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Integrating Your Websites Leads into Your Sales Process - Part 1

Houston, Texas, December 21st, 2008 – Craig Klein owner of SalesNexus talks about web generated sales leads, buying cycles and closing sales. “Closing sales is all about the quality of the leads you acquire and how many of them you have” Stated Klein in a recent interview. This is part two of a two part press release.

In our last post, we talked about the tremendous opportunity to increase sales your company’s website represents. We also discussed how few companies are really taking advantage of leads coming from their website. Get more information about SalesNexus at: http://www.SalesNexus.com.

A referral is someone that your current client believes could be interested in your products or services. The problem here is that your client probably is not the best judge of what makes a good prospect for you. They are also not likely to really know if their friend is actually in the market right now. They are more likely to just think that "they could use" your product or service.

A web lead on the other hand, has demonstrated their interest in you’re company by their own actions prior to you’re ever talking to them. They stopped doing what they do for a living to pull up Google and search for something related to your company. Depending on what your company offers, they probably weren't just doing it for fun! Just by taking time to perform the search, they've demonstrated that they need something.

And there's the rub...  you may find that you get many web leads that really need and want your products and services but, they're more of a potential user or beneficiary than the person the company has given the authority to decide and spend the money.

This means you need to be aggressive about qualifying these leads early in the process. I've seen lots of businesses spend money on their web sites and search campaigns just to overload their sales reps with leads that can never spend a dime. The good news is that it’s easy to do. Many times, just adding an additional input box to your web form can filter out the "tire kickers"... like Title.

You'll also find that the lead's "buying cycle" can vary greatly. Some are looking for something NOW. Others are investigating options that they can add into their budget for next year.

Bottom line, you need to have methods to be sure that your reps are qualifying the leads properly up front and allocating their time toward the most qualified leads with the potential to buy in the short term.

That sounds like countless hours in sales meetings teaching all your reps the finer points of qualifying and follow up management right?

Good news! It can be extremely easy and time efficient to set up. More importantly, setting up a system to manage the qualification and follow up for incoming web leads can be like pouring rocket fuel in your sales engine.

Here's a step by step guide:

1) Get a contact management system in which ALL new leads from ALL sources can be added.
2) If there will be more than 5 or 10 a day, be sure that when a web form is completed on your site, the lead is added to the contact management system automatically. Many vendors offer this capability at affordable prices.
3) Track the search that was performed.  Again, many vendors offer this capability.  As above, if your sales rep knows the specific search phrase that was used, they are empowered to quickly and easily qualify and assist the lead.
4) Add fields to your system that allow the sales rep to enter the answers to the top few qualifying questions directly into the database. Use standardized drop downs, etc. in order to keep data consistent and data entry fast.
5) Create lead nurturing systems for the leads that don't qualify. This is key! If your sales rep has an easy way to be sure non-qualified leads are "touched" on the appropriate schedule, they're much more likely to "let go" and avoid spending too much time repeatedly chasing the same old leads.

With a system like this in place, you can be assured that you'll be able to measure the return on your investment in your web leads. You will be able to track the results by search words and phrases and their level of qualification. This information is crucial in optimizing things in the campaign itself. You'll also be able to ensure that your reps are pursuing only those "worthy" of their time. You may want them to continue to prospect by cold calling, asking for referrals and other methods. You need to know that your reps won't be overwhelmed with non-qualified web leads so that they can continue these productive activities. Of course, a system like this can help you measure and optimize these other prospecting efforts too.

• The bottom line is that you cannot manage what you can't measure. One of the most amazing things about advertising on the Internet is how measurable the whole process is. Making sure to maintain the same level of measurability in the sales process allows you to compare all advertising and prospecting investments objectively. This lets you tune the engine to run at peak performance on the fuels you're feeding it.

Visit our blog for our two part article “Integrating Web Leads into Your Sales Process” for a clear description of the opportunity and challenges presented by selling to web leads and in depth discussion of best practices in gearing your sales process to create web lead selling success! Get more information about SalesNexus at: http://www.SalesNexus.com.

Read Part 2 of this article here.

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