Keeping leads coming in is essential for many businesses. You need to have interested people approaching to enquire about your services or products, and you need people to leave their contact details so you can continue to lead them through the buyer’s journey. Making sure you’re always able to collect leads and follow up on them can be difficult, though. You have plenty of other things to do and chasing leads can be very time-consuming, especially if you only have a small team or you’re a solo entrepreneur. If you want to avoid missing out on leads and ensure you don’t lose them, you can use a range of tactics.
Have a Clear Sales Process
A clear sales process is a must if you want to make sure you’re capturing and processing leads properly. It’s important to know how to qualify your leads and when and how you’re going to follow up on them too. A simplified sales process is a must if you want to identify the best leads and make sure you’re following up on them instead of letting them go to waste. When you have a clear sales process, it means that your communication with leads will be faster and more efficient, hopefully increasing your chances of turning them into customers.
Automate Follow-ups
Quickly following up on leads is one of the most important things to do if you want to avoid missing out on valuable leads. People will only wait so long for a response before they will move onto someone else, and they might already have made inquiries with several other businesses. If you reply promptly, your lead will pay attention and appreciate that you got back to them quickly. Automation is a good way to make sure you follow up on leads as quickly as possible. An automated email using a template allows you to respond to leads right away, buying you more time to take the next step in the sales process. The email template can still be personalized so it speaks directly to your lead.
Make Sure Your Phone Is Always Answered
When you get leads by telephone, it can be difficult to keep up with them. You might not always be available to answer the phone, but you don’t want to force people to leave you a voicemail message when they were expecting to speak to a human. One of the easiest ways to solve this problem is to use a professional answering service for your business. You get your calls answered and can choose whether to have a message taken or have the call forwarded. Your leads experience a professional greeting and speak to a real person, while you save time by having your calls handled. It’s more affordable and time-saving compared to having your own staff handle calls.
Focus on the Most Valuable Leads
Losing or missing out on any lead can be annoying, but it’s worse when you miss out on a lead that could be particularly valuable or likely to convert. That’s why it’s important to identify the most valuable leads so that you can focus on them. Some leads aren’t going to be very helpful for your business, so it’s acceptable to choose to throw them away if you want to. Whether it’s just one person analyzing leads or a team of people doing it, everyone involved needs to know how to qualify leads and decide which ones are worth pursuing.
Increase Your Positive Reviews
One of the ways you might not be getting the leads that you deserve is if you don’t have as many positive reviews or testimonials as you could have. People use reviews to judge a variety of things, from how trustworthy your business is to the speediness of your communication. If you don’t have a lot of positive reviews or even many reviews at all, it could be difficult for people to trust you. By encouraging more reviews from your customers, you can help to improve your image and reputation. Ask people to give reviews and consider even offering some kind of incentive.
Don’t Forget About Word of Mouth
Word of mouth marketing and referrals are often the way that small businesses start to grow their customer base. After a while, you end up needing a little more help and have to invest in some other marketing channels. But that doesn’t mean that you should forget about word of mouth and how it can get you leads. In fact, you can step up your efforts and harness the power of word of mouth even more by using referral marketing. Encouraging people to refer you to others can increase your leads. The majority of people trust recommendations from people they know.
Organize Your Emails
If you get email leads, you need to make sure you respond to them quickly. But it can be hard to stay on top of them, especially if there are plenty of them coming in. You have to be able to separate the useful ones from those that won’t come to anything, and you need to swiftly respond to those that you think could realistically turn into sales. To make sure you don’t miss out on anything, you need to be organized. Consider organizing your emails so that certain messages go into different folders. If you can quickly check a folder for new leads, they won’t get lost among other emails.
Use Social Media Effectively
There are many different channels to use for securing leads, and social media is one you don’t want to miss out on. If you’re not using social media effectively, you could be losing out on valuable leads. You first need to make sure you’re using the right platforms for your business. Not all social media platforms will work for all brands. You can use social media to do things such as sharing gated content, using live video, and promoting via social ads.
Don’t miss out on valuable leads. Do all that you can to bring in new leads on a consistent basis.
