The following topics are major players in growing your company’s leads and sales. It is important to develop business processes for each as they are all connected in the greater scheme to grow your company.
1. Website Traffic
2. Lead Captures
3. Lead Segmentation
4. Lead Nurturing
5. Lead Grading
6. Sales
Attract quality website traffic. Develop a business process for driving quality visitors to your company website. You can use an Organic SEO strategy such as blogging or you can drive traffic with paid search campaigns. If you choose to develop a process around blogging you will need to consider keyword research and the use of an editorial calendar. If you are interested in paid search you can set up campaigns with a service like Google Adwords. You will need to have processes in place to continuously monitor your ad campaigns in order to keep your costs down and your ROI up.
More web traffic = more opportunity for lead captures. Develop processes for optimizing your web pages for lead conversions. One way visitors convert to leads is by filling out forms. This means visitors need to be willing to share their contact information with you like their email, phone number etc. Well they may be willing to share this kind of information if they were offered something in return such as an ebook or webinar. Create content that is of value to your visitors then place that content behind a form and watch the leads flow in.
You have a bundle of leads, now you should consider lead segmentation. Having a process for segmenting leads is important, it allows you the opportunity to move leads down the funnel. Lets say you have 2 leads that behave exactly the same on your website except one “described themselves” as a marketer and the other a business owner. Lets say the marketer is your target audience, now this lead is further down the funnel than the other because you segmented them. If you place a qualifying question on your forms such as “What best describes you” the options you supply as possible answers should help you learn valuable information you did not know previously and in-turn, help you to segment your leads.
Once your leads are in segmented lists you can begin lead nurturing. Since you are segmenting your leads with a qualifying question begin to send customized messages that would appeal to that specific audience- no need to send 1 general email across the board anymore. With a lead nurturing process in place, your main goal is to help bring your leads to the conclusion that they need your product or service.
How does your sales team know when a lead is sales ready? Lead grading. You want your sales team to be successful, so give them quality leads in order for them to close their sales. Build a process for grading your leads. Try assigning points to the actions visitors take on your website and off your website. You can assign weighted points to form inquiries, content downloads and email click through rates so that when a lead starts taking actions that brings them closer to being a customer, they get more points. Everyones grading criteria is going to be different- it is going to take a conversation between marketing and sales to really nail down a process.
Sales Sales Sales! When a lead has been graded and considered ‘sales ready’ you need to have business processes in place for your sales team to be notified. All too often, qualified, sales-ready leads are not followed up with appropriately because there is no process in place. Introduce a customer relationship management system into the mix. These systems allow you to manage your contacts and store all the information you have previously collected from them. Once you have a streamlined process in place your sales team can work more efficiently and have a higher close rate.
OK. So we discussed 6 areas where business process can be developed and applied. But what is the key to making these business processes all successful?
The key to making these processes successful = repetition.
We define a business process as a collection of structured activities that is easily repeatable. You will never see continued success if you only apply a technique once.
Companies have business processes in place to aid in function, development and growth. These business processes are usually sound and reluctant to flexibility. Is this a bad thing? Not at all, only if the status quo business process is dead weight when it comes to reaching your leads and sales goals.
