According to Hubspot, inbound marketing is a business methodology that attracts customers by creating valuable content and experiences tailored to them. While outbound marketing interrupts your audience with content they don’t want, inbound marketing forms connections they’re looking for and solves problems they already have.
Making sure you manage your leads properly will lead to better conversion rates, happier customers, and even referrals. But there are right and wrong ways to manage leads. Here are the best ways we have found to maximize success with leads.
Score Your Leads
Lead scoring is when you assign values or points to each lead you have. Scores are usually based on multiple attributes of each lead including how much of their professional information they have, how they engage with your social media and website, and whether they have correspondence with you.
Once leads are scored, it helps sales and marketing teams prioritize them and respond accordingly.
This leads to higher conversion rates and a more successful sales process.
Stay Organized and Use a CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an incredible powerful tool when it comes to lead management. CRM is a technology that manages all of your business’ interactions and relationships with leads and customers. In short, it improves business relationships.
Using a CRM to help manage leads makes a world of difference for businesses. We use HubSpot, an inbound marketing mega tool for any business size. HubSpot helps manage contact information, email marketing, social media marketing, and so many other sales and marketing tools.
CRM tools are integral to staying organized in your sales process to create strong, long-lasting business relationships.
Follow up/stay connected
Here are some quick sales statistics to put following up in perspective:
- The average sale requires 5 follow-up calls
- Only 2% of sales occur at a first meeting
- 63% of people requesting information on your company today will not purchase for at least three months, while 20% will take more than 12 months to buy
Making sure you are consistently reaching out to leads will ensure you stay top of mind and will build a good business relationship.
We use strategies like email automation, using software to send well-timed personalized emails to leads to continue offering useful information and staying connected. Other useful methods would be follow-up calls to prospects you’ve previously spoken to, staying active on social media for your followers, and sending email newsletters.
Nurturing leads is one of the most important sales processes a business can have to achieve sales goals. Not sure where to start? Contact us today to get set up with a CRM and lead nurturing plan.
