06
Nov 2012
Are You Making Maximum Use of Your Leads?
By Janette Speyer and Katrina McNeill ~ Web Success Team
You have many avenues for generating leads; trade shows, webinars, your website and social media (just to name a few). However, without properly setting up and utilizing a Customer Relations Management (CRM) tool – your sales leads could be slipping through the cracks.
Four Ways You Should Be Generating Leads
1. Trade Shows: You grabbed a business card, but no one on your team put that lead into your CRM. How do you manage that lead with no record of it?
- Scan business cards and import them into a CRM
- Save them to a list so you can track where they came from
- Reach out to everyone in a timely fashion via email or a phone call
2. Webinars: Before you held your latest webinar, you did all your pre-work through networking in discussion groups, blogging and even paid advertising to get people there; why let all that work go to waste and not follow up on these targeted leads?
- Use a webinar platform that offers reporting tools to help you gather and follow up on leads.
- Take a look at some of the following examples: Verizon Small Business Web Conferencing, Microsoft Office Live Meeting, Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, Cisco WebEx, GoToWebinar or On24.
3. Your Website: Shouldn’t you be grabbing leads from your own website? How do you do that? There are a few easy ways, and they all involve the end goal of getting that lead’s contact information.
- Have a call to action on your landing page that encourages a follow up, like a phone number
- Offer a download so you capture a contact’s information. This is an opportunity to offer valuable information (catered to your target audience) in exchange for their info (this could be an educational whitepaper, video or free webinar).
4. Social Media: First of all, be sure to send people to your social media sites from your website, that way you can build and maintain that relationship on a regular basis. Now how do you actually get contact info from leads through social media?
- Grab more leads by encouraging your fans to become email subscribers
- Run a promotion or contest that requires they fill out a form on your website.
Fruits of Your Labor
If you are paying for a CRM, why not use it? If you paid to go to a trade show, why not call those leads? If you did the work to be involved in or run a webinar, why wouldn’t you follow up with those leads? Start putting these opportunities into practice and set your sales team up for success!
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November 26th, 2012 19:59 /
Helpful info. Lucky me I found your site by chance, and I am surprised why this twist of fate
did not took place earlier! I bookmarked it.