In the world of sales, there are few things that are a greater sin than letting good leads slip through the cracks. If you are like many companies out there, you spend too much money on marketing and perhaps have too few leads to have the luxury of wasting them. Unfortunately, that is exactly what many companies are doing. There are a number of ways that these cracks work their way into your business. Here are a few of the most common areas of leaky sales pipelines.
1- Inbound phone calls. If you are receiving leads from an inbound phone number you might be relying on the person answering the phone to manually key in the lead data to your CRM software. If you have a consistent person in this role you “might” be able to get them to follow the process of entering the data “most” of the time, but if you are a company that subscribes to the concept of Floor Time where sales agents take turns answering the inbound phone, or worse, you don’t have anyone assigned to answer the phone, chances are you are losing leads.
2- “Contact Us” forms on your website. If your website has a contact us form there is a good chance that that lead is sent to someone’s email. The first problem is in the routing of the lead to the correct salesperson. The person that receives the email may not even be the person that is ultimately going to call back the prospect. If you don’t have your webform integrated in to your CRM, then this is another huge area of lead leakage in most sales pipelines. You have to rely on the person manually entering the data from the email into your CRM database, and of course no sales person would ever not enter a lead after a mediocre initial call, right? (sarcasm intended).
3-Delayed Initial Contact. Leads are best when they are fresh. Newest leads have the best chances of closing and the best chances of contacting. The longer you wait to call a lead, the less likely you are to reach them. So, if you have a lead routing problem like in #2, and it takes hours or days to get the lead to the right sales person, you are at risk of the NO ANSWER phone call. If this happens, the sales rep may try a couple of times but if they do not have the right follow up system in place, these leads can get lost in a sales reps inbox forever.
4- In your CRM Database. This is one of the most unfortunate places to loose leads but it happens all the time in most CRM databases. Even if you do all of the other things right and you get the receptionist to enter the lead in the CRM, or you have a webform that populates the lead, some systems will rely on a series of scheduled calls or tasks to follow up on leads.
Fortunately, PlanPlusOnline.com with it’s unique “Process Builder” allows you to create a lead follow up system that can create Perfect Accountability. Perfect Accountability is achieved when you have lead forms integrated in to your website, and each Opportunity that is created will be assigned to a specified Sales Process. Once an Opportunity is associated with a Sales Process each step will be assigned to a specified user and will have a due date. The salespeople simple move the Opportunity through the designated steps of the sales process by advancing it to the next step or moving it out of the funnel. No opportunity is left behind. There is no way to complete a task without scheduling the follow up action and reminders can be sent out daily to reps for overdue leads as well as shared with managers on various reports.
