Effective Management Of Your Leads Increases Business Revenue

As a business if you do not have a lead intake process you could be missing out on a lot of clients. A business can have a great marketing strategy where they are getting awareness and potential customers converting but then the ball can get dropped. It could be happening to you and you may not even know it.

Every lead you receive either by email or phone needs to be tracked and followed up on right away. I have worked with many clients that do not have a lead intake process and they lose emails or miss calls or don’t follow up with the lead right away. As a customer you want your inquiry addressed right away and if it is not they will move onto the next business. There are ways to collect leads and to create a process that must be adhered to by your staff to ensure the continued success of your business.  

Tracking Leads

The first step in an effective lead intake process is to ensure you have a way of collecting all your leads. Many times people add their personal e-mail addresses to their websites which is no longer a best practice. First, it just opens you up for tons of spam but second if you use a contact form all the form submissions are tracked and you can access them. This is far better than relying on getting sent emails to staff or info email addresses and they get lost. Sure when you use a contact form it can email you too but you can always check the website for the list of all contact form submissions. 

You should also consider using a call tracking phone number service as well to help track your leads. Not only can you see all the phone calls you get along with other good data like who called but you can see how many calls were missed by your team. It is very eye opening to see the percentage of calls your team misses which can help motivate creating a better approach to answer calls if needed. Also, just like calls that were answered, you can see who called but you didn’t answer and call them back. 

Lead Management Process

Now you have a way to track all your leads both emails and calls now you need a process to manage those leads. For example, what is your service level agreement set by your team that a response will be made to the lead. Perhaps you get an email and it is expected that a person follows up the same day or by the next day by 10 am. Or maybe you have an expectation that all calls get answered and if they don’t and they either get missed or go to voicemail someone needs to follow up in the next 15 minutes. 

A process and the expectation of that process is needed to create a great experience for your potential clients. You have invested so much in generating leads, it would be a shame to lose a bunch because you do not have a clear process that your team is trained on. 

I have created a system where my client’s emails from their website contact form and all calls are automatically collected into a centralized place in the cloud. This way you can see all the leads you have received and then add important information about that lead such as how many times do you or your team try to follow up with them and when. If you did connect did they become a customer and how much did they spend with you. All this data can help you improve your intake process, get more customers, and understand the return on your ad spend or ROAS.