[E94] Sales Tech Week: Calling Form Fill Leads and Nurturing Prospects & Referrals

When someone fills out a form online, and it hits your CRM for the sales team to reach out to, we all know that the time for response is the so critical.

Instead of relying on a salesperson to put in that effort, there is technology to ensure it happens.

In this episode I also cover nurturing your prospects until they become customers.

And once they are a customer, you want to have a technology driven system for generating referrals.

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Episode 94 – Transcript

Welcome to another episode of the sales experience podcast. My name again is Jason Cutter.

This is episode 94 where in week 19 of the show and this week is all about sales technology. And if you’re not big into technology or you don’t think technology should be around in your sales process, don’t worry this week is for you to help you understand as a manager, as an owner, or even as a salesperson, where the technology for sales fits into the process. Fundamentally.

Always remember that technology should be a tool that makes everyone more effective, not a tool that gets in the way that makes everything harder.

Any kind of sales tech that you’re adding to your stack should be there to make sure that the sales people are performing better and better and producing better results and doing things that are more scalable, such that where you can add more people to your team [inaudible] get the same or better results instead of losing efficiencies.

A lot of times when you add more salespeople to a team or new salespeople, then the results are actually worse overall or definitely worse per person. And that’s not what we want. So we want to use technology to help us get to a different level, higher level, and a scalable level of results.

Now in today’s episode I want to talk about things that I’m going to put under the category of lead management and or nurturing technology. So let’s start with lead management. And obviously you have your CRM. Hopefully if you’re listening to this, you’re not on spreadsheets.

If you are, get yourself a CRM, that would be the first thing and then we can talk about that. Now, keep this in mind. I have been successful and done a lot with sales reps, with spreadsheets, especially in the beginning when testing or building out [inaudible] a new process.

Don’t feel like you can’t close sales unless you have a CRM, unless you have a fancy phone system, unless you have a dialler, unless you have all these things, what you need is a good solid sales process, a product or service that people actually want.

That’s a value and that you can sell. And you can do a lot on spreadsheets anyway, so keep that in mind. But first off, you want to make sure that you get off spreadsheets as quickly as possible. If you want a scalable business, like once you know it works and you know where you want to go, then get yourself a CRM.

Now let’s talk about what I call [inaudible] [inaudible] call. All right. What is that? And there’s a lot of companies that have [inaudible] technology for this and I’m not going to get into the different companies, the different options that are out there.

If you do want recommendations, you can hit me up, Jason@cutterconsultinggroupdotcomyoucangoontheketerconsultinggroup.com website and fill out the form or find me on LinkedIn.

What I put under the category of instacart is this, if you’re buying leads or you have a form that’s on line, so you have a web form on your website or you’re buying leads where somebody filling out a form and then those leads are being posted to you, the moment those hit your CRM, it hits your database.

That new lead is created, right? You want somebody to call on those?

I don’t have the stats, but I know there’s a lot of different ones depending on who you listened to, but the fundamental thing is the faster you can call that new lead, wow, they’re still on your website when they just filled out the form, the sooner you can call them, the better, the more likely you are to get them to answer the phone call because it’s still top of mind and beat out whoever else they are shopping with.

Because keep in mind, all right, and I don’t know if you’re like this, I know that I am. If I’m looking for something, let’s say its insurance, I’m going to fill out a form and then I’m going to go to a different website.

I’m gonna fill out that form and I’m going to fill out that form and I’m going to fill out multiple ones on different websites and then I’m going to get probably many calls and generally like most people, whoever calls me first, if they’re professional, they’re polite, they have a solution for my problem, for what I’m looking to try to fill or solve or where I want to get to.

Then that’s who I’m gonna go with. And so keep in mind that’s the same thing you want for yours. If you are buying web leads that are posted into your system or you have a website where people have filling out a form and it’s going into your CRM and you’re relying on your sales reps to take the initiative to call them when they should, which is right away, you will lose.

Most of the time sales reps may call, it may not, you don’t know. It’s not predictable. And so that’s not the way to run the business. Also, they may call it once but then won’t call it again.

Do they leave a voicemail? Do they not leave a voicemail? And so you want to put technology in place to take care of that. Right? And so you want to use a system or have one built for you, which is what I’ve done in the past where as soon as that lead posts into your system, it is instantly called on your phone system.

So you’re five, nine, your RingCentral, whatever it is. Yeah, it’s instantly called. And that call is instantly connected with one of your reps, so the rep has to do nothing. You want the rep to not make a decision, not to have any part to play in.

Whether that lead gets called you want it to be done instantly. That’s the way you win on those web leads. Even if they’re cheap. A lot of times you could buy really cheap web leads. Yeah, but the key is getting to them as fast as possible, being the first one to reach out to that person and then also putting them into a nurture campaign where they’re going to get called again.

Maybe if they have an email they filled out, they’re going to go into that kind of nurture. So that’s the next phase here I want to talk about in this episode is the nurture campaign. You want to make sure you don’t leave it up to your sales reps for how often when they’re being called, when they’re being emailed, what voicemails are being left.

