The 3 Laws of Turning Leads into Sales

Leads are a great way to attract a new business and expand on the market. However, turning leads into sales might be a bit of a problem for some companies. It might be timing or the quality of the leads, but some companies just can’t respond to leads fast enough.

The results from a recent surveys show that the average time for response to a lead is around 31 hours, which is not exactly enough when, especially for online leads, where the response time is vital. You need to act on your leads as if they were online, inbound call or face-to-face leads – you need to act on them fast.

So, let’s take a look on some rules, which will help you convert your leads to sales faster:

1. Be fast – we just can’t stress this enough, so we will give you an example – imagine you have a lemonade stand and a customer approaches. He is tired, dehydrated and really needs a glass of fresh, cold lemonade. He asks you how much for a glass, and you reply “Thank you for your enquiry. We will contact you in 24 hours”. What do you think he’ll do? Let us tell you what he won’t do – sit there and wait 24 hours for you to contact him. Especially when there is another lemonade stand across the street, that seems to work.
   So, think of your leads as a customer standing at your lemonade stand, thirsty for a glass of your drink. If you make him wait, you’ll lose him.
2. Optimize for speed – your CRM might be able to feed leads to your agents in real time, but can your agents reply to leads in real time? Because, as we’ve mentioned, not all leads are equal and some should be answered faster than the others. For example, online leads should be answered quickly, inbound calls also, while outbound calls and emails can be given some time before taken care of. Sounds easy enough, you know the timeframes, all you have to do is stay in them. But this is actually the tough part. If an agent is responsible for all types of leads, things can get messy. Imagine an agent making calls to prospect, then he receives 2-3 emails with enquiries, which he immediately starts to read and replies. Then, an online lead appears and the agent must get on the live-chat and take care of the lead. But because he received too much information from different sources, he can make a mistake or some leads might need more time to be dealt with.
   What you need to do is create teams that take care for particular type of lead – a team for the online leads and live chats, an employee or two for the email leads and a team for your inbound and outbound calls. If you think these are too much team to handle, you can always outsource your lead generation to a professional telemarketing company, that can strengthen your company with some needed experience and proven methods;
3. Respond first, be accurate second – studies show that it is better to have any agent respond to the lead, than waiting for the right agent to respond to the lead, because then it might be too late.
   The thing is, the rep that responds first shouldn’t necessarily be the one to make the sale and close the deal. All you need to do is respond in the timeframe, get some basic information about the prospect. When this is done, the prospect can be transferred to the right agent for an additional follow up call.

There you go, our basic rules for acting quick on a lead and turning it into sales much quicker and successful than before. All you need to do is evaluate your CRM, your customer service processes and make a more effective customer service department.
And if you think these are too much of a work for your company, you can always contact us and we will handle thing professionally and with a lower cost.