I’ve got a question for you… what’s more important?:
A) Generating Leads to Grow your Business… or…
B) Building a relationship with your existing leads to convert them into paid business?
The vast majority of business owners I speak to think it’s more important to generate NEW leads than to work their EXISTING leads and that’s simply not true!
You’ve gone through all that trouble to generate a lead, so why are you looking for even more… I don’t get it?! Most businesses have had in the past, numerous people who were ready to buy from them, but they’ve ‘let them go’ too easily.
The second stage of building profit in your business is improving the conversion rate and that is what we’re going to focus on now…. But not the conversion rate of new enquiries… the conversion rate of older sales leads.
We’re now going to look at a simple four step process, that you can put into practice right now, to help you find the hidden gold in your archives.
Obviously there are clearly way more than four ways to maximise the business from your prospect list, and that is what I help my paying clients with…
However, these are the real basics that you MUST master before you can build a business to be proud of…
Some of you will be doing some of these already, but I bet you £20 you haven’t got them all covered off as effectively as you should! Let’s dig in…
1. File it where it can be actioned
Make sure all your customer data is stored in one place. This includes your prospect data as well. Anybody who has enquired and any customer you have ever had needs to be stored in a CRM database.
For those of you don’t know what a CRM system is, it could be a spreadsheet, it could be a piece of software like Pipedrive or Salesforce, but as long as all of the prospects and customers you’ve ever had, are stored in one central place, you’re moving in the right direction.
Now, if you have got that in place already, look into it now and see if it needs improving… if you have something that is not doing what you want it to do, then it needs to be fixed right?!
2. Record Everything!
You need to make sure you are accurately recording all of the enquiries you get into this database… and from what I’ve seen from the past this is not happening, not consistently anyway.
So have a think how you’re recording your data and making sure it’s in the right place so that it can be found more easily in the future.
3. When do you need to next speak to them?
Record the follow up date on every single conversation you have, right after you’ve put the phone down, or you have sent or received the email.
If you know you’ll need to follow up with that person in the future, record the follow up date in the database or the CRM system that you’re using otherwise you’ll forget to do so. Another good tip for you is that your diary / system needs to be reminding you to follow up those people on the dates you promised to.
4. Follow up, follow up, follow up!!!
90% of business people in charge of sales are not doing this effectively and are not following up more than four times.
In many cases, the customer will come and spend money after the fourth, fifth or sixth time you follow up.
You’re better off spending more time with a smaller group of people, following them up rigidly, than wasting time, energy and money generating more leads.
I’ll leave you with this one parting shot:
5% of the people that will do business with you are ready to go now. So if we’re not following up effectively, we could be missing out on 95% of our business.
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So this is one part of a nine step process that I take my paying clients through to help them create a business that could work without them.
If you still need more clarity on how you could follow up with your enquiries and your customers more effectively, just click the button below and let’s speak.
