The Essential Small Business Guide to Sales Lead Follow Up: How to Convert More Leads into More Orders in Less Time

The Essential SMB Guide to Sales Lead Follow Up: How to Convert More Leads into More Orders in Less Time 

For the small or medium-sized business (SMB)every inbound sales lead has the potential to become not only an order, butalso to transform itself into a satisfied customer that represents a dependablestream of repeat revenue year after year.  

The primary obstacle that stands between anSMB and that repeat customer is the task of lead follow up. On the surface leadfollow up would appear to be quite straightforward but this simple step isfraught with difficulties for most companies. Sales industry research estimatesthat 40-50% of all inbound sales leads are never followed up. And, when theleads are followed up, common mistakes are made that unwittingly doom the SMBto lose the opportunity to convert that lead into an order.

Comprehensive and effective sales lead followup is built on the foundation of a commitment to rapidly respond to 100% of theinbound leads received. In this book we outline simple steps that every SMB canuse to build their prospect pipelines and grow their sales without increasingheadcount. Including yours.

What is a Sales Lead?

To develop an effective lead follow up processit is important to first understand what an inbound sales lead is. A sales leadis simply a question. With their inquiry a potential prospect is asking you oneor more question(s). They could be general questions such as: What does yourproduct do? How does it do it? Will it do what I need? What does it cost? Orthey could be more complex questions: How will your solution integrate into mycurrent workflow? What productivity increase will we experience with yoursolution?

In today’s competitive sales environment thepotential customer who has contacted your company about your product or servicehas already completed at least 30% of the buying cycle without you. They’vespent considerable time online, researching your product and others like it,and visiting your website and those of your competitors. By the time they firstcontact you that prospect may have already gathered about 70-80% of theinformation they need to make an informed decision to buy your product. Theyare contacting you not out of idle curiosity but because they have an interestand specific questions that need to be answered. They have a developed need.And the first seller with the complete answers wins.

Here are the essential steps that every SMBseller should take to be the first with the answers and maximize theirconversion of inbound sales leads into orders.

Step #1: Create a Lead Map

Sales lead follow up is a process. Before youtake any steps to fix and improve this process you need to make certain youhave a full understanding of your current sales lead follow up process. In allmy years of consulting with the CEOs of many small and medium sized businesses,this is the first question I ask the client. “Draw your lead management processfor me.” Not once has the client been able to provide a 100% accurate renderingof this vital process.

Check out the chart to the left to see an exampleof what it means to map out a lead. For every type of lead you receive, map howit is captured, recorded, and distributed to the salesperson that will followup with the prospect. Your map should also show how leads are distributed toyour indirect sales channels and how they are followed up, or aren’t.

Use your lead map to create a baselinebenchmark for your current sales lead follow up process. The critical items tomake sure you understand are how many hands a lead has to pass through beforeit gets to the right salesperson and, most importantly, how much time passesbetween the moment the lead was received and when the prospect receives afollow up.

At one client I quizzed the CEO and sales teamabout the exact number of new leads they received per week. They had no idea.In fact, they were averaging about two new leads per salesperson per day. (Eachsalesperson needed to close, on average, six orders per month to meet quota.)At first, they didn’t believe me when I showed them they were each averaging 15to 20 new leads per month. When I showed them the leads from the previous monthand asked what had happened to them, they defaulted to the standard salesresponse: “Well, I looked at those leads but they were no good.”

Which brings us to the most important step of an effective Sales Lead Follow-up Program:

Step #2: Follow up 100% of Inbound Sales Leads 

Every inbound sales lead is like a scratch-offlottery ticket. You don't know what you have until you scratch the wax off theface of it and see if you have won. How many people buy a lottery ticket andthen wait until the next day to see if they have a winner? None. Inbound salesleads should be treated the same way.

The opinions of sales industry researchersvary, but the bottom line appears to be, across industry types, that roughly50% of in-bound sales leads are never followed up. Let me say that again. 50%.Each one is a potential winner. Just sitting there. Begging to be scratchedoff. Does anyone believe that 50% of the scratcher lottery tickets sold lastyear in the US, approximately $25 billion worth, are sitting around in a drawersomewhere unscratched?

But sales leads have the same, if not better,potential to pay off as lottery tickets. It’s a continuing mystery why so manysalespeople have such a negative and distorted view of sales leads. Sales leadsare found money. Someone has purchased a lottery ticket and is attempting tohand it to you, but you turn your back.

