Generating leads and meeting new prospects through marketing and sales effort is really only half the battle. The more challenging part comes as you begin building up the trust and relationship necessary to turn a lead into a customer. Getting leads is great, but if you don’t have a plan to cultivate them into ACTUAL paying customers, than why even bother?
Prospect cultivation starts with creating an in-depth plan for following up with every lead. This follow-up typically consists of emails, phone calls, and snail mail campaigns delivered on a time line in a strategic fashion.
First you identify the different types of leads/customers to follow up with. For example, a mortgage broker would have several types of customers – past clients who may refinance, leads looking to purchase a new home, leads looking to purchase their FIRST home and maybe even leads looking to build their own home.
Once you have categorized your leads and customers, you can build a custom follow-up campaign for each category, filled with valuable and interesting information on the topics those leads might be most interested in. For example, every time you get a new lead in you probably want to send a card or email introducing yourself and thanking them for their inquiry into your service. Then you follow up on a regular basis with useful information, tangible gifts/trinkets, etc via the channels of email, phone and snail mail.
Once your strategic follow up plan is mapped out, we can create customized CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software to organize and automate these campaigns with your sales staff with systems included for you and your managers to keep your team accountable.
After the software is created we will help to implement it into your current systems and train you and your team how to utilize the product to it’s fullest potential. We can also provide sales motivation and training that will help your staff to understand the Internet consumer and the difference between dealing with them versus leads generated through more traditional marketing.
If you’d like more information on prospect cultivation and the software available to automate follow up, please give us a call at 866-312-3188 or fill out the form the right.