For many sales professionals, entrepreneurs, and business owners, leads are a huge part of the sales game. Either you are generating them yourself or paying top dollar to a lead vendor of some sort to send them your way. Whatever the case, they both cost you money and make you money at the same time.
The thing you have to figure out is the return on that investment.
If you’re paying $10 for every lead and it takes you ten leads to close a sale, your average cost per sale is around $100. It’s what you do with those other nine leads who didn’t close that matters! Do you have a process in place to stay in front of them and close them at a later date?
The secret to making more money is in creating a solid follow up process.
If you want to create a long term sustainable business model, you have to find ways to keep your lead cost low, your cost per new customer acquisition down, and do so in a way that keeps the sales pipeline full. Far too many business owners get themselves upside down by investing all their time and money into marketing, and not enough of it into creating a quality follow-up process for themselves and their sales team.
The first way to figure out if you have a good follow-up process or a GREAT follow-up process is to get a proper system in place and start tracking the numbers. As they say, “what gets measured, gets improved.” The only way you’re going to know if your company is profitable is to track the RoI or return on investment for every lead source you have. Whether it is the per lead cost you pay to online vendors, or the number of referral gift cards you are sending out to your partners and clients. There is a value that needs reflecting somewhere, and these numbers need to be accounted for somewhere.
Once you have that part down, you need to track how many touchpoints each lead goes through before moving forward with your product or service. Do they respond better to phone calls or text messages? What about emails or old school USPS mailers? When you get clear on the data, you can begin to increase your overall closing ratio and volume of sales drastically.
Set your system up to automate as much of these processes as possible.
A good CRM system will allow you to set up automation and integrate with many of the platforms necessary. You should be able to hook up your phone system to track inbound/outbound calls and text messages. Connecting to your email accounts will allow you to automate and track the back and forth conversations your team has with clients as well. Both can be extremely valuable when it comes time to CYA or Cover Your Ass in a case of he said, she said, between your sales team and an unhappy client.
The final step is to create a systematic routine for yourself and your sales team to follow with every lead and lead source. Leads are valuable no matter what source they come from; the difference is in how you work them. Leads from an internet vendor may need more touchpoints and automation than, say, leads from a referral partner. Both are equally important in the sales process, but you could run off a referral by calling them too often or lose a potential client from an internet lead by not calling them often enough. Another reason why tracking the data and the information is such an essential difference between good follow-up and GREAT follow-up.
Until you get a system and a process in place, you will never know for sure if your follow-up game is good or great! So take the time this week to get clear on what you currently have, and what your next steps should be for creating a better system and process. If you’d like to learn more about how to create a multi-seven figure sales database and follow up routine, you can pick up your copy of the CASH MONEY FOLLOW-UP SYSTEM by CLICKING HERE!