This lack of follow-up means that at least 50%of the dollars that the typical small or medium-sized business invests in leadgeneration and building brand awareness is wasted. If the deal is that you, asa CEO or marketing manager, invest marketing dollars to generate leads with theunderstanding that your salespeople will follow them up to get orders, then oneof you is not holding up your end of the deal.

ABasket of Cash: The Sales Math of Effective 100% Lead Follow up

Let’s break this down mathematically. Here isa simple illustration of the power of 100% lead follow-up in Zero-Time. Let’sassume that the average size of your typical customer order is $20,000. You get20 in-bound sales leads per week, four per day. I’ll also assume that yourorganization is average and estimate that your sales team follows up on 50% ofyour leads. For purposes of illustration, let’s also say that your salespeopleconvert 50% of your followed-up sales leads into qualified prospects and 50% ofthose qualified prospects into orders. What does the math say? It says that youare ignoring the easiest 100% sales growth you will ever find. Right now you’regetting 2.5 orders out of every 20 leads, or $50,000 in new business. Assumingthe same conversion rate from prospects to orders, by following up 100% of yoursales leads in Zero Time you will produce five orders from those same 20 leads,or $100,000 in new business. That’s an extra $50,000 in orders for the samedollar investment in marketing and sales. Who doesn’t want more sales?

InSales, Ignorance is not Bliss

A friend of mine, JB, is a high-powered salesconsultant. He works with CEOs of companies of all sizes to help them turnaround their faltering sales organizations. He told me about one assignment hehad taken on recently with a previously high-flying $10 million-a-year company.Growth was sputtering, so the CEO hired JB to analyze their sales processes andhelp implement the necessary fixes. Within a week, JB had uncovered the sourceof the company’s problems. He found a backlog of 1,800 sales leads, the vastmajority of which had never been followed up. The rest might have received somefollow-up but it had never been recorded in the client’s CRM system, which wasin place but not used. So no one knew for sure. Worst of all, the CEO and theVP of sales were aware of the situation but had moved at less than glacialspeed to fix it.

This leads us to Step #3 in our Effective Sales Lead Follow-up process:

Step #3: Enter all Leads into your CRM system as soon as they are received 

Make sure that all inbound sales leads areentered into your CRM system as soon as they are received and that each one isassigned to a salesperson for immediate follow up. Use your CRM system on adaily basis to check and make sure that 100% of your sales leads are beingfollowed up. If you aren't checking, it isn't happening.

What should you do if you don’t have a CRMsystem? Go buy one. Of course, you can devise a system for tracking leads thatdoesn’t require a CRM system. But why would you? If you want to see a powerfuldemonstration of how to use a CRM system as an effective sales tool, then lookno further. Improving your order yield from your pipeline of sales leadsprovides the “R” in the ROI from your investment in a CRM system.

Don’tPlay the Waiting Game

I asked a client once about their leaddistribution and follow-up policies.

“We usually gather the leads up and distributethem once a day.”

Why do you wait?

“I don’t know. It seems distracting to sendleads out to the salespeople as they come in. Both for me and the sales team.”

How can it be distracting to ask sales to dotheir job, which is to sell product to potential customers?

“Well, since you put it that way.”

Let me ask you this question: What goodhappens when you wait to follow up a lead? Does the potential customer becomemore impressed with your responsiveness, or less? Does the lead wait to talk toyour competition until after you finally get around to calling?

Which takes us to Step #4 of the EffectiveSales Lead Follow-up process:

Step #4: Follow-up Immediately; If not Sooner 

How much time should it take to follow up alead? Less than you think. Every minute that passes by while you wait to followup a lead is time that a competitor will use to swoop in and talk to theprospect before you. If they respond to the customer with the answers to theirquestion, then you are suddenly fighting for 2nd place.

I helped a client streamline their sales leadfollow up process to reduce their response time to inbound sales leads from 24hours to 30 minutes. The immediate result was more qualified prospects in theirpipeline. The longer-term result was a doubling of their sales with the samenumber of salespeople.

Your goal should be for the prospect to feellike they had just hit the “enter” button on their computer when yoursalesperson calls to follow-up. The first one in the door who is completelyresponsive to the prospect’s needs will set the bar for all the othercompetitors, which means that you will have dramatically improved your odds ofgetting the order.

