Tag Archive for: Improve Sales

4 Key Stages of Lead Generation

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Leads are the potential customers that each business wants to start a relationship with. From online to offline campaigns, lead generation campaigns find prospective customers, segment them, and then nurture them into a purchase.

So, how does a customer become a stranger into an advocate for your brand? There are four keys stages that they have to go through:

Attract

Customers don’t just show up in your store. They need to know who you are and how you can help them with their problems. The first step is building the right channels that represent your products and services. It should show information that any customer will need at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

The next challenge is to make sure that the right people know about you. Using a mix of online and offline campaigns, marketing teams start the process of separating strangers from potential customers. One of the main goals is to build trust with your brand through engaging and relevant content. Customers who take the time to view your channels want to know more before making any commitments.

Convert

Once companies have their potential customer’s attention, it’s time to engage them. To continue the relationship after you first meet, companies need to get their contact details. In this lead generation stage, a call-to-action asks for their personal information in exchange for access to a benefit such as freebies, special promo prices, or exclusive sales.

Often going from the conversion to the closing stage is not instantaneous, and many customers need time before they move into the next level of their buyer’s journey. This time should is filled with educating the customers on just what the products and services are, but how they are relevant to their individual needs.

Close

Once a customer believes that you might be the right answer to their problems and give you their personal information, then companies have now captured them as leads. Unfortunately, not all leads are the same. Some leads are better than others, but great leads are nothing without proper relationship management.

A great CRM system will tell you exactly which leads to prioritize and where they are in their journey. CRM systems help companies keep track of their movement along the sales pipeline.

Delight 

Once a lead has converted into a sale, the relationship is far from over. Companies that pay attention to their customer’s after-sales journey make them more likely to be repeat customers.

Simple actions such as engaging them again through smart content, asking them for feedback on how to improve your offers, or even cross-selling other products can improve the customer’s over-all lifecycle value.

Leads don’t just happen; they come into fruition through the various joint efforts of marketing and sales. They’re also continuously moving across the sales pipeline and always on the lookout for better offers.

Luckily, companies don’t have to worry about the lead generation process by themselves. Sales performance management can be improved partnered with companies like Hey DAN that does CRM Data Entry with their voice to crm solution. Your sales team may now focus more on nurturing their leads, and closing sales.

3 Main Types of CRM Leads

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Leads are the lifeblood of a great CRM system. For most CRM systems, a CRM lead is a kind of customer who could already be in your sales pipeline but has not completed their lifecycle yet.

Unfortunately, not all leads are made equal. Focusing on the wrong ones can be detrimental to both your company’s budget and your teams’ time. So what are the types of leads in a CRM system?


3 Main Types of Leads

Information Qualified Lead (IQL) – Cold Lead

In the early stages of interacting with your customers, companies are often given contact information in exchange for freebies, promotional offers, or relevant information. With a stream of nurturing activities from marketing and sales teams, IQLs need to learn more about your company, your offerings, and how it answers to their particular needs.

IQLs can be considered cold leads. More often than not, it’s good to keep tabs and regularly maintain your relationship with them. However, they shouldn’t be a priority for your team’s follow-up strategies.

Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – Warm Lead

Marketing Qualified Leads are a kind of lead that is likely to convert into sales. While they’re not likely to buy right now, they are likely to respond better to being nurtured. MQLs are also called warm leads. After a combination of time and effort, they can become paying customers.

Different companies will have different ways of qualifying an MQL. It is often a combination of the prospective customers’ positive interactions with your marketing campaigns, their existing history, or how well they fit into your ideal customer persona.

Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – Hot Lead

A Sales Qualified Leads is also what you call a hot lead. The main difference between MQL and SQL is their readiness to commit to purchasing your product or service. After being qualified by marketing, prospective customers are nurtured by sales teams to avail of your product or service.

Through careful vetting, sales qualified leads to feel that their needs are understood. The marketing department’s budgets are also better spent, and the sales teams maximize the effort they are putting in.

