60% of U.S. small business employers are understaffed according to a 2022 poll, so it follows that businesses are adapting by learning to get more work done with fewer team members.
You need the attention of your team focused on generating sales for your business. To do so, your team should prioritize the leads that are closest to becoming your customer, which will translate into immediate success for your business while remaining leads are nurtured toward the finish line.
This article will help your business prioritize leads with 4 simple tips:
- Set up smart processes for incoming leads
- Prioritize hot leads
- Focus on your high-value services
- Provide an out-of-this-world customer experience
Read on to learn more about how these tips will help your business convert more leads more often.
Tip 1: Set up smart processes for incoming leads
Calls are constantly coming into your business, and your team is working to close incoming leads while keeping your customers satisfied. Despite your team’s efforts to stay organized, every business gets to a point when there are too many calls and texts to track every detail.
That’s why in order to properly prioritize leads and close more business — and manage the customers you already have — you need to set up smart processes for incoming leads that enable your team to have smarter conversations. This is possible with a business communications solution like Lead Center from CallRail.
Lead Center lets you take, make, and manage all your inbound and outbound calls, texts, and chats from the team inbox, without ever leaving the platform. That means no more calls or texts from multiple apps or devices — keeping your team focused in one central communications hub. Pair Lead Center with Call Tracking and your team knows which campaigns brought leads in before they even pick up the phone.
Lead Center then centralizes all your team’s conversations into the unified inbox with a real-time view of the customer journey. With these tools your team knows which actions leads and customers have taken every step of the way, so they can provide insights and recommendations driven by data and context. Your business will never miss an opportunity to drive more revenue or improve the customer experience.
Tip 2: Prioritize hot leads
Some leads are easier to close than others and yield higher-value sales: You need your team to focus on closing hot leads first, creating quick and easy wins for your business.
To do this, you need to distinguish hot leads — or the ones that are closest to becoming your customer — from warm and cold leads. In turn, your team will be able to close hot leads with minimal effort, and set up marketing activities that convince warm and cold leads your business is the best choice.
Differentiating between hot, warm and cold leads
Hot leads
Hot leads need your product or service, are interested in your business, and will convert in the immediate future — unless you give them a reason not to.
It’s easiest to convert these leads to customers, but that doesn’t mean your business can be complacent. Make sure your team responds to inquiries as quickly as possible. Since responding to leads within 5 minutes increases conversion rates by up to 100x, Lead Center ensures you always either answer the first time or respond immediately using smart tactics that ensure incoming leads don’t move on to your competition.
Lead Center feature Round Robin ensures your next available agent always answers the call. If for whatever reason no team members are available, Quick Texts are pre-written follow-up text messages, or canned responses, your team can send to leads. A Quick Text might prompt callers to schedule a follow-up call, and ask the reason they’re calling. These are just two of many features in Lead Center that ensure hot leads are handled swiftly and all calls to your business are accounted for.
Remember that hot leads are ready to close when they reach out to your business, so as long as your business is equipped to answer every communication in a timely and professional manner, closing these leads should be a light lift for your team.
Warm leads
Opposed to ready-to-close hot leads, warm leads have shown some interest in your business, are on the market for the solution you offer, but still need convincing that your business is the best option. One agency found that search-driven warm leads have a 14.6% close rate, showing they can indeed be closed — but they’re not ready just yet.
With Call Tracking and Lead Center, you’ll be able to nurture warm leads by leveraging the real-time view of the customer journey — known as the customer interaction timeline — to provide tailored content that speaks to their challenges. Your team can add tags and notes to each conversation in real time while thoughts about the call are fresh in their minds, and work together to close warm leads with both a little strategy and patience.
As warm leads reach your business and move through the pipeline, your team is able to use insights from the interaction timeline to provide content that resolves leads’ hesitation to move forward. Case studies that show how you’ve helped customers with similar challenges in the past can be effective, as well as sales brochures that help warm leads make the decision that your company is the best for their needs.
Cold leads
Cold leads have shown little interest in your business. They boast a measly 1.7% close rate, meaning it’s an uphill battle trying to win them over. However, that doesn’t mean you should ignore them. After all, just because they aren’t ready to buy right away doesn’t mean they never will.
Since cold leads need to be warmed up, your team will get great use out of the unified team inbox in Lead Center. Tags and notes help keep all team members up to speed throughout the entire customer journey, so no matter how long cold leads take to warm up, your team always has visibility. If leads develop a rapport with one of your team members during the nurture process, you can automatically route their calls and texts to that person every time.
To make an impression on cold leads over time, keep in touch by sharing relevant content on a regular basis, in an email newsletter for example, so your business stays top of mind. When the time comes that they’re ready to purchase the product or service you offer, they’ll remember the professionalism with which you always handled their communications and become your customer.
Tip 3: Focus on your high-value services
Prioritizing leads doesn’t just mean choosing which leads to focus on — it also means choosing which products and services to promote. To do that, you need to identify your high-value versus low-value services.
Refer to the 80/20 rule, which relates that 20% of your products or services will generate 80% of your revenue. Focus your attention on these high-value services first. High-value products and services are costly because they’re worth a lot to the consumers that are willing to pay for them. Identify those consumers, empathize with their challenges, and close them quickly.
With call transcriptions, you can set up automatic processes to trigger when customers mention your high-value services. For example, a home services company can automatically prioritize all callers that mention words and phrases like “emergency” and “roof repair”, as well as ones that inquire about availability.
Or like the custom t-shirt printing business Toronto Tees asks, “How many custom t-shirts would you like to print?” They then connect the leads that answer “bulk order” to their best agents for prompt assistance. These low-touch tactics best utilize the attention of your busy team — so they can stay focused where their effort is most valuable to your business.
Don’t neglect your low-value products and services or coldest leads altogether, but again, use Lead Center’s Quick Texts to help your team prioritize. For example, real estate agents can send a Quick Text in the Lead Center app asking “What property are you interested in?” Based on the response, team members can categorize the lead and follow up based on urgency.
Tip 4: Give an out-of-this-world customer experience
While processes that convert as many customers as possible as quickly as possible are crucial, this won’t happen without a seamless customer experience (CX). Ensure your customers enjoy working with your company from start to finish by making them feel heard and valued.
For starters, don’t frustrate customers by making them repeat the same information to multiple customer service agents. Automatically route repeat callers to the same representative they spoke to last time. Rather than bouncing around from one rep to the next, leads and reps can develop working relationships, pick up where they left off, and enjoy a smooth CX.
What if the rep they spoke to last time is unavailable? No problem. In Lead Center, agents add notes and tags to each call, bringing visibility of the caller’s context to the team. Customer service agents can reference what a lead has mentioned in a previous conversation, even if they’ve never spoken before. This shows your reps are paying attention, and makes customers feel heard and valued.
When making outbound calls in Lead Center, your reps can use the same call tracking phone number that prospects initially dialed to get in touch. 87% of consumers ignore calls from businesses with unknown numbers. By using the same number, you’ll keep things consistent, increase your anwer rates, and maintain the real-time customer interaction timeline on those and all communications.
Help your team accomplish more when they can prioritize leads
If your small business is doing more work than ever with fewer team members, you’re not alone. To maintain business operations and continue closing leads, businesses need to adapt by using smart processes that ensure no lead or customer is overlooked and every conversation is accounted for.
Empower your team with tools like Lead Center and Call Tracking so they can prioritize the leads that will result in high-value sales for your business. Top it off by ensuring an out-of-this-world customer experience from start to finish, and you set your business up for success at every touchpoint.
Register for a 14-day free trial of Lead Center today to see the difference in your team when they’re able to prioritize your business’ leads effectively.