How much time should it take for your salesteam to follow-up a lead? Thirty (30) minutes max. (Sound too fast? Contact meat andy@zerotimeselling.com. I will show you how to make this happen.)

CompetitionKiller

Sam was selling big numbers as it was. Butwhen my client Manny, his boss, rolled out an aggressive lead follow-up processSam found that being completely responsive to leads within 30 minutes pushedhis sales into overdrive. Quick responses elicited more immediate questions andinformation from the prospects. If they sent a lead in, then they were de factointerested. Call them back immediately and the level of interest went up.Responsiveness captured the attention of his prospects and differentiated Samfrom the competition. Absolute responsiveness, completely meeting theprospect’s information requirements in Zero-Time was a competition-killer.

If the customer already has the bulk of theinformation they need to make a decision before they even call you, and youpromptly and thoroughly answer all of their additional questions in the firstsales call, you’ve gone a long way toward winning the order.

Which leads to Step #5 of this Simple butEffective Sales Lead Follow-up method:

Step #5: Provide Complete Answers Quickly

As discussed above an inbound sales lead isnothing more than a question. Being responsive to a prospect means that you areproviding a complete answer to their question(s) in the least time possible.The best way to do this is to position your deepest product knowledge closestto the customer.

It is not enough to be the first to respond tothe customer. You must also be the first to answer their questions. Manny andSam learned that during the buying cycle the customer is not only judging yourproduct. Perhaps more important, they are evaluating what it will be like towork with your company.

Responsiveness, understanding, andcompleteness all build trust and corporate credibility that lead to orders. Thefirst seller to respond to an inbound sales lead with the complete answer inZero-Time will dramatically increase their chances of winning the order.

YourSales Processes are Not Static

Once Reuben’s sales team bought into thebenefits of following up with 100% of their sales leads, they became noticeablyless skeptical about the value of the leads they were receiving. At that pointReuben’s team was following up on 100% of their sales leads but was taking twoor three days to call the prospect. They discovered that one of their maincompetitors was beating them to the punch with nearly every prospect. Clearly,two or three days were too long to take to follow up on new opportunities.

Reuben’s sales team decided to step it up anotch. Faster lead follow-up would give them an advantage with the prospect.They collectively decided to tweak their process to ensure sales leads werefollowed up on the same day they were received. They further refined their leadsystem so that all the leads received overnight were entered in the CRM systemand distributed to the sales team by 9 a.m., and all leads received in themorning were distributed by noon. Every member of the sales team quickly beganto see the benefits of responsive lead follow up on leads and they turned thetables on their competition. Now Reuben’s team became the first company tofollow up with a sales lead, and combined with 100% lead follow-up, drove evenmore prospects into their sales pipeline. Over time and with additionalrefinement to their sales processes, they reached the goal of 30-minute leadfollow-up.

Which leaves us at Step #6 of the EssentialSales Lead Follow-up process:

Step #6: Measure, Improve, Measure Again 

You must continually work to improve yoursales lead follow up process. As the old saying goes 'You can't improve whatyou don't measure.' So keep it simple to start with and measure the following:

a) How many sales leads do you receive eachweek?

b) How long does it take to respond to eachsales lead? (the time between when the lead is received and a sales persontalks to them for the first time)

c) What percentage of your inbound sales leadsare converted into qualified prospects?

d) What percentage of your inbound sales leadsare converted into orders?

Set goals for these metrics a-d (above) andthen check each month to see if you are achieving them. If you are, set newmore aggressive goals and fine-tune each element of your lead follow up processto achieve the new goal. If you aren't meeting your goals, examine each elementof your process in detail and implement steps you can take to improve it. Thencheck your performance again in a month.

ArtLesson

Art owned a family business that had beenaround for about four decades. His had an objective to grow his top line by10%. His first thought was that he would have to boost his spending onadvertising to create more demand and generate leads, but he was naturallyworried that increasing his marketing outlays would not result in more sales.

I spent time with Art’s sales team, reviewingtheir processes and their accounts. It was no surprise to find that theyweren’t paying attention to sales leads. I pointed this out to Art and told himthat he didn’t need to increase his advertising budget. He just needed to makesure that all his leads were promptly pursued.

Art wanted to increase the percentage of leadsthat were followed up by 50%. My response was that there was no need for halfsteps and that we were going to ensure that 100% of all leads were followed up.It was an easy fix. All in-bound leads were routed to Art’s sales admin, whoentered the account into the company’s CRM system and assigned it to asalesperson to follow up on. Each night before he left work Art reviewed thelist of leads and open follow-ups by each salesperson to ensure that theassigned leads had been followed up.

