Practical Applications of Fractional Sales

Introduction: Enhancing Team Effectiveness

The overall objective and the largest benefit from a fractional sales and service team is that it's really going to amplify the effectiveness of your current team. You have an internal group of specialists who are, assumingly, well compensated, and specialists, and have years of education in your industry and company. The goal is to have them be as productive as possible, with the highest leverage opportunities as possible. We’ll review three (of several) examples that a fractional sales or service team can do to increase the leverage of your internal staff.

SHOWS SUPPORT: Enhancing Trade Show Performance

Preparing for Success

In a lot of instances, a company puts together their annual new business development calendar. They have trade shows. We've seen a lot of success from customers who, in preparation going into the trade show, and then maybe even more importantly, as an immediate follow-up to the trade show, use fractional inside sales to both schedule appointments and acquire market research data.

Immediate Follow-Up

Attempting to find out which events people are going to attend on the front end and pass all that off to your sales team, so they have it ready to go when they attend the trade show. The key… immediate follow up from the time those trade show leads come back.

IMMEDIATE INBOUND LEAD SCREENING: Streamlining Lead Management

Timely Response

Many people have already built their digital, social, or marketing campaigns for demand generation and have multiple leads coming in, but because the individual quality of each of those leads may not be as high as the salesperson believes it's worth their time, all those leads end up going under leveraged.

Lead Triage System

An opportunity we've seen for inside or fractional sales is to have an immediate cadence to respond to inbound leads, essentially as a triage system. Particularly when somebody requests a callback. You should callback within five minutes to one hour. This shows immediate follow-up in case they're surfing for other competitive solutions. You ask two or three questions, explaining it as if you're trying to find the right resource, and to make sure that you can get all their answers prepared.

LAPSED CUSTOMER REACTIVATION AND ANALYSIS PROGRAM: Rekindling Past Relationships

Identifying Missed Opportunities

Third option, and one that we've often seen with the highest immediate ROI, is a lapsed customer reactivation and analysis program. What do we mean by that? Well… we take customers that you've had in the past, but may not have bought for you in the last two years. Due to the potential pending on the size of the deals, a lot of times, those have been transitioned because the salesperson is gone. Maybe even more frequently, somebody on the customer side, the role changed, and they just get lost. You just don't follow up with them as frequently as you needed to, and a lot of opportunity is left on the table.

Reconnecting with Lapsed Customers

What an inside fractional team will do is contact all of those lapsed customers. Explain that what you're doing is reaching back out to people who've previously purchased and haven't purchased in a while, and you want to understand why. Because it's a lapsed customer, they're often far more likely to give you honest feedback than right at the time of contract termination or deal termination. You get two things really quickly from that. You get some steady pipeline of leads, really with the intent of paying for the project itself. You also get a fairly significant pile of data that suggests why you were losing customers at the time. And you can bounce that off your current market research, your current NPS scores, your current customer satisfaction ratings, however you're measuring that, to see if that's changed. Or at least to keep a finger on it.

Conclusion: Expanding Opportunities with Fractional Teams

While we’re sure there are more, those are three specific use cases for how a fractional sales or service team can help or has assisted our customers in the past. If any of those solutions peaked some interest, we’re happy to explore and provide insight, just schedule some time with our team today!