Consolidate Your Leads and Never Miss a Sales Opportunity

When it comes to new business, one problem that many businesses face is the management of leads. In respect to traditional and digital marketing, leads can come from a handful of channels: from business cards to website forms. When receiving and sorting new leads, having multiple connection points to your potential customers can become a headache to maintain – leading to missed opportunities as some leads can fall between the cracks.

In order to mitigate the loss of potential leads, one essential method is to consolidate your lead generation. However, it’s easier said than done; many CRM platforms don’t support all methods of communication – both offline and online – making it tricky to ensure 100% of your leads end up in one place for sorting and qualifying.

First, let’s explore the most common ways your customers may be trying to reach you.

Phone Calls

Selling used to be as simple as picking up the phone, and it still is. Your sales team most likely deals with inbound and outbound phone calls on a daily basis, making it one of the most important channels of communicating with your customers. The personal touch of a phone call can hardly be replaced by an email. 

However, the difficulty of phone calls begins with tracking conversations. Your salespeople may not be documenting their chats with potential customers, and if they do, many of them keep their notes to themselves. It’s important to ensure all phone conversations are logged, with notes made immediately after the call and available for the rest of the sales team (and their managers) to view. Sharing call details can open the door for improving sales communication and, if they talk to another sales rep, makes the potential customer feel they’re even more important.

Emails

Emails have made communicating with customers even easier. Email threads with customers are a common place in any sales environment, but it can be hard to track the discussion and at times, important details can be lost in a flurry of emails. 

By choosing a CRM that allows email importing, you’ll never lose the details. Loading your emails into one location allows all correspondence with your potential customer to be easily accessible by yourself or your sales team.

Website Forms

It’s standard practice to have a contact page with a web form embedded into it. This allows an easier way for your potential customers to connect with you. However, most web forms have limited functionalities that may be important to your business, such as custom fields to ask business-specific questions. Even worse, completed web forms may only notify you via email, which then need to be relayed to your team. The solution? Integrating custom web forms into your CRM.

To ensure your contact form emails are never lost, and that you’re asking the right qualifying questions on your web form, it’s important to source out a web form that gives you better customization options and sends the details to your customer database. 

Business Cards from Trade Shows & Events

It can be hard to remember every conversation you’ve had with everyone – especially at an event where you’re speaking with dozens of people. You’ve collected a stack of business cards, and have loosely scribbled down point form notes on them. So, what’s next?

By putting all of your sales activity into a central location, you’re able to keep notes of in-person conversations that you’ll be able to share with others. It’s always best to take notes immediately after a conversation too – don’t let your memory prevent you from losing a sales opportunity!

While there may be more ways your business meets new customers, you’re certainly not limited to the above when it comes to consolidating your leads. By creating a consistent, systematic process that facilitates the nurturing of leads – no matter the source – you’ll increase your sales opportunities and move your deals forward. 

Storing and sharing notes after sales correspondences allow your salespeople to remember every detail about the customer, spark collaboration between your sales team by improving the sales opportunity, and attach anything associated to the deal: emails, pictures, documents, and other attachments.