Three Surefire Rules To Lose Your Leads

How to lose leads and not influence people
Leads can be fickle so congratulations on having people to help manage new inquiries and nurture new business BUT if you’re not super quick off the mark and if you don’t manage the lead process tightly these folks will turn colder than a pair of penguin feet at Christmas.

Rule Number 1. Ignore their initial inquiry for several hours
Research by Inside Sales show that responding to a potential customer within the first five minutes of an inquiry results in a 95% contact success rate. Waiting just ten minutes to call that lead reduces that successful contact rate to around 25%. Don’t believe us? Apply some commonsense (chances are the lead is still sitting at their desk) and check out this cool Inside Sales infographic.

Rule Number 2. Never pick up the phone
Engaging in a string of email conversations is unlikely to close a deal quickly. People like to buy from people so if you pick up the phone and introduce yourself and set a time for an indepth conversation or if you find the inquirer has time to chat right then you’ve made a connection. If you’re the first company to make a connection with a buyer you have the opportunity to provide them with expert advice and emphasis your business value. The poor schmuck from the next company who follows you needs to be more impressive, more knowledgeable and able to make a better connection than you; good luck to them!

Rule Number 3. Add them to your generic email list
That new lead gave your their email address so you could contact them directly and help solve their problem – they didn’t give it to you to be inundated with crappy, generic emails clogging up their inbox every morning (that’s what Facebook is for, right?). A surefire way to turn that happy lead into a miserable potential customer is to automatically opt them into every email campaign you have firing – they’re going to do what you would do; unsubscribe without even a kiss goodbye.

Final Thoughts
It’s great to have a CRM system like Salesforce but it’s important to remember that leads are real people; they need to be kept warm, loved, nurtured and respected not left out in the cold for your competitors to pick up or bombarded with irrelevant messaging. If you want to turn your leads into sales you need to respond to their inquiry quickly, pick up the phone and humanize your company and keep all communication hot and relevant.

If you need help with measuring your response lead times and automating parts of your lead process then contact us but also check out some of the great Hubspot blogs on what not to do with your leads and marketing emails so that we can both help you drive more business collaboratively, more efficiently and pain-free. Work Delivered.