You’ve got a build out what your ideal nurture process looks like to move your prospects out of the pipeline, out of the cold and into a sale, to being a client.

You’ve got a structure that, yeah, and then you want to put in technology in place to do those reach outs, whether it’s your hub spot email campaigns, it could be even Mail Chimp plugin that you use to reach out. It could be your phone system that’s gonna dial or call.

It could be something like phone burner that works well for this. And then, uh, process and technology like drips who will send SMS messages and do a chat bot interaction with them or hello AI, where it’s going to engage with them, get them back on board with them.

Now keep in mind this is not a paid product placement for any of these companies. They didn’t pay me to list [inaudible] them in here. However, I do have some relationships with some of them for helping them find new clients or get them set up. So if you do want more information, let me know.

But whoever you go with, you want to make sure that you’re nurturing those leads. Yeah. You’re moving through an automated process and the number one key, like I said, is that you’re not relying on your sales reps to do it.

When you fall in that trap of hoping or relying on your sales reps to follow up with their pipeline or nurture them appropriately, in some cases, you’re going to win some of your top reps that you’re going to have 80 20 rule. They are going to be effective. They’re going to go after it.

They’re going to call, they’re going to email, and they’re going to do everything you’d want. If it was done by a robot, they’re going to do it because they’re hungry, they’re driven, they have a goal, they know why they’re there, they know what they want to achieve and they see the value in their pipeline and follow-up.

Then you have the middle and then you have the bottom set of your sales reps and that’s where you’re going to lose and if you’re paying for leads, you’re buying leads. You need them to convert both now in the moment, and then also lifetime in the pipeline.

That’s how the company achieves a profitable cost per acquisition. So make sure you put in technology, what does that nurturing, and again, there’s simple, easy ways. Don’t be worried if you’re on spreadsheets and you’re buying form fills and you’ve got these leads and you’re not sure what to put in place.

Literally you can sign up for things like mail chimp, which can do some of it. So don’t be bogged down and worried that you’ve got to have a fancy thing. And I must have salesforce and I’ve got to have five, nine and then I’ve got to build all these technology and I’ve got to have this and that.

Like that’s not always necessary. Now that’s where you’d want to get to. There’s some scalable systems like that, but that’s not necessary to start and to build this in and to fill in those gaps and stop expecting your team to do what you think they should be doing because they never will long term and not all of them. And then lastly, the other part of the nurturing campaign that I want to talk about was referrals.

Now once a client becomes a client in your system, then what you want to do is you want to make sure that you have something in place to generate [inaudible] referrals from them.

You want to have some kind of referral advocate programs, some platform in place where instead of relying on your salespeople to reach out for referrals where your customer service reps to reach out for referrals or account managers, whoever it is, you want to make sure that there’s something in place where the [inaudible] customer can easily find your company, send referrals and where you can nurture them.

You can send them [inaudible] notifications, messages, emails, phone calls, text, whatever that is to keep top of mind with them so that they think about you, your company, your service, the experience you had, how amazing it was and how they want to tell their friends and family.

Whether you offer them compensation or not. Maybe you don’t pay her for rewards. Maybe you do, maybe you can. Maybe you can’t base on your industry no matter what. Even if you don’t pay out referral compensation, you still want to make sure you have a platform in place to stay top of mind and then it’s automated.

Don’t rely, again, this is the theme. Don’t on your sales reps to call their pipeline of closed deals to ask for referrals. They’re too busy moving onto the new leads you’ve bought for them and are have given them and they have moved on.

They’re literally focused on the here and now and they’re not worried about or thinking about [inaudible] how they can plant more seeds and get referrals. Of course, we would all love that. Every sales manager would love a team full of sales reps who care only about referrals and that is their focus on planting those seeds every time they close the deal.

But most sales team culture [inaudible] isn’t built around that and isn’t focusing on that and it’s instead here and now, what deals have you closed today? What about this week? What about this month and how do I get you more leads that you can close and be effective and focused on that. So you want to make sure you have a referral platform.

There’s several of them out there. The one that I recommend to people is called get the referral. Depending on your industry can work really well. It’s very scalable from one on up, but make sure you have something in there no matter what you do.

So don’t rely on your reps to ask for referrals, take control of the company, put that in place, and then have that running in the background, nurturing it. I hope these things have helped. I hope these areas have helped. And again, there’s simple processes you can put in place.

Yeah, there’s complicated processes you can put in place no matter what. Starts somewhere. Put something in place in any of these categories and get the pressure off of you expecting your reps to do things that they may or may not do.

Some of them might do it. Yeah, but stop relying on it or expecting them to do it. Everyone’s human, they’re going to forget. Are they going to be sick where things are going to happen or they’re just not going to want to do it?

So put the technology in place to fill in those gaps. And again, if you have any questions, one of the suggestions, reach out to me. I can also go to the cutter consulting group.com website and see a list of the links from the show as well as the full transcript. And that’s it for another episode.

Always, remember that everything in life is sales and people remember the experience you gave them.