Nurturing Every Kind of Lead

The key to a great CRM system is knowing exactly where each lead is in their buyer’s journey. As a rule of thumb, it’s always best to prioritize the hottest leads first before going after the colder ones.

It’s not enough to have a lot of leads. You also have to find good quality leads. With limited time but a mountain of opportunity, sales teams need help to find the best prospective customers at the right stage and the right time.

One way to make sure that each lead is taken care of until they are ready to be closed by sales is by working with Voice to CRM enablement companies such as Hey DAN.

With their data management system, consulting services, and opportunity spotting technology, they can help you nurture each kind of lead at every stage of the sales pipeline.

What is Lead Generation

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Lead generation is the process of acquiring leads through marketing to convert them into paying customers. It’s when a prospective customer enters your sales pipeline for the first time and starts the journey towards learning more about each other.

There are many ways that companies start relationships with their customers. Starting with the awareness of your offer and sharing what makes you different, the relationship that upon nurturing well can last a lifetime.

Why do we need to generate leads?

Generating leads is important because it helps companies can better focus their efforts on the right kind of customers. Sales teams have a wide range of roles to fulfill – prospecting customers, nurturing relationships, and converting sales.

Being able to identify who will need their offers, and afford to make that decision will mean a huge difference. From knowing what is a good and bad lead, companies can save thousands of dollars in marketing expenses, sales team hours, and overall team morale.

How do we generate leads?

With the rise of the internet, online and social media has changed the landscape of lead generation. Prospective customers are more educated now than ever. From checking reviews from previous users, reading about your company’s status on industry reports to even reading direct comparisons with your competitors, customers need a lot of information before making a purchase.

A combination of on the ground activations, great content, and online campaigns can generate leads. From compelling blog posts, special events, or webinars to eBooks, once a customer has given a significant amount of time and shown enough interest to give their contact details, they become a lead.

What makes lead generation difficult?

While great leads exist, so do bad ones. Pursuing bad leads may even be worse than having no lead at all. One of the biggest reasons that lead generation is hard because it can be either very expensive or incredibly time-consuming.

For leads to be good, they must have accurate, relevant, and up-to-date data. They also need to be segmented into high and low priority and followed throughout their journey in the sales pipeline.

Improving the lead generation system

Lead generation is a tough business. Making sure the lead generation process is efficient and effective needs more than just a one-off set up process.

It’s a combination of marketing and sales working together to paint a clear picture of each customer. It requires continuous refinement of the buyer’s persona, understanding the customer lifecycle, and refining the nurturing process. All of this can be possible only with the right foundation of CRM data.

Your partner in lead generation

While the journey to generating leads may be difficult, companies don’t have to do it alone. By partnering with sales enablement platforms like Hey DAN, companies can utilize their consulting services to analyze opportunities throughout the sales pipeline.

Hey DAN also does data entry, clean up, and management services, which are essential to making sure that your company gets not just quantity but also quality leads.

 

The importance of the proper Follow-up

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You just attended a big networking event and you’re excited about the potential from the day’s activities. Assuming you’ve done your homework (gathering, inputting and studying the information from your CRM system), you know the next step is to do a follow-up with your leads, but what is the right approach?

The importance of the follow-up sequence

A quick follow-up keeps the conversation going, so make sure to touch base the day after that first meeting. If it was a large event, perhaps people are traveling back to their homes or offices and won’t have time to read a lengthy email. A quick and simple email that states your appreciation can make your client feel important and keep the communication line open. This will also cultivate, at an early stage, a positive relationship. By the second or third correspondence, you can already gauge the individual’s interest and determine your next move.

Quality is Key

People can usually tell when you are sending a generic follow up or even worse, immediately putting them in an automated drip campaign. For high value prospects, a personalized message should be sent. The personalization doesn’t have to be long or complicated. You can simply reference a topic of mutual interest that was discussed at the initial engagement or congratulate them on a personal achievement they shared. After a day of networking, we know how hard it can be to recall the details of these discussions, but ensuring you have those details written down and accessible makes the difference between a generic and impactful follow up. Leveraging a CRM system, a voice to CRM add-on and combining it with the discipline to always ensure the engagement details are captured while they are fresh in your mind, will enable you to stand out from the crowd.

