Why The Need For Speed Converts More Leads
You would be surprised at how many leads you missed out on converting into clients simply by not immediately following up. Every inbound lead needs a follow-up system. When a lead comes in, it has to go into a CRM (Customer Relationship Managment), which is going to be key. That’s essential. The main reason money leaks out of your bucket is because there is ZERO (or poor) lead capture and follow up. If you take longer than 5 minutes to follow up on an inbound lead, the ability to talk and to qualify that prospect drops by 80%. YET only 7% of companies are actually achieving this average lead response time.
At TMT, our clients use MAP and I preach this point. As soon as the lead comes in, add it to your CRM. Once you add it into the database, then you have to clean and follow up. There is a 391% increase in sales conversions when an inbound lead is contacted within the same minute they submit their form. That is why it is critical my team immediately captures, cleans, responds and follow up with ALL inbound leads. With 71% of qualified leads not being followed up on, you are at an advantage if you follow this roadmap I am giving you. That is 71% of qualified leads that nobody is talking to.
You want near-immediate cleaning and qualification, which can happen with the next step. This is really an immediate phone follow-up for all web leads. When a web lead, someone’s on your website and they opt in, you want to call them like right away, immediately. If it is an offline lead then you want to follow up within 24 hours. Example, you are at a trade show event and you meet somebody and they give you their card, you want to call them the next day.
8 Steps To Handle Hot Inbound Leads:
- Capture into your CRM
- Near immediate cleaning and qualification
- IMMEDIATE phone call follow up
- IMMEDIATE email follow up
- Multiple emails within a 7-day period
- Multiple phone calls within a 7-day period
- (Advanced Step) Offline package of information, contains copy of a book, copy of free report.
- If no response or not interested at this time. then the lead should be placed into a drip marketing campaign
I’ve got a person on my team that’s the SDR who is calling right away, even before it’s been cleaned, because I want fast response on that. However, you can quickly go online and learn if this a good lead or a bad lead. Do a little research on them. Look and see if they are in your CRM or not. That list cleaning and follow-up can happen by the same person if that’s where you are. If you don’t have a marketing team like that it is fine. They would look at it, they would clean it, they would qualify it right away.
Then immediately follow up with email. One of the things that’s powerful about CRMs is as soon as somebody opts in, it triggers an email. So, you don’t have to manually do anything. An email will automatically go to follow up and then a series of emails will go within a seven-day period because again, this lead just came in and the emails for follow-up, just to be clear, if the prospect does not book an appointment, because if they book an appointment, we take them out of the inbound lead follow up and we put them into like a confirmation sequence.
This specifically is for leads that come in that ask for a free report, that ask for more information. Maybe they filled in your contact us form and said, hey, I’m looking for an IT company, right? And they don’t book an appointment. You want the system to try and bubble them up to get them to book an appointment. So, we’re going to do that with emails. We’re going to do at least five phone calls with those inbound leads within a seven-day period. An advanced step, which isn’t mandatory, but you’re welcome to do it, (I’m just trying to be careful because I know a lot of you don’t have a lot of time and resources. You’re small.) is send an offline package of information/mini shock and awe box. What I send out is a sales letter with some information about us to try and book an appointment. When a lead comes in, all of this is kicking off in my company and one of the things we actually do is send out a direct mail campaign that resets the part two. Then we call and we follow up with that. If there is no response after the emails and the phone calls, then there is a seven-day kind of like intense period before we put them into a drip campaign.
