A few years back, when I first found sales funnels and online marketing, I coined a silly catchphrase with my friends in the community.
“CALL THE DAMN LEADS!”
You see, one of the biggest struggles lead generation companies and marketers face is that a large portion of the sales community struggles with calling their leads. So when your job is built around getting leads for sales professionals to contact and sell a product or service, well, you end up dealing with frustrated customers who say, “these leads suck.”
“No, Karen, you just suck at sales and follow up…”
As much as I would have loved to say that to a paying client, I certainly knew better. But that didn’t make the desire to lay into these lazy wannabe top producers any less.
So what does that have to do with creating thousands of dollars in recurring revenue? Don’t worry. We’re getting there soon enough.
Back to Karen…
When clients of our agency would wonder why they struggled to convert the leads we were sending into sales, we would start probing about their sales and follow-up process. Did you know that 87% of sales professionals only contact their leads one or two times before moving on and forgetting them? Are you aware that 93% of sales are made after between eight and twelve touches?
Looking through the statistics on sales, it’s easy to see why most sales professionals leave money on the table and miss out on larger commissions.
Our clients who struggled with converting leads to paying clients would then be put through our follow-up training program. Inside that program, we would teach them how to build an easy-to-implement system and follow a sales process that allowed them to get in front of the prospect multiple times over a 3-6 month period. Using various contact methods would increase their ability to reach their prospective customers and increase their closing percentages.
The more we taught this process, the more we recognized that many of the folks we had spoken with did not have any CRM or customer relationship manager. Which meant they were relying on old emails and notes on a paper calendar to remind them, which leads to contact. As you can imagine, this meant many of the leads which the business owners were paying for were getting lost in the mix and those marketing dollars wasted. This is why my group of marketing friends and I would constantly message each other, “CALL THE DAMN LEADS!”
As the months went on and I moved out of the lead generation business and more into the consulting space, I realized the value of creating a simple to use CRM and templated follow-up process that any business or sales pro could quickly adopt.
Even though there are thousands of CRM platforms in existence, I recognized a need for something simpler.
Many of the platforms that exist talk about the bells and whistles and all the things they can do, but what they fail to do is show the importance of the actual process, why it’s essential to build an integrated sales and follow up process that you follow with every single lead that enters their data into one of your collection points.
To combat this issue, www.leadstages.com was born…
The CRM for salespeople, by salespeople!
Since “CALL THE DAMN LEADS!” wasn’t a scalable name, we went with the next best thing, an accurate representation of creating a solid sales and follow-up process.
Successful businesses have built a system based on stages, each lead and customer experience on their journey. Inside each of those stages, specific actions must occur, from setting up appointments, fulfillment, and even requesting reviews and referrals.
If you, your business, and/or your sales reps are struggling to stay on task and fail to follow-up with those expensive leads you’ve been purchasing, it’s time to implement a better system.
Make sure you check out www.leadstages.com for more!
