The delivery of new leads in the sales team is often a logistical challenge. Potential clients for whom you have paid must bring the greatest possible results in the form of new contracts, and thus money that will cover the investment.
In this situation, time is money and the efficiency of your sales department will also be important. A hot lead should maintain its temperature, and for this you need great work organization and a good attitude of employees. Otherwise, the boiling point of your prospects will quickly melt, and so will your lead generation campaign budget.
Fortunately, we’ve prepared a list to help you prepare for the flow of leads and organize your team to run like a Swiss watch.
Here are some practical tips. The implementation of at least half of them will be felt in the conversion rate of new contracts. We estimate that 10% of the leads we provide turn into real paying customers. Just think what profitability would you get if you doubled this factor!
Table of Contents:
1. The attitude of the new business team.
Before starting the campaign, it is worth informing your team about the planned action. We’ve noticed that salespeople are reluctant to deal with leads that don’t come directly from the company they work for. Unfortunately, it happens that they deliberately lower their priority to just prove that this type of campaign is aimless and ineffective. This usually happens in groups of more than 3-5 employees (surprisingly, a similar situation does not happen when you deal with the sale yourself).
It is worth recalling then that the alternative is to get leads by the team on their own, by picking up the phone or creating and sending e-mail campaigns. Most salespeople got used to working on “warm” contacts provided by the company, and this reduced the level of involvement in their own activities contributing to the acquisition of new customers. The team attitude plays a key role in the lead generation campaign, so instead of communicating the emergence of new, additional work, try to use the language of benefits: development of the sales department, challenges, quality leads, faster and more pleasant work with already verified clients.
Perhaps a good solution will be an additional bonus system for “squeezing” the maximum out of a new source of customers.
2. CRM (customer management system, including the customer acquisition process).
Regardless of the level of excitement of your team with new leads, all acquired contacts should go to the company’s CRM. Designate one person in the team who will equally distribute them among employees (may be unrelated to the department, e.g. an administration employee). There should be no favoritism in this matter, everyone should be given the same amount of work to do, and an efficiently organized customer management system will make it easier. It is worth adding the source of the lead, eg “hotlead” – this will help you easily prepare a report and draw conclusions about the profitability and results of the campaign.
3. Time is money and hot buns always taste better than reheated chops.
If the hot lead is boiling at 100 degrees (when it was generated), then each day you left it without contact will lower its temperature by at least 30 degrees, and over time it will cool it down to 0 and make it completely stale. Forge the iron while it is hot and contact a new customer as soon as possible. Did you know that the chances of contact with a potential customer decrease more than 10 times within the first hour of leaving a lead? Although the article is over 10 years old, and some of the data it contains may be outdated, I recommend you to read it as an inspiration to act quickly – https://www.forbes.com/sites/kenkrogue/2012/07/12 / the-black-hole-that-executives-dont-know-about /. Subscribers who receive a welcome message show 33% more willingness to stay with the brand. What’s more, 35-50% of leads choose the supplier who responds first! Doesn’t that make you think?
4. Divide the tasks.
In the case of a large number of generated leads on a daily basis, an appropriate division of duties will be a good solution. It all depends of course on the characteristics of your service or product, although you can appoint separate employees whose task will be:
- Call the customer as soon as possible in order to perform basic scoring (use the 1-5 scale to focus first on those customers who have the most promise), clarify the details and inform that the team is already working on preparing an offer.
- If for some reason the client did not provide his contact number, prepare a message in which you will inform him about the receipt of his message and the date of the scheduled scoring interview.
- Preparation of a personalized offer and sending it to the contractor.
- Another phone call with information about the offer sent, in order to arrange a date on which the person responsible for it will contact you regarding the decision made by the lead.
- A business conversation aimed at completing the sales process and possibly pinging the customer.
5. Prepare and season company materials.
Your team will be the more successful the less it has to build during the customer acquisition process. Before starting the campaign, make sure that the most important documents and templates are available, that is:
- Autoresponder template – this is the e-mail message that should be sent immediately after receiving the lead.
- Scenario for the first telephone conversation.
- Offer template – for the duration of the campaign, prepare an abbreviated offer that will not take more than 10 minutes to prepare. Of course, take care of its personalization (logo, customer data, date of preparation and elements that will give it a personal character – a screen from the website, a quote from the blog and any other element indicating an individual approach), but make sure that everyone will be able to do it. quickly edit. Of course, we recommend PowerPoint for the preparation of the offer, due to the ease of duplication and removal of the offer slides.
- Template of e-mail messages – starting from the e-mail content with the offer, through a series of 2-3 follow-ups, to messages summarizing the cooperation (e.g. with a draft contract or information about the next steps of cooperation) or saying goodbye to the customer due to the lack of contact.
- Template of the contract and other documents, such as NDA.
6. Summarize the month.
This tip is to close the cycle started with point 1, i.e. the attitudes of employees. Regardless of the results achieved, you should summarize the entire campaign at the end of the month, present detailed results, discuss the results of each employee, ask for suggestions and comments aimed at getting better results, and in the case of a commission system or employee of the month competition, reward the best (hug President will not necessarily be the best reward).
To sum up, new customers are always a big challenge for your sales team. Control the time and operate with the precision of a Swiss clock to keep the hot leads fresh and prevent them from turning into warm dumplings. Before starting the campaign, make sure you are prepared for it, and the pressure raised in your team will result in a gold rush and a 3-digit return on investment.
If you have reached this point, let me know if it was worth it and share your opinion, comment or a thumbs up 🙂 Thank you!
