Most organizations are currently impacted due to quarantines, shutdowns and work from home rules. All this has already caused an immense loss in revenues. The uncertainty about when normalcy would resort is getting people a little restless now – but don’t give up as there’s always a silver lining on the horizon. Rather, use this downtime as an opportunity to do activities that you otherwise don’t get time for.
If you’re in the sales or marketing function, one of the most important tasks that always gets put on the back burner is organizing your leads in the CRM. It’s even more likely at a time like this that you’ll lose track of your leads and contacts.
This downtime is ideal to organize your leads so that you can go back to forgotten or left-open opportunities, especially when the inflow of leads can be limited. And also to have your leads scored and organized for when normalcy resumes – you will know exactly who to reach out to.
Here are a few tips.
Capture Your Business Cards Leads
There is likely to be a stack of business cards leads from the meetings, events and shows that your teams have attended in the recent past. This is a great time to tap all those potential opportunities and get all the contact details from business cards leads into a centralized CRM.
This can be a tedious task if you do it manually. But instead of manually entering the data into a spreadsheet or a CRM, use a business card scanner app like ScanBizCards. This app will scan the contact information on the cards and let you export scanned cards to a CSV file or directly export to various CRMs or email marketing systems.
Add Tags to Contacts
When your sales team meets prospects, not only are business cards exchanged but meaningful conversations are also held. During this time, the team must have taken down notes about the prospective leads. Use this downtime to add these notes to the contact database that you have created. The business card app ScanBizCards will help you to do this work quickly and easily. A lot of interesting analysis can be done from such notes. For example, you can find out:
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- Which product features are being most appreciated
- Which media source is working for your brand promotion the most
- Which is the most common issue that customers are talking about
- Create ‘client folders’ or tag existing customers. This will help you when the renewal time comes
- Nudge “stale” opportunities. You can do this by reviewing when the last meeting was held and what was the outcome of it. If you have been following up with them for a long time but have not made any progress, these should get tagged. There is no need to give up on these leads without a final try. With more time on your side now, you can split your BDR teams into groups. While one takes care of the existing customers, the other group can be assigned the job of cold calling the ‘dormant’ group and try to nudge them.
You can use this downtime to use this information to work on your future marketing strategy.
Email Signature Capture
Just because meeting people is now no longer happening, it does not mean that you cannot generate new leads. Emails can be used to get new leads. You can use the ScanBizCards app for this. It has an Email Signature Capture feature which will help you to find hidden contacts from your email exchanges and add them to the database. Currently, the app supports popular email providers e.g., Microsoft, Exchange, and Google. Once your account is connected the app will scan any available emails from the past 30 days, and also new ones that you receive, to look for available contacts in email signatures.
Organize your CRM
Having tons of leads will not give you tons of conversions. Often low quality leads clog the sales funnel and adversely affect the sales cycle. So it is important that you organize your CRM. This can be done in the following ways:
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- You might find that CRM has fields that have become redundant. Remove all fields that you don’t need and make it clutter-free
- Fix the page layout so that you can see the critical information on one page and minimal page navigation is required
- Schedule training sessions so that all who are using the CRM know how to optimally use the software
- Remove duplicate data, or data that is incorrect due to errors in typing or invalid (changed phone numbers)
Get in Touch With Prospects
While you are organizing your leads, use this time to also get in touch with the ones who are on the list but you have never had the chance to follow-up with – call them! While you speak with them, find out from where they got to know about you as this will help you to determine what form of advertising is working for you, which form of events trigger the best leads for you, which geography your audience mostly live in, and others. Once you have all this content in place, it will help you to nurture these new prospects better and move them slowly towards a conversion.
Communicate with the Sales Team
It is not just about organizing your leads, but also about communicating with the sales team how to work efficiently. Sometimes the team does not follow up with a contact and things fall through the cracks. This can happen because:
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- The sales reps are already following up with a long list and some top of the funnel leads are forgotten or
- The contact information is not made available in a timely manner, by the time it’s found, the prospect is no longer interested
The team needs to be told how important it is to follow-up with a new contact without any delay and to put forth a process by which this would get streamlined.
Identify New Partnership Opportunities
When you organize your leads, it is possible that you might find new business opportunities through ways other than pure sales. You can find potential businesses that you can partner with. For example, if you have a marketing system, such as a CRM or mobile app, you can partner with marketing agencies, or other APIs and software vendors to deliver integrated solutions to clients. When you do this, you share each other’s customers, thereby helping to generate new prospects that will help your business to grow.
Final Thoughts
Simply having a huge contact database is not enough. The leads need to be categorized so that the sales team will know who to follow up with on priority, where each contact is in the sales funnel, and also not miss out on any prospect. As the current pandemic still looms over our heads, you should use these tips and the time you have to organize your leads. It can definitely win you new customers, and also help you to make better decisions when it comes to devising a future strategy to grow your business.