Most businesses are always talking about how they need more leads. There’s got to be a way to get more leads from the current vendors and marketing avenues that they’re spending money on. While it’s true, the more leads you have, the more opportunities you have, the challenge is not in generating the leads. It’s what happens once the leads are generated.
Today I’m going to share with you two of the best options your business has to maximize the potential of every lead that comes in. Do the one that fits your business and you’ll see a far greater number of cold leads turn into buyers. Ignore what I’m about to share and watch your hard-earned dollars get flushed down the toilet.
Today I want to share with you why lead generation on its own is worthless, and why lead engagement and follow-up is priceless. You see, nowadays it seems like there’s an entire world filled with vendors and contractors whose sole business is focused around delivering leads to the businesses who need them.
It’s such a congested arena that the lead generation business is now a commodity and it becomes a race to the bottom of who can undercut who on price. Delivering leads is only a small piece of the puzzle and frankly, it’s a pretty easy thing to do. Honestly, you could train a dyslexic, one-armed orangutan to run Facebook and Google ads and generate a whole bunch of leads for your business. The magic, as well as the money, comes from what happens after that lead is generated.
Here are the two best ways to maximize every lead opportunity. The conclusion you come to on which is the best choice will rest on several factors, but if you’re a smaller operation or your business is say centered around some kind of skilled labor, being redoing someone’s bathroom or redoing someone’s smile, you might at best have a secretary who answers the phone and might confirm appointments. So in this instance, having an automated follow-up process to nurture each lead until they’re ready to buy or book an appointment may be the best bet for your business. Why is that?
Because the reality is that that secretary is trained to do one or two things at best. They’re not a professional salesperson or appointment coordinator. They likely won’t know what to do with a list of potential customers and when they don’t hear back after the first or second call and email, it’s highly likely that they never reach back out again. This becomes a huge waste of money that could easily be fixed by incorporating an automated follow-up system that uses artificial intelligence to deliver the right message and response at the right time.
On the flip side, if you’re a much larger company that books lots of appointments each day, you likely have an internal staff who has some level of training when it comes to coordinating appointments with prospective buyers or clients. The challenge here is that most of the staff is only trained on how to book an appointment, so if they don’t get that appointment right away, they follow up from a weak position that decreases their chances of getting that person to commit to an appointment. The key to using a staff to book appointments for the business is not to focus solely on going directly for the kill, but in using the art of understanding and getting on the buyer’s page in order to properly assess their needs and walk them through the next steps. Doing this makes it far more likely that a potential buyer will make a commitment to visit your business or agree to a visit and it will increase the odds of a sale greatly.