While assisting other customers, your team receives many unanticipated inquiries. By the time an employee can check the inbox, the inquirer may have turned to a competitor. The leads may receive a quick response, but no one may be certain who is responsible for follow-up. As a result, many leads are lost.
Search Intelligence System (SIS) gives a competitive advantage by defining and improving how leads are managed. We analyze how leads are created and captured, and how the leads are structured and advanced by your team. This allows us to create a customer journey that integrates and improves your team's working processes.
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Your site may capture leads in several forms including contact or lead forms, call and appointment requests. It’s likely that some leads are replied to or placed in sales conversations, but you may not know which leads those are. Leads may be distributed among multiple mailboxes, or may lack details like phone numbers or emails. Staff can be very busy and may overlook leads.
We show the entire lead process by identifying the start and end points of each lead, including what happens to the lead between points, who responds to the lead, and when the lead is ready for sales. We improve lead capture and the process of getting leads to fill in information required of them through Conversion Optimization.
02
You can talk to leads through various means including your website forms, calls, booking requests, live chat, and campaign landing pages. We help you track and standardize the different means by which leads get in touch with your organization. With well-documented lead information, it becomes easier to assess the lead’s requirements and identify the best team member to respond to the lead.
We all get a mix of leads and opportunities. Some are more valuable and time-sensitive than others. We can customize what information is captured for each type. This allows us to give the right level of focus to the leads and opportunities that matter the most to your business. We are focused on helping you optimize your sales process.
People need to know when a request is received and the next steps. Reviewing response ownership means determining the person or team responsible for responding to requests. It includes the information given after a request on a form or the booking request and the internal processes followed by the team for requests made over the phone or in writing. To be helpful, a response should be provided in a timely manner, and the response should be in line with the expectations set by the information provided on the page.
Leads require a range of things, from an answer to an estimate to a follow-up conversation to help them make a choice. We help you identify potential next steps, and the date after which action should be taken to keep the conversation from dying down with the first response. The right process ensures your team stops following up on prospects who have already been ruled out or don’t qualify.
Your team needs to be able to identify which leads are new, contacted, qualified, booked, pending, or closed. We’ve agreed on a set of practical steps and ownership so team members can quickly pick up where a colleague left off. The focus for the Sales Optimization component is on the elements of the sales process that guide a sales team member to move a sales lead from a qualified status to a customer’s decision to make a purchase.
03
Some businesses need to provide a same-day callback for lead inquiries. Others need to prioritize based on type of service, service location, or appointment time. There is a variety of ways to handle lead follow-up. We begin by reviewing your existing contact channels. We will also review your team's capacity and the steps you take during your sales process to facilitate follow-up. Reliable follow-up will then be mapped.
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Keep track of the inquiries you want to manage (by phone, in person, email, fax, etc.) and the corresponding forms and documents.
Figure out what information you need to determine which leads to work first and send where.
Decide who is responsible for managing which leads, and what the status means for each lead.
decide what the next step should be and when it should be done, based on your customers and your employees.
Examine the leads to determine which leads, if any, should be eliminated, what leads should be worked first, and how your employees should interact with leads.
Getting organized doesn’t require extreme measures. You can pick a default location to maintain a centralized view of all open requests. You can also decide on ownership for each request and define a process for managing the requests. Finally, you can decide on the request throughput. There are several options to further automate the process using CRM and other automation tools.
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An increase in leads can indicate positive growth for your business, however if only a small amount of your leads are qualified or accessible, this could be misleading. It is important to look at the full lead management process from the initial response to the lead, to the qualified conversation, and finally to the booking. Reports should be analyzed based on the goals and requirements of your business.
We also consider the first point of contact for the lead. If there is a significant difference in the volume for each of the lead channels, and one of the channels focuses on lead qualification, this should be taken into account when developing and prioritizing improvements for your business.
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A good lead management plan is something your employees can easily understand and implement. Therefore, we have documented the various stages of leads, who owns each lead and what next steps are, if any. This shows us how leads are progressing through the funnel. We have benchmarked the lead management process and, in the absence of other data, do not guess conversion rates. Also, we do not assume that just because a lead is uncontacted that the opportunity is lost.
If your employees are unclear what happens after a prospect engages with your company, then lead management is a good place to start. For more information about how SIS approaches lead management and other aspects of business growth, see our other services.
FAQ
Lead Management is a process of capturing a lead, evaluating its circumstances, assigning/taking an action, following it up, and tracking it till the lead gets converted.
Lead Management is a complete process that consists of people, activities, and decisions. A CRM captures and records these data. Depending upon the process, automation tools may be integrated.
It may not be necessary to change the CRM to improve Lead Management. We may have to evaluate the processes followed by the employees and change or improve those processes first, if required.
Both forms and calls will be treated equally for Lead Management process. We will see how your organization manages, documents and follows up on calls first, before making any changes.
We will help you and your team understand how to properly qualify inquiries and route them to the appropriate teams. This increases productivity by focusing effort on the most relevant opportunities.
We identify key metrics for measurement based on the existing level of process maturity. These metrics may include booking rates, conversation rates, average lead velocity, and others.
We help integrate your teams' lead processes to improve visibility into your sales funnel, and act quickly to pursue new opportunities. Tell us where inquires are received and what the next step is. We can help build a reliable process for lead management and help identify process gaps.
