A new white paper released by the Sales Lead Management Association offers some insight into the question of why some businesses fail to see a satisfactory ROI, even with high quality, real time leads.
The reason is that the majority of leads are simply wasted. A survey by the SLMA found that 75 to 90 percent of all leads turned over to salespeople are not followed up on. How do you know if this is happening in your company?
- Track your ROI. A separate study by the SLMA found that more than 60 percent of businesses do not do this, even though most sales software comes with ROI tracking built into the program.
- Identify and isolate issues related to meeting your ROI, and establish a plan to overcome these issues and meet your ROI goals. Include some of the steps below to increase the productivity of your sales team.
- Establish a policy that requires 100% follow up on leads.
- Observe whether your team is spending too much time between calls. If so, minimizing distractions will help them stay on track—and on the phone with those leads while they’re fresh.
- Use progressive dialing, which will automatically start to dial the next number in line as soon as the salesperson ends the current call. (Not to be confused with predictive dialing, which causes a pause when calls are answered; most people will recognize this as an automated call.)
- Next best call routing is also an excellent tool. It eliminates the need for the sales rep to stop and analyze which call will be the best one to take, which can eat up a surprising amount of time. The system will select and route the next best calls to each rep, based upon criteria selected by the company owner or manager.
- Make certain your leads are properly nurtured. Have a plan in place for following up on leads that do not result in a purchase on the initial call. These are still very valuable leads, but are often ignored by salespeople.
By taking these simple but effective steps, and continually tracking your results using the ROI tracking aspect of your sales program, you should see a higher percentage of your leads turning into customers.
Ideally, in order to achieve real growth in your business, you should maintain a steady stream of premium, real-time leads. In reality, however, there may be times when budget considerations or lack of sales staff compel you to look for ways to ‘fill in the gaps’ between premium lead purchases.
If the marketing campaigns you have in place are producing a certain amount of leads for your business, you may wonder if it’s really necessary to purchase additional leads from a lead generation company. And if so, what kind of returns can be realized by using such vendors? There are actually several compelling reasons for considering this step.
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