Are you following up? According to one study, more than 70 percent of sales leads are lost simply because the sellers don’t make contact quickly enough after an initial contact.
“A study of more than 600 companies by Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT found that the odds of a lead entering the sales process were 21 times greater if the business made contact within five minutes of generating the lead versus contact in 30 minutes,” says Brandon Stuerke, president of Advisors Edge Marketing. “Another study, this one by the Harvard Business Review, found that the average response time by businesses to a generated lead is 42 hours—and that’s just for responses that occurred within 30 days.”
Generating sales leads is big business, with more than $23 billion spent on Internet leads alone, he notes. “If you’re a financial advisor or another professional, you may also be spending money on direct mail, invitations to seminars, TV commercials and/or print ads,” Stuerke says. “How many leads are you generating, and at what cost per lead, only to lose them?”
Lexie Gross, sales director of BVR, has her own tips for creating and keeping leads. “Your website is your sales tool,” she says. “The customer on the phone is going to be looking at your website while you’re selling.” Make sure it’s good and current. She also wants you to send thank-you notes, handwritten ones occasionally. I just received one for some judging I did for another association—it works.
Sales will be a big topic of discussion at SIPA 2013, June 5-7, in Washington, D.C. (The early-bird rate expires this Monday!) Shopping Cart Marketing: Today’s E-Commerce, Selling Website Subscriptions and Creative Packaging, and Pricing Strategies for Groups and Site Licenses are just three of the sessions that will touch on this topic. Plus Rick Longenecker, a frequent speaker on sales, will be on hand to talk about eLearning.
Stuerke gave two important ways professionals commonly lose sales leads.
• Indifference in interactions. No matter what your profession, it’s likely you’ve got a lot of competition. For consumers, shopping includes researching, and they’re comparing services, expertise and experience before deciding who best deserves their patronage. If your interactions with prospects fail to “wow” them, they will quickly move on. But most professionals don’t have a storyboarded plan for giving prospects that experience, which is what is needed for consistent results. An automated system that delivers carefully planned interactions is a great way to achieve this.
• Using social media without a plan. Many professionals have discovered that delivering consumer-friendly, useful content through social media is an effective means of attracting followers and cultivating prospects. However, one of the biggest problems with how businesses use social media is that they post a lot of high level, one-way communication with no call to action. Having a call to action in your posts leading prospects back to a website designed to capture leads is critical for producing tangible results through social media.
Gross says that she checks LinkedIn every day. “It’s one of the best sales sources ever. You can do searches by state in that industry. Like Kevin Bacon’s 6 degrees of separation, I know people one or two degrees away. It’s a great place to get new fresh names. On the west coast, people do their mining between 3-5 p.m. They aren’t as used to being sold, so [your message] can come across nicely, not as overt. Invest the $26 for LinkedIn upgrade. It will tell you who looks at your profile.”
Twitter is harder to track, she said, but she likes Google Alerts. “Who has Google Alerts set up for your company names? Who has Google Alerts set up for your competitors? Get your major lines of businesses on it. Spend 10 or 15 minutes on it every day.”
Stuerke said that a lot of these sales issues stem from a common problem: businesses focusing only on the hottest leads—the people who are ready to buy today. “Instead of allowing those ‘cooler’ leads to fall by the wayside, businesses should capture and cultivate them,” he said. “Eventually, they’ll find that instead of constantly chasing leads, they’re harvesting new clients.”
Ronn Levine began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post and has won numerous writing and publications awards since. Most recently, he spent 12 years at the Newspaper Association of America covering a variety of topics before joining SIPA in 2009 as managing editor. Follow Ronn on Twitter at @SIPAOnline