Many of the online advertising experts, Search Engine Optimization, Adwords Campaigns, etc., that I know will tell you this but, unfortunately, I don’t think most small businesses that are experimenting with generating leads via their web site and driving traffic to their site via search engines are reading the same things I am. I recently read Brian Carroll‘s “Lead Generation for the Complex Sale” and he makes it crystal clear.
Certainly my competitors aren’t! In my webinar this Wednesday, we hold one each Wednesday at 2pm EST, one of the attendees mentioned that our response to her request for information via our website was “super fast”. That was a nice comment to hear in a webinar like that!
She also mentioned that she had filled out web forms requesting information or free trials from a few of my competitors on the same day. She still hasn’t heard from any of them – a WEEK later.
If you have leads coming in via your web site, you HAVE to set up a process that allows your sales team to know about that lead instantly and contact that lead immediately! If you don’t, your odds of selling something to that lead go down tremendously.
You may say, “What I sell isn’t bought on impulse, its a high ticket item” or “I don’t want to waste my sales people’s valuable time on tire kickers that visit my web site” or “I like to take a look at the leads and hand the out to the sales people individually as an incentive or based on which accounts they manage” etc.
Well, I can tell you from first hand experience that SalesNexus wins business every day because we’re the first to respond. When our prospects request a demo or free trial from us, they almost always do the same thing on a competitor’s site.
We call immediately. We can because we use our own technology that pops the lead into our database and alerts the sales rep instantly. Its easy for the sales rep and the prospect is always impressed with our promptness. We use this to take control of the research process or buying process the prospect is in and to make the point that SalesNexus is different from its competitors in the attentiveness we pay our customers.
If you can’t see a way to do this for your “web leads”, then you shouldn’t be spending money on them.
BTW, the worst offending competitor is Salesforce.com. They typically take a week or so to call the lead. You may think I’m crazy divulging this competitive advantage. The fact is that Salesforce.com won’t care. They’re not that interested in the types of small and medium sized businesses we are. If you only have 20 sales reps, you aren’t big enough to get top notch sales response from Salesforce.com.
I’m not bragging here but, I highly recommend that you put it to the test! Request a SalesNexus Free Trial and a Salesforce.com Free Trial. Watch what happens next. If you’re willing to try this, let me know your thoughts afterwards.