Business Process Software
Fixing Your Follow-up Failure with CRM Management
Turns your dead lead graveyard into a gold mine
Whether you have a start up small business or an established business, the best small business advice is to use web based CRM software to help convert more leads into sales, get more repeat sales from customers and grow their businesses without growing their staff.
What are the typical reasons that small businesses fail to follow up on their leads?
- Forget
- Focus on hot leads only
- Unconverted leads fall through the cracks
- They think people will call them back if they are really interested
- They don't want to be pushy
- They don't realize the potential impact that follow-up can have on their businesses
- They have internal communication problems
- Weak business planning
Key findings: People buy when they are ready to buy.
67% of the prospective buyers that tell you "no" today will be ready to buy in the next year. - Gartner Group
80% of leads you consider to be "dead" will buy within 2 years. - Sirius Decisions
Follow-up failure ultimately means you are delivering the sale to your competition!
What are the 5 common follow-up mistakes to avoid?
- No follow-up at all.
- Weak follow-up
- Irrelevant follow-up
- Jumping right into a sales pitch
- No centralized database
These 5 mistakes fail to take into consideration just how many touches it takes to close a sale.
- 2% close on the first call
- 3% close on the second call
- 4% close on the third call
- 10% close on the fourth call
- 81% close on (or after) the fifth call
This means that if your business is only calling 1-4 times, you are only reaching 19% of your business' potential sales.
In the typical sales funnel a campaign may direct 40% of your leads to fill out a web form and 60% to call your phone number. As you continue down the sales funnel approximately 50% of the leads become ones that your sales force is actively working. The other 50% just disappear. Only 9% of the active leads are turned into a sale because typically three or less follow-up calls are made. The ones that do become customers will remain one time sales because little if any customer retention programs are enforce. So you will continue to lose people as move down the sales funnel.
When a small business regularly follows up on leads (ones they have already developed so they are getting additional return on their investment) and converts only 1 out of every 8 leads lost on a weekly basis, they will experience a 260% increase on their ROI at the end of the year.
Clearly the time to stop letting prospects slip through your fingers is right now.
What is follow-up?
- Education
- Nurturing
- Ongoing contact
- Relationship and trust building
- Providing long-term value
- Staying top of mind
- Differentiating yourself from the competition
It is not about a constant bombardment of sales messages.
Effective follow-up happens through a combination of media: email, phone call, and postal mail, fax broadcast, voice broadcast in a way that is most appropriate for your customer base.
In order to do this, there has to be an effective means of capturing information on your website in order to avoid losing potential customers who have yet to make a purchase. They can opt in for a free report for example and be led through a multi step offer campaign or if they have already made a purchase then be led through a welcome campaign. Sending value-added emails that offer tips and education is trust building for both B2C and B2B campaigns. Thank you notes to new customers are very important as are customer satisfaction surveys, more valuable tips and chances to up sell and cross sell and ask for referrals. All of this should be part of an automated contact system.
How do you fix follow-up?
- Make a commitment
- Create a follow-up program
- Use CRM with a web based document management system
The key to successful follow-up best practices is including as much automation as possible. A Saas CRM management system will help start up businesses to highly established ones.
Contact us to find out how your follow up can be automated.
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Testimonials
...follow through is exceptional. You can always rely on getting accurate information and honest recommendations for best practices."
President, Free Enterprise Press, Inc Look for all Testimonials