What You Need for Effective Inbound Lead Follow-Up
Effective inbound lead follow-up depends on your sales team’s ability to analyze the lead source and understand where the prospect is in their buy cycle. When you pair these two data points, your sales team becomes more effective at inbound lead follow-up and converts prospects to clients.Train Your Sales Team: Sales Methods to Get to Yes! Faster
Start by segmenting your list by the lead source
The lead source is easy to obtain; your marketing team can tell you if a prospect came from:- Gated assets or forms on your website
- Phone calls
- Emails
Lead source indicates how qualified a prospect is
Effective salespeople use it to pinpoint where prospects are in their buy cycle. If you aren’t familiar with the buy cycle, think of it as a sales funnel for prospects.The sales funnel and the client buy cycle
While you’re moving through the sales funnel, a prospect also moves through their buy cycle. In it, prospects go from figuring out they have a problem to taking action and making a buying decision. The 5 steps of the client buy cycle are:- Unawareness
- Awareness
- Interest
- Desire
- Action
Your Guide to Pairing the Buy Cycle With Lead Sources
How you reach out to a prospect will depend on their mindset (where they are in the buy cycle). Their perspective will change as they move through the funnel, which is why one message – no matter how well-crafted it is – can’t convert every lead. To get more clients, your salespeople need to tweak what they say to fit the prospect’s state of mind.Downloading assets points to awareness
People who download gated assets from your site – like ebooks and checklists – demonstrate they:- Know they have a problem
- Realize you can help
But they may not be ready to talk to you
The topic and depth of your gated assets help define where a prospect is in their buy cycle. Overviews and content with less depth point to problems early in the buy cycle. Whatever problem they’re experiencing hasn’t become a priority. Prospects are using your information to do research. It’ll likely be hard for your salespeople to engage contacts when they’re in this phase. Solution-focused, more explicit content points to later in the buy cycle. These prospects are looking for potential solutions to their problems to determine the best way to address them. Your salespeople will find it easier to engage these contacts if they are persistent, but may encounter stiff competition.Featured Guide: The Bloodhound Follow-up Strategy
Stay top of mind
As your prospects work their way through their buyer’s journey, don’t let them forget you. Using the information they provided to access your resource, you can:- Add them to marketing campaigns
- Put them into sales sequences