A lot of sales people, and company owners, think that every lead should be followed-up. That’s ok if the leads are a good fit, but, chasing every lead can waste time and make your sales team inefficient. On that topic, lets talk about when you should NOT follow-up with a lead, which is part of our series on Business Growth...
It’s an odd assertion to make, but one that is sound in logic. I deal with many contacts in CRMs that could be great leads for our partners, but I always ask myself these questions first before I do anything else:
- How did they enter the CRM?
- Who are they?
- What company do they work for?
- What is their job title?
If I don’t initially have or can’t obtain this basic information, then these contacts stay in our CRMs until I can enrich them fully. I don’t know at this point whether they are our partner’s ideal buyer. I can’t target them with the appropriate content and know where they are in their buying journey until I know these fundamental details.
It can be frustrating and tempting to just send them any old content, but resist.
So what do I do with these sorts of contacts?
Three words - enrich, enrich, enrich. I already know through the HubSpot CRM what source they have come into the CRM from, what pages and content they have been looking at on the website, when they looked at it and how many times they have looked at it again.
Often these ‘unknowns’ will re-engage via other channels - they might subscribe to a monthly newsletter, submit a meeting request or open a live chat.
The most important thing to remember is that if they are really engaged with the company and product, they will want to give you their details and start interacting with you.
And when they are fully enriched through repeated contact point, you can select the right content to send them at the right time over the right period.
What if I approach them anyway, a lead’s a lead, surely?
There is nothing to stop you from perhaps asking to add them to a mailing list, or asking them why they have initially engaged. But be wary.
This is just a guess on your behalf that they ‘might’ be the right buyer. They also may not be. It is a gamble. Wouldn’t you rather be armed with absolute facts about that person before going on a fishing expedition?
It can be an amateur approach to reach out to a contact before you have fully enriched them. It can seem like you haven’t been bothered to research them or their potential issues and goals. At best, they may sign up to your blog, but at worst, they can mark you as spam and report your domain to the ISP.
Not a great start to developing any potential buyer / seller relationship.
So why is The Tree Group different?
- We work with our partners to identify your ideal buyer.
- We only target ideal buyers.
- We only approach enriched potential buyers.
- We use our market knowledge to target contacts we already know so we don’t have to start from scratch.
To learn more about sales process, start with our article on Sales enablement for Automotive companies.
You can find previous posts in our series on business growth on our blog, at iTunes and Soundcloud, or on YouTube.
