As a small business owner, you have the unending task of finding the most efficient way to transform leads into customers. Your business needs a proper lead management system in place to ensure that this is done efficiently. It’s essential that you make the most out of the finite number of leads that come into your sales process.
“There has never been a business that succeeded without sales.”
~Mark Cuban
The problem that we face is that only a small percentage of leads are sales-ready and only a few of those are qualified buyers. It’s important that we approach the sales-ready leads correctly. This is done through effective lead management.
In short, lead management is the process designed to transform leads into sales-ready customers. Here are some tips that will help you accomplish that goal.
Know the Difference Between a Sales and Marketing List
There are times when we might market to an entire list so that we can test what messages resonate with specific categories of buyers. However, just because a lead looks at marketing content doesn’t mean that they are willing or qualified to engage in a conversation about sales.
As a small business owner, it’s your job to ensure that you segment marketing lists into sales lists so that you can better target those leads. This will boost the response rate of your marketing efforts, essentially leading to more meaningful conversations.
Never Stop Learning About Your Prospects
Building relationships with your audience has become the cornerstone of marketing in today’s world. You should never stop learning about your leads. Understand their problem and try to be their solution. With every campaign, you will get leads to reveal more about themselves.
Every interaction that you have with a lead adds to their list of details. When they visit your website, you can track their interactions to learn more about their behaviour. Response rates on specific ads will reveal what drives leads.
Set up your lead management process in a way that allows you to get the most information from potential customers as they engage with your content. Just make sure to avoid asking the same question more than once.
Track Anonymous Visitors and Pull Their History When They Opt-In
In order to track your leads activity on your website, you’ll need to insert some code. You’ll want to track both anonymous and marked leads. There are a lot of different ways that you can track leads. Most small businesses will find that it’s as simple as adding a line or two of code to their website.
You should have a process in place that attributes previous visits when a prospect fills out the opt-in form. Knowing what content those prospects interacted with will help you understand the steps they took to reach your opt-in page. In short, you will learn what content works so that you can better target them.
Segment Your Database
Your database should be split into several fields including Company, Industry, and Job Title. This allows you to target specific segments. It also avoids bottlenecks that force you to make multiple calls to a single prospect in order to find the decision maker.
Segmentation also has other powerful benefits. For instance, email lists that are segmented get a much higher response rate because emails can be targeted to specific groups. Rather than marketing to the entire list of leads, you can market to specific segments.
If you’re using Daylite to manage leads and sales, you may want to checkout this tutorial video How to segment clients for mail blasts & other initiatives.
Always Automate When Possible
Make sure that your teams are working on ways to automate every possible step in the lead management phase. Then keep up with the program to ensure it’s being executed properly. Automation not only makes the entire process much easier, it also is more efficient.
For instance, when a subscriber opts-in to your list, they should get a series of email blasts targeted specifically to them. Those email blasts can also be segmented based on whether or not the prospect is actually opening the emails or clicking on links.
Nurture Leads
Today’s business world is customer driven – more so than ever before. This actually puts small businesses at an advantage in that they are able to better nurture leads. Use all of the tools at your disposal to bring prospects exactly what they’re looking for, especially during the research phase. You must be willing to provide free information to nurture these leads into customers.
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About the author:
Jacob Haney is a content marketer presently working with Research Optimus, a lead management and business research outsourcing company. A writer by day and a reader by night, he is loathe to discuss himself in the third person, but can be persuaded to do so from time to time.
