Quality beats quantity in most instances, and leads are no different. Although, it may feel good getting an influx of leads each day, they really don’t matter if they aren’t leads that show potential of converting into sales. How do you determine the quality of your leads, and what steps do you follow to see them through to becoming a sale?
First thing’s first, you need to know what audience you’re targeting so that you can start identifying quality leads. If you don’t have a target in sight, how will you know what you’re aiming for? A great place to start is by creating a customer profile.
How do you Create a Customer Profile?
Your target audience needs to be specific if you’re going to explain to your team what the goal is. What does your ideal customer look like? If you say “everyone”, you’ll need to be more specific to be successful. Here are some factors to consider when building a customer profile:
- Age: The age range of your target audience will affect the way you need to strategise your marketing, the platforms you need to use to reach them, how your sales people need to approach them and more. If you have varying age ranges to target, this opens the door to doing many marketing campaigns that will boost the amount of leads that you bring in. A young adult will be very different to engage with compared to a senior citizen. Consider your product, and contemplate what age range/s your ideal customer is in.
- Gender: There are many products and services that will appeal to both men and women. This is great! It gives you the opportunity to appeal to both in different ways, allowing you to be more creative and innovative. The genders do differ significantly, though, and will want to be engaged with differently. Identify which gender your product or service appeals to most and action accordingly.
- Location: Depending on where your target audience is based, you might need to make allowances for flexibility. Knowing where your main target audience is based will give you insight into the needs they are looking to fulfil. For example, if you are a company who sells agricultural equipment, major cities may not be where your target audience is based.
- Level of Income: If you have a high-end product that requires a larger budget, your focus won’t be on lower income areas and audiences. Determine what sort of ideal income your leads should have in order to be labelled as part of your target for a quality lead.
This is just a basic outline. Don’t discredit a lead if they don’t fit your exact consumer profile; there are exceptions to every rule. Your business will never be able to please every single lead that comes in, but at least, by having a target, your team will know where to focus their attention.
So, if a lead comes in that fits your quality lead description you can consider this to be a quality lead that will require more attention and persistence. If a lead comes in that doesn’t match any of the criteria, don’t discredit them or leave them hanging. Engage with the contact and give them the information they need, but don’t waste time chasing them when there are other, better prospects that have a higher chance of converting into a client.
Managing Quality Leads
So, you’ve got your quality lead goal in mind – now what?
With an efficient lead management system, gone are the days of wasting precious time sifting through leads one by one. Leadtrekker can automatically assign leads to the relevant sales people according to your preferences.
This can mean that leads from a specific source (like a Facebook marketing campaign) can be automatically assigned to the right person. Alternatively, Leadtrekker can be configured to equally distribute leads between sales people in a round robin process.
Leadtrekker acts as your very own client database and automatically captures leads so all you have to worry about is nurturing them to result in sales.
Nurture Your Leads from The Beginning
From the minute they make contact, your lead should feel important to your company. This means that you need to ensure a fast response time so that the lead knows you are ready to engage with them.
Some of the ways Leadtrekker can help:
- Leadtrekker sends automatic responses to leads once they make contact, making sure that the lead knows that they have been heard.
- Leadtrekker will then send a notification to the relevant salesperson to let them know that a lead has shown an interest and that human contact needs to be made.
- If a salesperson is unavailable for whatever reason, after a certain amount of time Leadtrekker can assign the lead to the next available via the escalation feature employee .
Once contact has been made, the lead will know that you are dedicated to assisting them. For a lead who is not yet ready to purchase, the communication towards them should focus on educating them on your product or service.
At this stage, it’s also important to maintain contact with them. You can use Leadtrekker to keep an audit trail of all interactions made with the lead to ensure that the lead has been continuously nurtured throughout the entire sales process.
Continuously Manage Your Leads
In order to constantly optimise your processes and use your resources wisely, you should regularly refine the lead management process. You can do that by looking at the leads on your Leadtrekker account and use filters to compile a report of your most successful marketing campaigns. You will also be able to gain insights on what processes were followed that landed you the conversion from lead to customer.
Once a lead has converted, your team mustn’t forget about them! Sometimes the best business comes from returning business; if you can stay top of mind (by following up occasionally), you might land more business from existing customers.
For simpler quality lead management, contact the experts at Leadtrekker for a demo so that they can show you how this tool can revolutionalise your company.
