Sales are the lifeline of any successful business. The health of that lifeline is a crucial cost every owner, manager, and administrator must dedicate resources to. With automation, Keap Pro customer relationship management (CRM) can keap that cost down. Think of automation software as the project manager for your sales team. While software helps your team focus on the most important tasks ahead, it also keeps track of leads who aren’t yet ready to buy. This ensures progress at every stage of the sales journey.
Set a Framework for Your Sales Pipeline
You need to have a road map to drive your sales, and the road from prospect to paying customer includes a few stops. The costs of these stops include mapping the route, helping your sales reps guide prospects from one destination to the next. This ensures no one gets lost along the way. Keap Pro cuts that cost and organizes the existing process that sales reps follow to close a deal. When the process is clearly defined, sales reps can move leads from one stage to another, ensuring consistency and providing visibility into where each lead needs to head next. While the sales process varies with every company, here’s an example of how automation can augment a sales pipeline.
New Opportunity
- A lead has been identified. When a lead is tagged as a new opportunity, the software assigns a sales rep to contact him.
Contacting
- The lead moves into this stage when a sales rep calls him. If the sales rep reaches him, the lead advances to the next stage. If the call goes to voicemail, an automated email is sent as a follow-up (see item No. 3: “Always win at phone tag”).
Engaging
- The sales rep is talking with the lead to learn about his needs and how your product or services can benefit him.
Qualified
- The lead moves into this stage when the sales rep determines that he’s qualified. In other words, that you recognize the budget and authority to make the purchasing decision. The rest of the sales process plays out from here. Including different automated actions set up for wins and losses, as well as those not ready to make a decision.
Keap Cost Down and Focus on Your Hottest Leads
Having too much of a good thing comes with unforeseen costs. Having more leads than time to contact them is a problem, a good one, of course, but one that needs a solution. Keap Pro lowers the cost and sets your priorities by ranking each lead based on his or her engagement with your marketing efforts.
Keap allows you to focus on the potential customers who are ready to buy over those who need more time. Depending on the lead scoring rules you establish in the software, one rule might mean the prospect filled out a contact form. Consistent clicking, emailing, and calling might result in a rule of higher escalation. Once the lead is officially deemed hot, the software tells you to go in for the sale. Not only does automated lead scoring eliminate the wasted time cost in your sales process. By tagging leads based on their level of interest, you can better anticipate their needs and target them with messages.
Stay Engaged with Prospects who Aren’t Ready to Buy…Yet.
You wouldn’t propose marriage on a first date, right? The same logic applies to a new prospect. In the B2B world, 73 percent of leads aren’t yet ready to become customers. This is according to a report by the research firm MarketingSherpa. You can establish trust by cultivating the relationship over time, until the prospect is ready to make the big decision. Keap Pro can cut that cost and provide a “lead nurturing” process which prevents prospects from slipping through the cracks. When tags are applied to customers who needs time, Keap Pro sends an email each month that pushes toward sale.
Overall, each month, Keap can send resources that educate the prospect about your company and address common questions they might have. Be sure to include options for increasing or decreasing the frequency of the communications. While lead nurturing affords the prospect more time, it also ensures that sales reps focus on the leads who are most prepared to buy. Therefore, on average, nurtured leads result in a 20 percent increase in sales opportunities, compared with leads that didn’t receive that attention, according to a study by the B2B marketing publication DemandGen Report.
