Ahhhh, the infamous sales cycle – a series of steps to guide prospects from interested leads to closed sales. The process helps determine the level of engagement and interest for each sale, and it’s critical when you’re selling PPC.
Pay-per-click advertising has never been more critical than it is right now to business success. Every sales team must construct a clear strategy that allows their business to remain sustainable and promote revenue growth across digital platforms.
The PPC sales cycle follows the same seven stages you may be familiar with. (We’ve included a chart to depict the entire process.) Note that each step has its own needs, which we’ve touched upon in the section below.
White Shark Media has developed sales enablement tools to empower sales teams to work their way through the cycle. Read on to learn how our PPC tools come together to make these tasks easier for your team.
Prospecting & Initial Contact
If you ever watched Law & Order or any other TVcrime show, you’ll know that leads are contacts that have been brought to your attention and require follow-up.
“Prospecting” and “lead generation” are industry terms for attracting new customers or contacts. Every industry and business has different indicators that they use to qualify “leads” as interested parties. In the digital marketing world, these leads can come from an online trial, subscription, special offer or any other action that establishes contact and interest in this company. This usually makes follow-up less intrusive.
Your team should have a standard way to qualify prospective leads and initiate contact. A little information about their current standing will help your sales team understand if this is a real opportunity. The data will help determine if your business matches your prospect’s needs and whether you should invest time in a journey down the sales cycle. Compass features that support this stage are:
AdInsights
Our AdInsights guest audits will allow prospects to examine their own campaign while providing the information your agency needs to qualify and contact them.
PPC Courses
In the initial contact stage, your contacts will carefully size up your agency. The better your understanding of the PPC offering, the smoother it will go. You can peruse through the Academy’s available content to brush up on digital trends and best practices for selling PPC.
Sales Consultations
If you find that this initial stage is a barrier for you, a 1-on-1 sales consultation can be extremely useful. Learn how to spot certain red flags to determine feasibility and get in there as confidently as possible with your offering.
Discover how you can build stronger processes with help from our sales consultations:
Nurture Your Prospect
“Nurturing your leads” means warming them up to your services. Your sales team should have a structure in place to accomplish this in several ways.
The nurturing stage is crucial because it will be their first taste of how responsive you will be with your services. This is the time to show prospects how easy the communication flows between your team and theirs. This open dialogue will inspire confidence and establish a rapport.
Provide prospects with information about your business, methodology, and unique value proposition. Don’t fall off the map, but space out communications as you share some of the benefits of PPC that will help address any of the frustrations they face. Compass features that support this stage are:
AdInsights – PPC Audit Tool
If prospects didn’t leverage guest audits, you can help address the question that all clients ask, such as: ”Where is my money going?” If your potential client is running Google Ads or Microsoft Advertising and is not getting results, sales teams can use AdInsights to flag issues in ad campaigns and help them see where certain optimizations will improve their ROI.
When sales teams run through these improvement areas with their leads, it helps establish the relationship from the get-go and demonstrate the value of your involvement.
Sales and Marketing Collateral
If your sales process is slowing down, the right information can turn it back around. Our selection of materials helps you address PPC pitching concerns and technical questions that can help set you apart from other agencies.
Present Your Offer
The elevator pitch test is a way to see if you can communicate the value of your PPC services in the most straightforward format possible. “What is the gist?” How can you fulfill the needs of this particular client with the solutions that you can provide?
Believe it or not, understanding the needs of clients isn’t something many agencies bother doing before delivering a proposal. The best sales teams, however, will place themselves in their prospect’s shoes and project the confidence that makes a client take a leap of faith.
So, how can Compass help? You’d be surprised how tedious and extensive a proposal can really be. Save yourself some time and rest assured everything that you need is included for smooth sailing. The Compass feature that is dedicated to this stage is:
The Proposal Engine
Our sales blueprint guided the design of this tool. After 10+ years in PPC, the calls, hangups, pitches, and objections were reduced to some primary considerations.
Our white-label customizable proposal documents include the latest benchmarks, industry rates per location, keyword data, and the latest digital marketing strategies. It addresses the account’s current standing and how your PPC offering can get them to their desired position.
Moreover, our PPC proposals provide the information to dilute some of the typical sales objections that can arise later down the sales funnel. This proactive approach will set the foundations for quicker closes.
Tune in as one of our White Label Partners discusses the benefits of using our Proposal Engine.
Overcoming Objections to Selling PPC
Our sales team is a fan of objections because it allows us to tackle doubts head-on. If you reached the final stages of the PPC sales cycle, all that’s left is knowing how to close.
If your agency is exceptionally knowledgeable about sales but not as much in PPC, we have the resources that can iron that out for you. Our PPC sales tools are designed to help you gain the skills and information required to answer your prospects’ concerns and help them through the sales funnel. Compass features dedicated to this stage include
Sales Consultations
Objections can trip up a lot of sales teams. One of the quickest ways to iron these out with your team is with a 1-on-1 sales consultation with a PPC expert. They will be able to point out some of the points that are slowing you down, suggest reallocating topics at different times, and more negotiation tactics that can begin to change the course of your sales process.
Marketing and Sales Collateral
Our selection of resources helps agencies move through the stages quickly and easily. There are strategies to discuss prospects’ PPC and all Google and Microsoft products, the latest technology, and detailed explanations to address common concerns. Objections aren’t as scary when you have the tools and the information to guide prospects out of the conversation with clarity and confidence in the future.
Academy Courses
Our experiences prove how important it is to stay informed about the industry. We’ve made it our business to teach PPC and have added it to our partnership offering. You can leverage the courses and materials provided by experts to close more deals, avoid the most common pitfalls, and complete the sales cycle with your prospects. Academy by White Shark Media currently offers courses under the following categories:
- Client Lifecycle
- Pitching Series
- Microsoft Advertising
- Google Ads
You can start closing more deals by providing insightful and expert product information.
Conclusion
Today’s market is more challenging for teams to meet their expected quotas and planned targets. Our PPC tools are designed to help your sales teams flow through the sales cycle, resolve the usual issues that arise, and halt the process.
Now more than ever, an effective PPC sales process can lead to considerable increases in closed sales. If your sales process feels more demanding than usual, find and use sales enablement tools to grow your digital marketing agency.
Are you interested in learning more? Contact our team about a free demo to go through each of these on your own time.
