A sales team is perhaps the most forefront entity of your business that is out in the real world competing with other businesses on your behalf.
You can have all the sophisticated telemetry software, analytics, marketing ploys and advertising campaigns in the world, you still need a team of highly motivated sellers. A sales team is perhaps the most forefront entity of your business that is out in the real world competing with other businesses on your behalf. They’re down there in the trenches, trying to fight for as many noticing eyes and ears as possible. But as we all know customers come and go, it’s very difficult to turn a potential customer into a loyal customer. Consumers have so many options that it seems like your business only has a fraction of their time to grab their attention. But just grabbing their attention isn’t enough, you have to give them your entire company’s ethos in terms of what you want to achieve and how you can affect their lives for the better. It feels like you’ve got a limited amount of time to put your best foot forward. But lead capturing is the practice of getting to know your customers in your own time instead.
Creating a magnet
How could you get customers to give you their information willingly, despite only having just met you online? When shoppers are browsing around on the internet, their impulse buying nature is not at the forefront of their mind. It’s obviously lying dormant and they have free time to inspect and compare products all they want. This is where your magnet comes in to make them stop clicking from webpage to webpage, and pay attention to your business. A popular item could be on sale, a free gift card to another store, a limited time only product or service could be advertised to people searching for keywords in search engines. When they click on the ad, they are transported to your website. Put in your banner could be the deal they just saw and clicked on. If they choose to click the action button such as ‘buy’, ‘claim’ or ‘purchase’ you instantly have them fill in a form along with their product. Keep it simple as it’s the first time they are interacting with you, you don’t want to scare them off by presenting to them a long convoluted form. Their email address, forename, and surname are all you need from them at this point.
Nurturing dormant leads
Now that you have captured their lead which is their basic contact information, you can now target them with general updates and newsletters. Many businesses opt to send their customer email list weekly newsletters or promotional material. Something simple as a related product to the one they just bought or were originally interested in your business for. However, as we all know the vast majority don’t respond to the direct messages every week and most just let them sit dormant; becoming dormant leads. Your sales team should be writing them personalized messages with exciting attention-grabbing titles to the emails. If you read Jozef Opdeweegh’s article, he writes about having a sales playbook. The playbook is “It is a prescriptive set of processes and procedures that guide the salesperson in his or her daily task of convincing new customers and retaining existing ones, all while preserving or enhancing the contribution margin of the sale.“ If each member of your sales team has their own personal playbook, and they know what kind of leads they’re responsible for, their persuasion techniques keep getting better and so do their personalized email updates.
A sales team should never admit defeat to a dormant lead. Their whole tasks should be to turn that dormant lead into an active lead by creative writing and targeted products for the customer’s needs.
