Stop losing leads today.
The loss of a client on the way to a deal can ruin a well-set pipeline for transferring leads into beautiful dashboards.
There are at least four reasons for this. And most likely, you knew about them. Let’s dig into it.
A few weeks ago, I talked to the vice president of a large manufacturing company, our customer, so I asked him a question: what is the biggest problem in your company today? What keeps you awake at night?
His answer was not about cost, margin, or crisis. What worried him most was the leakage of potential customers.
Yesterday you shook hands, and today the lead has disappeared into the bustle of the sales department. It seemed to the interlocutor that this happened due to poor tracking and CRM, which sellers do not know how to use.
I did not advise him to set up tracking and send a FAQ url to the sales department. You can make a popular business course on this, but we looked at the situation differently and found four typical problems that lead to a leakage.
There is no scoring of leads at the first stages.
Wrong:
Cold leads receive overly complex/advanced product information.
Leads who have conducted specific research understand the product and analogues receive, on the contrary, low-detailed information for beginners.
JTBD:
Determine the degree of awareness of the lead about your product asap. Even responding to a cold email first can be pretty prepared.
Directly ask the person how the problem you are solving is precisely his problem in the company. What was the experience in solving it (competitors’ products, methods, horrible patience for many years, etc.)
Training your leads
Wrong:
Leads receive all content regardless of scoring and product understanding
Marketing does not know how a lead training campaign differs from a content plan and pours materials from a basin onto passers-by below
JTBD:
Launch a separate omnichannel campaign for leads who are ready to know the product in-depth. Don’t take the information back to Step 1 in learning the product’s benefits.
Discuss a training campaign with marketing and sales. It differs from the content plan by a separate scenario line, where with each new message, the lead receives more and more details of the product and sees new ways to use it.
How your marketing and sales teams learn to communicate their expectations of leads.
This is a sore point for most. So it was with us, with them, and probably with you. Marketing and sales answer the same question in different ways: “how do we determine that a lead is ready for a deal?” And yes, it depends on your product. He put the goods in the basket, nodded in the affirmative at the meeting, or started a general channel in Telegram — these are all critical signs, but they still do not guarantee a sale.
We answered this for ourselves: a person is ready for a deal when he sees all the advantages of our solution and has no questions left. Marketing agreed with this and did not even argue sales. This is how we qualify people who do not want to solve their problem in the old way or through the crooked solutions of competitors. This helps not to lose leads at the junction of departments.
Content is a King. Contact is a Queen.
We have all concluded that we need to invest in high-quality content. Now let’s see something else. The lead has already watched all your videos, read through your digests and scrolled your Instagram feed. Who will be the first to answer his question? Who is this person at the entrance to sales? I’ve met many companies at various stages of growth that forgot the importance of first impressions, left it all to a contact centre, a sales intern, or worse, a dumb bot. And all growth hacking was sucked up by this black hole of your efforts — an incomplete answer to the first incoming request. Look and listen to whoever meets your leads. This is your brand.
