8 best practices for pursuing sales leads to acquire more customers

As you may already be aware, how you follow up with leads is just as important as when you do. The timing of your communication, their needs and pain areas, and their position in your funnel must all be considered. Here are some best practices to help you follow up with sales leads and prospects in an efficient manner so you can close more deals.

 1. Segment your lead source.

Several levels of messaging will be necessary for each sort of lead. The lead might be hot and ready to close depending on how you got it, or it might require a little warming up. For instance, a lead who contacts you through an email opt-in campaign and one who uses your website’s “contact me” form are at distinct stages of the sales funnel and should be treated differently.
Make at least three groups out of the leads: hot, warm, and cold. It might sound a little remedial, but believe us when we say that you’ll want to pay attention to the leads’ temperatures so that you don’t treat them uniformly. There are software tools that will differentiate your leads based on the point values you assign to different consumer behaviors if you’re interested in doing a more thorough lead-scoring endeavor. Leads should be moved from one category to another as you get to know them better and bring them closer to becoming paying customers.

 2. Get back to people quickly.

Plan to respond to leads within 12 to 24 hours with a thank you email, a welcome call, or both. To show how much consideration and care you provide to each customer, offer to respond to any inquiries they may have.

 3. Personalized Communication

It’s a good idea to personalize your correspondence by incorporating the recipient’s name in your emails, delivering them information based on the sites they’ve visited on your website, or individually answering an online inquiry rather than pushing manufactured responses.

 4. Nurture leads to useful material.

You should constantly concentrate on adding value when communicating with your audience, regardless of where they are in the sales funnel or how you choose to communicate with them. There are many excellent possibilities, including blog entries, infographics, beneficial stats, success stories, and downloadable manuals. Focus on nurturing or “warming” your leads because they won’t convert to consumers after only one conversation. Instead of attempting to persuade them to take an action like becoming a customer, concentrate on taking minor steps like downloading that guide or browsing that blog article.

 5. Several communication channels should be used.

You genuinely have no notion at this time what the preferred method of communication for leads is. Connect with potential customers by using social media, email, regular mail, and phone calls.
We don’t want to directly contact you through every available channel! Just make sure you’re accessible regardless of the preferred platform used by your lead. As a result, reply to social media messages swiftly, check your inbox, and promptly answer and return phone calls.
These are a handful of the communication techniques you could use:

•  Email: Emails allow the lead to read and answer at their own convenience and are a little less intrusive than phone calls. The likelihood of your email getting lost in the shuffle is significant, though, considering the volume of emails we receive daily, so it’s crucial to follow up more than once. Use captivating and pertinent subject lines, and provide helpful content rather than merely pushing your services, in your follow-up emails.
•  Phone: Phone calls are a fantastic opportunity to demonstrate your expertise to prospects and show them that you genuinely care about their needs. You lack the phone equivalent of an email subject line, though, to draw your prospect in. On the contrary, a foreign number is now visible on their phone. When using the phone call strategy, it’s crucial to perfect your voicemail message in order to provide your prospect with a cause to contact you back. Calls must be made more than once, much like emails.
•  Text message: Sending text messages to leads you’ve already spoken to may be preferable. Pay attention to what you discuss with them and tailor your follow-up SMS to meet those demands.

 6. Establish a schedule for follow-up.

Keep in mind that before a conversion occurs, there are normally 7–10 touches. You can maintain consistency in your communications and avoid allowing the leads you worked so hard to get slip through the cracks by planning out your follow-ups in advance. Your contact schedule should be designed to keep you at the top of your leads’ minds without becoming intrusive.
Your timetable, for instance, might be as follows:
 Once every week for emails
 One monthly phone call
 Once every three months, face to face
If you say anything more, you run the risk of being ignored.

 7. Observe communications.

A CRM (contact/customer relationship management) system puts you well ahead of the competition. CRMs give you the ability to document all customer outreach and the outcomes of those communications. Excel may be used for that if you don’t have a CRM, so don’t worry! Simply make a spreadsheet with your prospects’ contact details and notes about the occasions and strategies utilized to nurture those leads.

 8. Learn when to give up in hopeless situations.

A crucial step that should be completed as soon as feasible is qualifying your leads. Be strategic about what you’re pursuing rather than acting rashly and giving up on opportunities that may require some effort to close. Three qualified groups to consider:

 Are they financially capable of making a purchase?
 Are they driven?
 Do they have the final say?
Save their information if you find out later that they are not now qualified. Place them in a file marked “to be followed up with later” and develop a campaign to target those leads you’ve put on hold later, perhaps after their circumstances have changed.
Order to stay in front of your clients without offending them, or becoming omnipresent, as it were, is the goal of lead prospecting. Instead of trying to persuade them to buy, your objective should be to be available when they are prepared to do so. This level of dependability is positive for your brand and gives leads a sense of respect and worth. What more effective technique is there to grow your consumer base?
For more tips, check out these:  What is a Customer Base? The Ultimate Guide for 2022