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It’s important that businesses do what they can to maximise the chances of converting leads and potential customers into sales.
Every lead counts, and it is therefore critical that you take steps to maintain and nurture each one, not least to make sure that potential revenue does not end up with competitors. So what steps can you take to avoid this happening?
Have a defined process
No lead should be ignored, so having a concrete process in place for logging, assessing and tracking leads is important.
Every lead that comes to your business should be treated in the same way (hugely valuable) and the process you put in place for starting to deal with them should be the same across your business. This means there’s less risk of simply losing leads by ignoring or overlooking them.
Your initial process should include:
- Recording each lead
- Assessing the value of each lead
- Prioritising leads
- Filtering those leads through the most effective people
Doing this allows you to put each lead in front of the right people to ensure they are dealt with effectively.
Follow up every lead
Every lead should be followed up, getting more information and building a clearer picture of how your business can help with each enquiry.
Not responding to a lead can cause a potential customer to feel ignored, and not responding promptly can make them feel like their business isn’t valued.
Getting in touch, even just to ask for more information or to give a timeframe of when they can expect to hear from you, can make a difference. This means they’ve had contact and know what to expect in future. Both email and SMS are great tools for this, automatically dropping the customer a holding note explaining that you have their enquiry and will be in touch soon to avoid losing leads.
Doing this reduces the chances of a lead going cold and becoming disinterested in working with you.
Quality communication
Another way to avoid losing leads is to make sure the conversations and interactions your teams have with them are meaningful.
Lead tracking allows you to keep a record of conversations, what communication there’s already been and the status of a lead.
This helps put your teams in an advantageous position, as that insight means that any interaction with a lead should be a step forward — the lead doesn’t need to repeat themselves or re-tread any previous conversations (which can be frustrating). Doing this allows everything to keep moving forward and helps to avoid losing leads or them becoming disinterested.
A record of what has been sent to leads in terms of sales and marketing material is important too. This helps to prevent sales teams from repeating themselves or filling a lead’s inbox with materials they’ve already had.
The key is to not frustrate a lead through poor communication. You need to take steps to show you are engaged, informed and to the point. This helps to streamline the sales process and helps a lead to convert into a sale much more efficiently.
Helping you to effectively manage leads
Turning a lead into a customer requires skill and planning.
Understanding the value of each potential lead and having the processes and tools in place to help them to convert is going to be vital to any business’s long-term plans.
FLG’s dedicated software can help make lead management easier to handle, which, in turn, helps your team focus their efforts on the best possible leads to track and pursue. Our toolset can:
- Efficiently process leads to help a team follow up and achieve more sales
- Integrate with other software platforms, including Trello, MailChimp, Quickbooks, and Campaign Monitor
- Use powerful workflows to automate call centre sales processes
If you’d like to learn more about FLG and how it can integrate with the rest of your business, take a look at our Customer Contact page.
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