Thank you, Martin, for going back in time with The Sales Evangelist podcast. Thanks to him, we're going back to episode 1177 where I deep-dived into why leads are creating more work for us.
In this episode, I share why many small organizations struggle with their inbound sales and how to fix it. The challenge is always deciding who should follow up on them and how to do it effectively.
The Sales Team
- Assume that a sales team is composed of three people: the marketing person who does almost everything, the junior assistant who helps with content creation, and the outsourced person who does the marketing strategies. Among the three, who should follow-up the lead?
- Not all leads are created equal. This means that before deciding who will follow up the lead, the lead should be evaluated first.
- You don’t want your salesperson pitching to a lead that in the end would go to another competitor.
Do a Pre-Qualification
- Do a pre-qualification in your organization to know if the people you are going to have the conversation with are ready to consider the deal. Set a benchmark and rules for what you consider a marketing quantifiable lead. Consider the following questions:
- What is considered a sales qualified lead?
- What is the KPI of your organization?
- How many new inbound leads do you want to get per quarter/per month?
- How much money do you want to generate from those leads?
- The answers to those questions will lead you to your ideal customer. It would also help you identify the triggers that qualify them to be a marketing quantifiable lead and a sales qualified lead.
- The work is far more efficient because when a lead comes in, your salespeople can vet them and follow the pre-qualification factors you’ve set to see if the lead can generate new business for the organization. This is also helpful in maintaining your current customers.
Create a System
- Create a system to efficiently manage the workload. The marketing team can do the pre-qualification to increase the odds of the lead being converted into something real. Whenever a lead comes in, let marketing take a look at it and check the website and the title of the person.
- Then let the intern or junior marketing rep take over the other tasks like looking into LinkedIn, HubSpot, Marketo, or other platforms you have to find the data that you can transfer into your CRM.
- Marketing can help fix the problem of having to go back to the beginning of the funnel and pre-qualify the leads again because they’re not yet ready at the moment.
Website Leads Matter
- The sales team sometimes takes for granted the leads that they didn’t hunt for. A good example is leads coming in from the websites.
- It is disheartening when a sales rep doesn’t take that into consideration when a lead comes in via the website.
- Whenever an inbound lead comes in, it is best to use your flow process to follow-up particular prospects. It should be written and put in your company’s playbook so that everyone can read it and use it with every inbound lead that comes in.
Follow-up Right Away
- A stat from insidesales.com said that a lead that’s contacted within five minutes is 100 times more likely to convert than leads that are followed-up 90 minutes later.
- When a lead comes in, follow up right away. You’re more likely to convert than if you wait.
- The sales team can take a quick visit to the person’s website, check their LinkedIn profile, and the pages they’ve visited on your site.
Focus On The People That...