Follow these steps and I guarantee you will not letting good leads slip through and boost your sales.
A quick way of increasing your revenues is to review your lead management process and program. Prospects can come from different channels and sources, be in different formats and quality and usually it is a loose structure to manage and react to the leads. Your size of the sales pipe and performance to hit the revenue targets all begins with a good lead manage process.
Let’s review what a lead is before we start talking about how to improve the lead managed process. A lead is a potential customers, also knows as a prospect. Depending on organisation a lead can be defined in different ways. A lead can be a defined as contact and a determined prospects, but a lead can also be an undefined contact, but still a potential prospect. What remains is that a lead will potentially become a future client/customer and sales team have the responsibility to convert a maximum leads to clients (conversion rate).
A lead can be generated from different channels both traditional such as phone and mail, but as well from Digital marketing channels such as Search Engines, social media and email marketing.
So back to the main purpose of the blog. How to you improve the lead management process?
Firstly, develop a definition of what a lead is and how you work with leads. Make sure all sales persons understand the process and also know how to access the leads and work with them. When does a prospect become a lead that a sales person should work on and when does the lead become an opportunity? The majority of the leads generated is not managed by any sales persons, and the main reason is that the lead is routed to the wrong person and not passed on to the right person in time to keep the lead hot.
What should the sales person do with the lead to mature it and qualify it? Should they call the contact and ask some questions to quickly qualify if this is a contact the has the potential to become a lead and a won opportunity.
Secondly, install a good Customer Relationship system (CRM). With a good CRM system you can optimize the sales process and give the sales persons a tool that can capture all information about the contact, account, lead and opportunity. This includes to integrate your CRM system to all marketing channels and website and to populate the CRM system with as much info aa possible that helps the sales person to qualify the lead.
Help Sales persons and track where the lead came from and why. Try to track the lead and include as much information as possible about the channel and the reason for why the contact reach out to you. White paper name, contact details, account details, LinkedIn profiles and social media profiles.
Respond quickly. The rule is to respond back to the contact within 48 hours. That will dramatically increase your sales closing rate. How many times have you contacted companies and never been contacted back or been called back days or weeks later.
Make sure to always communicate back to the contact/lead with links to blog posts, white papers and other sources related to the subject the contact is interested. Include contacts details to the company in the case the response time increases and make sure to continuously send out emails to the contact to keep the lead hot.
Nurture your leads. Depending on the products and services you offer, most people are probably not ready to buy based on their first interaction with you. Best practices call for nurturing your leads over time. You need to develop campaigns that allow you to touch your prospects multiple times so you can move them through the sales cycle until they’re ready to think about actually purchasing from you.
The more information you have about a prospect, the more excited your salespeople will be about the lead. Whoever’s collecting prospect information needs to extract additional information from every prospect with each interaction, including such things as “what interested you about our products” and “why is it important to you.” They should also try to may the organization so your salespeople are getting in touch with the decision-makers in each company.
Treat your prospects like customers. By capturing the source I mentioned above in #2 about each prospect, anyone at your company can answer a call from that prospect and more effectively answer their questions. This will have a significant impact on your prospects and will cause them to want to engage with your team further.
Use a tool like D&B Rev.UP to match your web visitors to their online identifiers (e.g. company, geographic location, industry), pre-fill forms to reduce customer experience friction, and deliver personalized web experiences to better target your top accounts.
Measure everything you do. But in order to measure your results, you need to decide what you want to measure and why. Then you can capture the correct information upfront. And once you have the right information, you can determine the return on investment of your campaigns and focus on the campaigns and prospects that will increase your sales pipeline.
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