It can be challenging to get to a point in your business where sales are static or on a gradual decline. Chances are, there may be some loopholes in your lead generation system.
Lead generation is the driving force that guarantees the profitability of any business. With the proper systems, your company can close sales consistently and ensure customer satisfaction.
There are a handful of strategies you can adopt. These strategies will give you a headstart in setting up your system or augmenting an existing one.
Three Reasons Why You Need A System For Lead Generation
Everybody has a sales process of some kind. It could be in the form of prospecting, writing a proposal, cold emailing, Et cetera. To successfully close more sales and generate more leads it is essential to create defined systems to oversee these activities. The advantages of having these systems in place are as follows:
- Confidence: A working system serves as a confidence booster. This will increase your ease in closing sales because it keeps you super organized and always in the know of where your leads are in the sales process.
- Standard Metrics: With a defined system, you can identify the most profitable lead generation methods. As an agency, you will most likely get leads from several different sources in your company. A system for lead generation will provide the right metrics to know which methods lead to the best and most profitable outcomes.
- Data-driven decision-making: You’ll have insights into what is and isn’t working in your sales and lead generation efforts. Ultimately, this will inform the decisions you make that affect the future of sales.
One Reason Why Your Lead Generation Is Failing
One common mistake agencies make during their lead generation process is failing to track leads. This mistake can cost you a few sales and leads.
One of the ways to find out if you are effectively tracking your leads is to answer five crucial questions without guessing.
- In the last year, how many leads has your business generated? It could be someone who indicated an interest in buying any of your products or services.
- What percentage of those leads were qualified?
- Of the percentage above, how many actual sales did you close?
- What are your top three sources of leads? It could be google, referrals, networking, or any other source.
- Where are you tracking these leads?
If your answers to these questions contain a lot of maybes, lack of detail, and uncertainties, you might be poking holes in your pocket.
Tracking leads through your sales pipeline and then analyzing this data to see what is and isn’t working for your sales is critical to your business’s success. Not having these specific details creates loopholes that hinder your efficiency in closing sales and generating more leads.
Four Surefire Ways To Fix The Loopholes
Each of the questions above represents different aspects of your sales process. They also represent underlooked opportunities for proper analysis and marketing optimization. Outlined below are three ways you can fix this.
Track Lead Sources And Optimize The Most Profitable Ones
Your business most likely has several sources through which it generates leads. If you don’t keep track of these sources, how will you know which ones generate the best leads?
This is why you should track your lead sources—get to know how leads find your business. This information allows you to work with 100% accuracy. It becomes most valuable when deciding on the best source to optimize and scale. For instance, if 70% of your leads come from Facebook Ads, 25% from referrals, and 5% from google ads, your best bet will be to focus more resources on Facebook ads.
You can track your lead sources by including a form with a list of source options. The answers they provide can show you your most valuable lead source.
Track Each Potential Customer’s Journey Through Your Sales Funnel
You might be doing everything right to generate new leads. However, they may drop out of your sales funnel at specific phases. It could be at the budget and pricing phase, the contact phase, Et cetera.
To curb this loophole, you need to create a system for tracking specific details of the customer’s journey through your sales funnel. It is okay to start at the very beginning when they make their first contact with your agency and trace it to the point of closing the sale(or wherever they stop in the funnel).
By mapping the journey like this, you can track the exact phase where a large percentage of leads fall off. For instance, if you get leads through Facebook ads, factors like budgeting and pricing of your services are out of your control. However, if a large percentage of leads fall off at this phase, you may need to reassess the demographics of people your ad targets and split-test other demographics with higher income levels.
Create A System For Tracking The Status Of Your Leads
When you know the status of your leads as they journey through your sales process, you’ll take the right actions to keep them moving down the funnel. For instance, a follow-up email to a prospective customer who has shown interest in your agency may be the right nudge needed to close the deal.
Keep Track Of The Specific Needs Of Your Qualified Leads
Attending to specific needs may take quite some time if you have a ton of qualified leads. But it is worth it in the end. Segmenting your audiences this way helps you communicate with them on a more effective level based on their unique needs.
Adaptation And Changes
Optimizing your entire sales process to close more sales and generate more leads is a constantly evolving process requiring consistency and dedication. It helps to let go of the idea that it has to be a complete and perfect system because whatever lead tracking system you create will potentially change over time.
Get ready to adapt to the changes as they come, and with consistency, you’ll be able to close more sales and generate more leads.
This post was originally adapted from the October 2021 webinar How to Close More Sales & Generate More Leads with Noah Britton. You can watch it in the DAO community.
