Effective Sales Lead Follow Up

So your business is generating leads - terrific. The best way to ensure all those expensive leads don't get ignored, is to create a great lead follow up process.

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Lead Follow Up Process Components

Your process should include cross-media marketing efforts as well as sales lead follow up. This will put your sales force in the best position for qualifying leads and ultimately converting sales.

A well managed, effective lead follow up process combines the best of your sales and marketing efforts. Consider the following components in your lead follow up process.

Follow Up with Leads Using Multiple Forms of Media

Some people prefer e-mail, some prefer talking on the phone and there are those that use fax machines or the postal service. Consider all these mediums in your lead follow up process. Here's an outline of what I mean - this is an example for a product or service provider:

New Lead Comes In

  1. New Lead comes through the web
  2. Lead contact information goes into CRM system
  3. Autoresponder email generated thank prospect for inquiry
  4. Fulfillment material mailed (catalog, product information, etc.)

One Week Later

  1. Sales person calls prospect - qualifying lead
  2. Letter is mailed with initial promotional offer
  3. Lead is assigned a status in the CRM system
  4. If this is a hot lead - begin sales conversion process

One Month Later

  1. E-mail and letter sent reminding prospect of offer deadline
  2. Sales person calls to remind prospect about promotional offer
  3. Sales person gets purchase timeframe

This exact process may or may not fit your business model, but you get the idea of using multiple touches, a call to action, CRM marketing and integrating both sales and marketing efforts. If you do something like this for every lead, your conversion rates should increase.

Sales Lead Follow Up & Qualifying
Leads?

While marketing is a critical component of the lead follow up process, the best method of qualifying leads is person to person, and that involves the sales person or persons.

Qualifying Leads

Here are some tips to help your sales people improve at qualifying leads.

Find the decision maker early in the process

Identify the prospects needs

Ask difficult, direct questions - don't be rude, but know what to ask

Establish the purchasing timeframe

Find out what the prospect needs to move forward

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Sales Lead Follow Up

Leveraging your CRM system can greatly improve the sales follow up process. If your sales group has done a good job of qualifying leads, reminders, activities and actions can be set in the CRM system to trigger your sales people into action. Marketing can assist with the sales lead follow up process by providing messaging, product information and e-mail templates - all of which can likely be stored in your CRM system. Take advantage of all these powerful tool and your sales follow up will improve, and so will your conversions.

Lead Follow Up Process Summary

Improving your sales lead follow up and better qualifying leads is important to maximizing revenue. Don't let your online marketing lead generation efforts go to waste!  Contact Marketing Practicality to improve your lead follow up process