespeople’s mobile phones to be attended immediately. Pushing this innovative platform further, their product works in a way where unattended leads are automatically rerouted to the next available salesperson after 45 seconds.
Diagram of how SalesCandy helps clients close more sales
It doesn’t stop there. SalesCandy also believes that prospective clients have to be treated like VIPs, and the most potent way to achieve that is through a prompt response system.
One thing prospective buyers hate is waiting long periods of time. It is proven that in sales, prompt follow-ups often lead to the best of first impressions, ultimately strengthening customer relations and increasing chances of lead conversion.
When a potential lead makes a web enquiry, a generated SMS is automatically sent to him/her from the salesperson’s phone, followed by a phone call straight from the salesperson. What SalesCandy does is digitally automate responses while reminding salespeople to make follow up calls over the course of the transaction.
This encourages promptness in the lead management system, helping salespeople break out from the vicious cycle of closing fewer sales, requiring more leads, and slow response times from sales.
Proven and tested
“SalesCandy has helped us in streamlining our leads management process. It used to take almost 24 hours before we were able to contact any leads generated by our social media and now it takes less than 1 minute to do so,” said one satisfied SalesCandy client.
In the cut-throat world of sales where every second counts, this makes SalesCandy an important component to any business model. More than speed, however, SalesCandy also provides efficiency and security, since the platform essentially automates conventionally manual work.
“Prior to using SalesCandy, there was a lot of manual work. We needed to chase the salespeople for reports in Excel sheets which was very tiring and time consuming,” said the Agency Director of Manulife Financial. “Life is so much easier now that I am able to monitor the sales progress daily with the SalesCandy Manager Portal. With the SalesCandy app and reporting system, we are able to monitor the salespeople’s leads statuses anytime.”
On the other hand, Hap Seng Land Deputy Sales Manager said, “now, we have organized enquiries, records that can be tracked, and clients who are impressed with our shortened response time.”
Reza Rosli, Chief Technology Officer of SalesCandy, receives an award for being part of the top 15 finalists and winning the Digi Innovation Award at AmBank BizRACE 2018
What they are most impressed about isn’t only how it grants businesses the ability to monitor staff performances, but also the great impression they give their potential customers whenever they call only minutes after the enquiry.
Because of these results, SalesCandy is confident enough with their solution’s propensity for closing sales, that if clients do not see any improvement within 60 days, they would return their money.
What the future holds for SalesCandy and lead management in Southeast Asia as a whole
One major challenge they faced early on was rejection from a lot of their peers. A perennial comment that was made is that the SalesCandy solution is something that the biggest CRM players have already created.
However, SalesCandy powered through not only by proving the reality behind the pain points they managed to figure out, but also by creating a completely unique LMS that helps clients deliver first 5-minute response time to leads using patent pending real-time rerouting and action-based leads update — a unique solution that remains unrivalled.
According to Stanley and Jeffry, we can already map out what the lead generation trend in Southeast Asia looks like. In 2010, the success of marketing campaigns was measured based on cost per 1,000 impressions (CPM).
This evolved to cost per click (CPC) in 2012, cost per lead (CPL) in 2016, and cost per sale (CPS) in 2019.
The trajectory, therefore, that SalesCandy will take will also be anchored on these trends, amplified by plans to hyper-localise the markets they are currently in, which are Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Philippines, and Indonesia. Currently, they already provide language support of four different languages within five different countries: English, Bahasa Indonesia, Thai, and Vietnamese.
In the coming years, we can expect SalesCandy to come up with more features and products to help businesses close more sales across a series of diverse verticals: real estate, private education, banks, insurance, and automotive.
Machine learning and adoption of AI technology are certainly within the realm of possibilities, especially since SalesCandy is looking to analyse raw sales activity data in order to predict sales outcomes—all well within the confines of their mission, which is fundamentally to help clients close as many sales as they possibly can.
Interested companies can get in touch with SalesCandy here.
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