This is Sales Insanity – Wasting New Leads

Good morning, good afternoon, good evening. Welcome to Talking Points Live with me, your host, Jason S. Bradshaw. And it's delighted that you're taking the time out of your day to join me live or to watch the replay. Today we're going to talk about sales insanity and how some businesses, many businesses, are wasting fresh new leads every single day. But first, a reminder that my next edition of my fortnightly newsletter, Talking Points with Jason, drops this coming Friday. So if you haven't already subscribed, be sure to subscribe on my website, Jason sbradshaw.com or on LinkedIn. So, like I said, thought today we'd talk about sales insanity. Specifically, how many organizations are wasting new leads? Marketing teams around the world are creating ads and content that gets you to take action. I'm sure you've seen them in your feeds on social media. You know, click this button to get a quote or click this button to learn more. And you fill out the details, usually your name and email address. And 99.9% of the time, they always insist on grabbing your phone number. And what happens after you click get the Quote, which is the not so great part, because all that work that your marketing team's doing to get this, this prospect to go from just that, a prospect to someone that's showing intent and interest in your product by giving them your. Your name, their email address, and of course, your phone number. That's great. But what happens next is the insane part, and your organization could be guilty of it as well. So what happens after you hit the Get Quote button and you've given them your details? Well, depending on the company and the time of day, you could get a phone call within minutes, sometimes even seconds. It's remarkable. Sometimes it's the next day. The really crazy bit, though, is if you don't pick up your phone, they leave a message and then just keep on trying to ring you. Now, some are really hounding you. Some will. Just as soon as you don't answer, they'll redial you. And if you don't answer, they'll redial you. Others give it a few hours. Many will continue to try to reach you by phone for days or weeks. In fact, just the other day, I had a phone call from a real estate agent that rang me three months after I put in my lead request. Now, that's a whole other form of insanity. But right now what I'm highlighting to you is that you've got sales teams out there that are ringing, prospects, people that have asked to be contacted, and just leaving a Voicemail and taking no other action than ringing again later. Just wasting your time and probably frustrating that potential new client. So here's today's learnings, and I'm looking at this problem, and that's exactly what it is. If you've got salespeople spending time trying to contact customers and they're not actually having a conversation, you're wasting time. So when I look at this problem, at this challenge, I put on a commercial customer experience hat, which is how we should always look at customer experience. It should be about delivering great transactions, great, creating great relationships with customers, but it also needs to have a commercial outcome for the company. And so this is what I suggest you should do in this situation. The lead comes in, the sales consultant picks up the phone, dials the number, and let's face it, it's probably a dialer. So picks up the phone, doesn't connect with the. With the customer or the prospect, the lead. As soon as they've left a message, two things should happen. First of all, a text message should be sent saying, hey, this was person X from person Y calling you in relation to your request for a quote. On what? On whatever. Please click this link to schedule a great time for me to contact you. Now, that's putting the power back into the customer's hands. Putting the power back into the customer's hands to allow them to schedule a convenient time to talk to you. Now, will every customer complete this? No. But for everyone that it does, it creates an efficiency loop for you and your organization and it reinforces they're interested in this product or your service. And the second thing that should happen straight away is an email be sent to the customer with information around why you just called, information about your product and where you need to get some information from them to give a quote really transparently, just ask. Sometimes our clients find it easier to get a quote via email. Please list please answer these following questions so that I can do that for you. Now, I'm not saying you should try and do everything over email, but what I am saying is you should give the customers the choice on how they engage with you. Because at the end of the day, the more leads that you get to connect with, the more quotes that you get to deliver, the greater your sales will be. Which should turn out to mean that you're having breakthrough growth in your business. Breakthrough business success. Every day I come live around this time with hints and tips on how to break through and have business success. I'm Jason S. Bradshaw. I look forward to catching you next time on talking points with Jason.