Our job is to help mostly small businesses (small teams in big-ish businesses) create clients by churning the online ocean into something they can take action on. Small business lead generation and conversion is what we do. People (us included) may not always want to blog. But we want customers. That’s why we do this stuff. Get it? Good.
So I’m working on my OWN lead followup, you know from the people I meet online that express some interest in working with me. These are people that are chasing me based on the waves I’ve made. Not people I’m desperately chasing, not strangers. The folks that need to be convinced should go to a webinar or something for that to happen.
We will mark ‘em “A” leads: A leads return calls and have an expressed need.
If they aren’t going to buy today, they have a logical reason (need a closing to happen, waiting on check to clear, hoping to use my bonus money to buy). They’ve agreed that the will be working with us but haven’t closed just yet. In our business they should be closing in a week. In the real estate business, it might be 30 days, and in other businesses they are sales cycle dependent.
“B” leads are folks that might work with us. (You). They say everything looks good, but they need some condition to occur to make this happen. This might be a spouse approval, etc. They return calls, they aren’t strangers, but there is some reason including getting quotes from competitors that keeps them from moving.
We are moving towards helping them, and if they need help, we want it to be from us because we are the very best helpers ever. We don’t want to be responsible for them getting shitty service from some opportunistic internet marketer. We deliver the goods, period.
Goal: convert into a customer within 72 hours. This helps them by protecting them from the social media morons of the world.
So, here are the assumptions:
They inquired.
We don’t know them all that well, yet. (different from a past client inquiry)
They have a need in our wheelhouse.
Folks we know well get a different treatment–we let them pace a little more, but we do call twice.
Max calls for a hot lead = 4.
Goal: Contact w/action plan in 24 hours.
First day:
- Call 2x with no voice mail
- Call 1x and leave voice mail 1.
- Call 1x the next day to leave vm2. VM2 leaves door open.
With no response, relegate them to “b” lead and banish to the autoresponders. Goal: 10 “A” leads at all times, and generate “A” leads so you don’t have to chase people.
Voice mail 1: “Hi, it’s Chris from Flat Rate, got your inquiry, glad you called and I wanted to see what you needed help doing…as always, you can reach me at 614-432-8758. All the best…”
Voice Mail 2: “Hey it’s __________ with __________. Sorry we couldn’t connect, hope we can soon. In any case, we’re doing a FREE webinar on $next_webinar_date.Call me at 614-432-8758 if I can help with anything, I’ll leave the light on for you (or other phrase).
Then they are banished to Heap CRM and given follow up sequence [2] $product_inquiry.
Our product inquiry process has an 8×8 plan via email, and then it’s a recurring event: call once a quarter. Once we establish a better client base, we’ll boot these out of the “call” channel, but they stay for now. They are moderately effective to sell to/work with/use.
They’ll get booted when we’re managing 300 clients. Right now we’re at 55 clients and can use 245 more.
