In an ideal world, you would spend a minimal amount of time sifting through leads to find which ones are ready to buy your product.
If you’ve got a sales team, they would spend their day talking only to qualified leads, focusing on turning them into new customers or upselling them to larger packages to boost your business’s revenue.
If you’re running an ecommerce outfit, you’d be able to effortlessly send only the hottest leads targeted offers to boost sales conversions.
If you’re a single-person operation, you’d spend all your valuable sales time talking one-on-one with the leads who are most ready to buy.
However, the reality for most businesses is that sales efforts aren’t always that efficient. Spending hours calling contacts who aren’t qualified leads or sending emails to leads who are nowhere near ready to buy isn’t the best use of your time or resources.
Learn where to focus your efforts. Use these five tips to take out the guesswork.
1. Ask Leads for More Info
If you have a web page that collects leads for your business by asking visitors to share their contact info, you can add fields to the form to gather more information about them that’s relevant to the purchasing decision.
For example, if you sell to businesses, you might know that businesses with fewer than 50 employees are not likely to become your customers. On your opt-in form, you could add a dropdown field for “business size,” and then prioritize following up with those who have 50 or more employees.
Qualifying leads in advance using fields like this is a great way to save yourself time.
2. Use Lead Routing
A common cause of wasted time on a sales team is when leads are not sent directly to the right person on the team. For example, maybe your sales team is regional, or maybe you want leads for a certain product to go to one sales rep only, but occasionally they end up with the wrong person at first. Reassigning leads to other team members means a longer first response time and can create a poor first impression for new leads.
In ONTRAPORT, you can assign incoming leads to a lead router to easily distribute them to different users in your account to better leverage your team’s time.
You’ve got two options: Round Robin and Weighted Random. A Round Robin lead router will evenly distribute leads to each of the users who are in the router you create. This way, everyone ends up with the same number of leads over time.
A Weighted Random lead router assigns leads to users by percentage. You could set it so that a certain user in your account receives 50% of the incoming leads while two other users each receive 25%.
You can also assign leads to specific users depending on data you’ve collected about them. Maybe you want all leads who are from California to go to one person while all leads from Nevada go to another. You can create a different lead router for each user and assign contacts to it using a global Rule that adds the contacts based on which state they select from a dropdown menu.
You can find more information about how lead routing works in ONTRAPORT in our Knowledge Base.
3. Score Your Leads
To save even more time and focus even more on the leads that matter most, you can implement lead scoring. According to the ONTRAPORT Knowledge Base, “Lead scoring is a system by which your contacts are ranked automatically in response to a particular action they take or if info in their Contact Record meets a set criteria, all of which is determined by you. The resulting score is used to prioritize your contacts and pinpoint how far along they are in your sales funnel.”
With lead scoring, you can quickly judge how hot a lead is. For example, you could set it so that your leads get 10 points if they visit a tracked link to your sales page, 10 points if they open an email you sent, and 10 more points if they list their job title as “CEO.” Then, you can use automated Rules to take action once they reach a threshold score. In this example, you could make it so that whenever someone reaches a lead score of 30, an automated task is fired for your team to give them a call.
4. Qualify Leads With Tripwire Products
Another easy way to find hot leads is by promoting tripwire products. Sometimes also called “splinter products,” tripwire products are inexpensive products that are easy to sell (meaning that leads will buy them without needing to talk with your team). For example, say you’re in the life-coaching business. You could sell an ebook for $10 that contains some of your best strategies. Whenever someone buys that ebook, you know they’re far more likely to buy your coaching services because they’ve already taken an action that indicates a strong interest. When people pull out their wallets and buy something from you, they become much more likely to buy again — so you know that it’s worth your time to follow up with them.
5. Use Good Traffic Sources
You can be sure to find the most qualified leads by carefully selecting where you advertise.
If you have a business coaching service and you place an ad in Woodcraft Magazine, if any leads do come through, they’re not likely to be high quality. Likewise, if you’re primarily using LinkedIn to promote your fitness and nutrition business, you’re looking in the wrong place.
Another factor to consider is the type of advertising or promotion you’re paying for. A general rule of thumb is: the cheaper the lead, the poorer the quality. At ONTRAPORT, we’ve noticed that inexpensive ads, like Facebook Audience Network ads, can get us a staggering number of pageviews on our lead capture form and a decent increase in new leads. However, these new leads tend to provide wrong phone numbers and email addresses and cancel calls with our Business Solutions team.
On the other hand, we’ve found a lot of success creating high-quality traffic with Facebook retargeting ads. Retargeting campaigns produce better leads because they are targeting those who have already engaged with your business online — either by visiting your content pages or joining your email list. Retargeting is cost-effective because it only shows your ads to targets who are most likely to click through. Check out this article for more info on how you can leverage retargeting to collect more high-quality leads.
The Final Takeaway
Using these strategies, you can eliminate the guesswork involved in deciding which leads to reach out to and when. It might involve some experimentation to figure out what works for your business, depending on the size of your team, the average decision period of a customer buying your product, and the number of questions buyers have. Mix and match the techniques above, and you can start using your time more efficiently, no matter your business model.
The post 5 Simple Ways to Focus on the Most Qualified Leads appeared first on The ONTRAPORT Blog.