How to Get Leads for Your Business and Close Sales.

Every business owner knows that leads are great but closed sales keep the doors open. After the sale, a great customer experience is vital to retaining customers/clients and growing revenues.

How can you streamline marketing, sales, and customer service to make client acquisition and retention easier?

Let’s walk through a straightforward process that you can implement.

Assuming that your website is built to attract your ideal client and is showing up strong in searches, then developing a strong sales and marketing strategy to drive traffic to your website is the next step.

Marketing Overview
Since this article is about sales processes, we’re just going to talk about marketing strategy on a high level. One of the best ways to reach potential clients is to purchase or develop a list of contacts. Coldlytics is a good source for list building at a reasonable price. The contact list can be used in email marketing, LinkedIn campaigns, Facebook ads, and cold calling. Social media campaigns can be designed to work with other types of campaigns for a consistent message. All the tools needed to manage these marketing campaigns are included in Accelerator-Pro.

Let's kick off the lead and sales process. To get started, take a few minutes to set up the necessary tools in Accelerator-Pro.

Prepare for Lead Generation

Contact Forms
Before starting a marketing campaign, build all your forms on Accelerator-Pro. Embed the forms into your website so that captured data goes directly to the CRM to trigger a series of pre-built workflow automations.

Staff Profiles
Create profiles within Accelerator-Pro for each individual who interacts with clients. Each account will include an email signature, availability, calendar selection, connections to Outlook or Gmail calendars, permissions, and more.

Calendars
Also, create a scheduling calendar for each sales team member so potential customers can self-schedule appointments, if appropriate. Each salesperson can also manually schedule appointments. Links to scheduling calendars can be added to your website to encourage visitors to take immediate action.

Sales Pipeline & Opportunities
Take time to define every step in your Sales Pipeline so that each lead and sale is tracked throughout the sale process. Accelerator-Pro provides the tools needed to create one or more pipelines. The Opportunities feature enables sales members and managers to monitor the sales process, leads, closed deals, and opportunity details.

Workflow Automation Setup

Setting up workflows is where much of the “magic” happens when streamlining processes.

For instance, when a lead completes a Form, a workflow can direct the data to the CRM, assign a team member to the contact, create an Opportunity in a specific pipeline, notify the newly assigned team member of the new contact with contact information, and send an email/text to the lead with a specific message. The salesperson can communicate with the lead directly through the CRM for a complete record of all communications. Within the lead’s email could be a link to a scheduling calendar, survey, form, products, or more.

Working with Leads
Appointment Setting and Workflows
A lead could schedule their appointment when provided a link to a scheduling calendar for the salesperson. Salespeople can also manually schedule appointments. When an appointment is scheduled, an automatic email/text confirmation is sent to the lead. Before the meeting, the lead will receive an email or text message with the meeting location, how to prepare for the meeting, etc. Messages are often sent 3 days in advance, 24 hours in advance, and one hour before the meeting, which greatly improves the chances the lead will show up at the scheduled time.

No-Show Follow and Workflows
Sometimes clients miss meetings for a variety of reasons. Stay in touch with the lead using a series of messages designed to give the lead an opportunity to reschedule a meeting with the assigned salesperson.

Post-Meeting Follow-Up Workflows
Since salespeople sometimes forget to update contact information following a meeting, it can be helpful to implement a post-meeting follow-up check-in. Once the meeting has taken place, a workflow can circle back to the salesperson via text or email to update the Opportunity information. Was the sale Won, Lost, or Abandon? What is the potential value of the sale? Has a second meeting been scheduled? Has the lead moved to the next step in the pipeline (to trigger another workflow)?

A workflow can trigger a follow-up email or text to the leads to get feedback or ask them to take the next step in the sales process.

Post-Closing Workflow
Once a lead becomes a client, a congratulations email or text can be sent to them with instructions on how to get started, take the next steps, login credentials, etc. A series of emails or texts can be sent to the new client with ongoing instructions, feedback on their experience, check-in for questions, etc. At specific intervals, messages can be sent that contribute to a great customer experience for the client.

Activity Dashboard

The business owner or sales manager can track sales team member activity within Accelerator-Pro using the built-in Dashboard. The Dashboard can be customized to meet business goals and can include calls made, appointments scheduled, revenue, upcoming tasks, and much more.

Ongoing Marketing
If the lead isn’t ready to move forward immediately, you can keep them “in the loop” with scheduled marketing campaigns and tactics. When lead information is added to the CRM, it’s available for use in various marketing strategies.

Email Marketing dovetails with the CRM so email articles and information that answer the most common questions leads ask when meeting with your sales teams. This type of email not only educates the lead about your services or products but also helps build trust. To be clear, this is not a sales pitch in an email format; it’s more of a conversation that provides helpful information, tips, and pointers.

Social Media Engagement can be planned and scheduled to stay connected to leads. Connect with leads on social media and invite them to your business page or group. Plan and deliver great content that keeps them engaged, such as short videos, a graphic with a gold nugget tip, answers to frequent questions, or a link to a helpful article.

Reputation Management Systems promote and protect your online reputation. When you’ve completed a sale and the client has received their services or product, follow up with them to get their feedback using the survey tool. This can be done using a pre-built workflow and an online survey or website page with an embedded Accelerator-Pro survey. Ask the client to rate your services. If the rating comes back with 4 or 5 stars, then send the client a review request that will show up on Google or Facebook. If the feedback is 3 stars or less, a sales team member should contact the client to better understand and correct the issue.

Was this article helpful to you? Let us know about your automation challenges. We’d love to help you streamline processes within your company. Contact us to schedule a virtual meeting.