What Art found initially was fairlypredictable. The good performers followed up on all of their leads. The chronicmiddlers and underachievers didn’t. (It is not a coincidence that industryresearch estimates both that only 50% of leads are followed up and that only50% of salespeople achieve their annual quotas.) Art met with his middlers andunderachievers and told them it was a non-negotiable condition of theircontinued employment that they follow up all their leads.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the entire teambegan following up on 100% of their leads. One positive result was that themiddlers and underachievers developed more prospects and closed more orders.They still weren’t all-stars, but they had closed the gap. And total companysales rose as a result.

Making it Happen: Management Action Items

The next steps are upto you. While it takes management commitment and follow-through to implement aneffective sales lead follow-up program this is also the easiest of theZero-Time Selling solutions to implement because the results are so simple tomeasure. Either you’re following up on 100% of your sales leads or you aren’t.

Here are the sixaction items to take today to begin following up on 100% of your sales leads:

1.     Map your lead handling process.

Check out the chartagain on Page 4 to see an example of what it means to map out a lead. For everytype of lead you receive, map how it is captured, recorded, and distributed tothe salesperson that will follow up with the prospect. Your map should alsoshow how leads are distributed to your indirect sales channels and how they arefollowed up, or aren’t.

2.     Capture all your leads in your CRM system as soon as they come in.

Every sales lead thatyou receive, regardless of source, has to be immediately entered into your CRMsystem with a follow-up action assigned to a salesperson.

I had this discussionwith JG, a client’s VP of Sales.

“Enter every one ofthem?”

Absolutely.

“Even the bad ones?”

What is a bad lead?Can you tell me?

“I can tell just bylooking.”

Really? Are you 100%sure that you are not passing up a valid sales opportunity each time you flusha lead down the drain without talking to it first?

“Well, no…not 100%.”

So, how many orders,how many thousands of dollars, have you handed over to your competition duringyour career because you didn’t follow up on every lead?

“Umm…”

Just what I thought.

3.     Immediately distribute all your sales leads after you’ve entered themin your CRM system.

Don’t wait until youhave a certain number of leads; don’t gather them all up and enter them once aday. If you do, you’ll lose valuable time, you won’t be responsive to thecustomer, and you’ll open the door for your competition. You will need todesignate someone—yourself, a sales admin, or a receptionist—to enter everylead into your system. It doesn’t matter who does it. What is crucial is thatit becomes someone’s responsibility.

Who is that person inyour company? Enter the name right here: ____________________________________.Now, send that person an email and ask him or her to come talk with you aboutthe important role they have to play in your sales success.

4.     Assign follow-up action items to a salesperson for each lead that isentered into your CRM system.

A specificsalesperson needs to be assigned to follow up on each lead. Salespeople have tounderstand that, effective immediately, following up on leads is compulsory. Itis a condition of employment.

This is a very simplebargain between management and salespeople. Management will invest in leadgeneration. All the salespeople have to do is follow up on the leads that aregenerated. It’s pretty simple.

5.     Daily checks by management to ensure that leads are promptly followed-up.

This is essential. Itis now up to you, as the CEO or sales manager, to check your CRM system at theend of every workday to ensure that all of the assigned lead follow-ups tookplace.

As I like to tell meclients: If you aren’t checking, then it isn’t happening. The follow-up andspot-checking really doesn’t take very long. And I guarantee you’ll seeresults.

6.     Write up the 100% lead follow-up process as a standard sales policy andthen distribute it to everyone on your sales team.

The policy muststipulate the following points:

·     100% of all sales leads will be promptly followedup.

·     Prompt and universal lead follow-up is a conditionof employment.

·     All leads will be immediately entered into your CRMsystem and assigned to a sales person for prompt follow-up.

·     Management will monitor lead follow-up daily.

It’s Time To Make Some Changes

By following up and effectively managing 100percent of your sales leads, every day, a small business can go a long waytoward not only developing additional sales, but creating a strong, loyalcustomer base as well.  Disciplined andcomprehensive sales lead follow up is the simplest way to improve the ROI onyour sales and marketing dollars.

It’s simple, logical selling that’s easy foreven the most novice business owners to manage: either you’re following up witha 100 percent of your leads or you’re not.

Use this book to make it happen for you.