Timing

Determining when to follow up and at what interval can be tricky. Wait too long and the prospect might have already forgotten you. Acting on it too soon and you run the risk of coming across as a hard sell. Although there is always the remote possibility of succeeding, that would be the exception and not the norm. Proper timing often spells the difference between closing or losing a prospect. Since every client has a different personality, you can customize your follow-up timing for those select few. But to determine when to make a follow-up, it’s a good idea to have a general set of rules.

Third time’s the charm. Set the number of follow-ups to three times per prospect. This means that if you don’t get a response after the third time, then maybe it’s time to move on to the next. But don’t delete the prospect, just put them on your list of future follow ups (perhaps in a quarters time?), which leads us to;

Rekindling

We think that a non-responsive prospect is a non-interested one, but it can be for a number of reasons. There are times that the message you sent failed to get through (it happens);or maybe the person is preoccupied with something else; it could also be that what you’re offering may not be the priority at the moment. Whatever it is, don’t forget about them, give them some time and space and then rekindle the connection. Wait for as short as a month and then you can send them a “catching up” message – but never throw out a contact.

Making it fool-proof and not making a fool

Having incomplete or error-filled data captures can lose you all those leads you worked so hard at. You need the right information to make the correct follow-up on all those prospects. The more details from the conversation you can recall in your follow up message to make the discussion meaningful and personal, the more likely you are to succeed at the follow up engagement. Leverage your CRM data, ensure that data was entered while the conversation was fresh in your mind. Services like Hey DAN, a Voice to CRM service that provides fast and efficient data capture will populate your system with all the information you deem important. It’s as simple as dictating all the info into your phone and letting the technology do the rest so you can move on to the next engagement while ensuring those important conversational details are captures and available for when you need them. So the next time you make a follow-up, confidently take that client information and send those follow up emails that stand out from the crowd..

Hey DAN Ranked by HubSpot in the Top 10 in CRM Sales Tools

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HubSpot, an established authority in sales and marketing, ranked Hey DAN among their list of “The 10 Best Networking Apps Every Sales Professional Needs”. Formerly Dial-A-Note, Hey DAN’s Voice-to-CRM service is showcased for improving the quality of information captured on new prospects. Speaking notes after a meeting ensures that sales reps can add contact profiles along with details of their interactions to their company’s CRM right away so they don’t forget pertinent information. Hey DAN’s Voice-to-CRM solution is quick and easy which allows sales team to “get back to meeting more people” hence gaining it’s Top 10 status in CRM tools for Sales by HubSpot.

HubSpot recognizes the reality that “Networking often takes place…when you least expect it — like standing in line at the airport. What’s important is that you’re always ready to make the most of any encounter with a prospect.” Hey DAN stands out among the apps listed as the tool that most meets this need. Other tools recommended by HubSpot include presentation sharing apps, news aggregators and lead generators which all help to seek out and prepare for impromptu networking opportunities; but of all the tools showcased, only Hey DAN users are ready to capture meaningful insights when those opportunities are at hand. With Hey DAN’s Voice-to-CRM service, sales reps are best able to capture key information, and this data helps them to capitalize on more opportunities.

No other Voice-to-CRM technology was included in HubSpot’s recommendations suggesting that Hey DAN’s approach is a stand out among similar services. Unlike most speech technology available today, Hey DAN doesn’t require users to make adjustments to their ways of speaking for it to function properly. It is built on AI that is seamlessly incorporated with human intelligence giving its users the best of both worlds. The service can accurately capture complex data and enter it promptly into your company’s chosen CRM — be it HubSpot or any other. It is a ‘technology service’, rather than strictly a technology.