To drive more sales, you may have tried sending out more email blasts, automating more of your follow-up process, or even doing more prospecting in an effort to talk with more potential customers, and you may have experienced firsthand just how difficult it is to get results with these tactics. In today’s competitive, digital world, emails get lost in the inbox, phone calls go to voicemail, and budding relationships with new leads fade all too quickly.

Turning leads into customers becomes much easier when a personal relationship develops. The best way to invite your prospects and customers into a relationship is to show them that you’re listening and that you understand and care about their challenges. When customers engage with the personality behind your brand, they will be more open to hear about the relevant solution to their challenges you have to offer.

To personalize your automated sales process and connect with your leads on a human level, follow these steps.

1. Map out the customer life cycle

The first thing you’ll need for a personalized automated sales process is a master map of all the interactions that you consistently have with customers and leads. Think of this as a blueprint or diagram that clearly shows what’s supposed to happen to your customers and leads at every step. Here are some questions you might ask yourself:

• Where do your leads come from?
• What processes do you have in place that help leads make the transition to customers?
• What does your sales funnel look like?
• Do you have a customer onboarding process?
• Do you offer support to your clients?
• What do cancellation and/or refund processes look like?
• Do you have a referral system?

Once you’ve answered all the relevant questions, physically map out your lifecycle. You can write it on a whiteboard or create a campaign map using your automation software. You can do this using a platform such as Ontraport’s visual Campaign Builder or with a mapping tool like LucidChart.

Your map might look something like this:

2. Find opportunities to add valuable human interactions

Consider the times in your business when people make — or should make — an impact on your lead and/or customer experience. Giving one-on-one demonstrations of your product, supporting clients when they have questions, or giving them a call and thanking them for a purchase are just a few examples.

If you’re a coach/consultant, this is the whole value proposition of your business, so your value probably lies in your coaching calls. Similarly, you likely talk with leads on the phone while they’re in the evaluation phase of working with you, so that’s another time when human interaction is necessary.

You might want to send thank you notes to leads after you have a sales call with them to thank them for their time. Sales automation technology makes it much easier to send handwritten thank you notes to the right leads at the right time, plus it can speed up production of these notes by sending the right information about each lead to the person who will write the notes. It’s easy to add a task for anyone on your team to write a handwritten message — without any guesswork about what the message should say.

Here are several types of personal interactions that you can add to your automated sales process:

• Thank you notes
• Sales follow-up calls
• New customer welcome calls
• In-person appointments
• Annual customer check-in calls

3. Personalize and humanize your automated interactions

Using sales automation technology to humanize every interaction is the most scalable way to get personal with each lead in your pipeline.

Top brands such as Stitch Fix have successfully used personalization to get new customers and retain them for longer. Your customers are unique, and they like to be treated as such, which is why tailoring the experience to their preferences and needs is so effective.

Personalization doesn’t have to be complicated. It can be as simple as sending your customers messages that match up with what you know about them. For example, if you are in ecommerce, you could send customers promos for products in the same categories that they have browsed on your website. If you are in B2B sales, you might nurture leads by sending them follow-up emails with links to blog articles and content about a particular topic that you had discussed. Processes like these are easy to automate and are, therefore, completely scalable, which means that you don’t have to increase the time spent on building relationships as your list of contacts grows.

To have a truly successful automated sales process, you will want to ensure that each lead receives relevant follow-up content by grouping all of your content into categories that correspond with the most common challenges your leads and customers face. For each content category, you would build a funnel of several follow-up emails that deliver the content and explain how it relates to their unique situation. For example, the body of your email might look like this:

Just remember, when writing your follow-up emails, to be as specific as possible based on what you know about each lead.

Here are some additional personalization ideas:

• Birthday emails or postcards
• Quizzes or surveys that provide personalized suggestions (and valuable segmentation data for you to use later)
• One-year customer anniversary cards
• Emails personalized with merge fields that recap important info your customers shared with you
• Narrowly targeted promotions based on content or products in which your contacts have already shown interest

In addition to personalization, you should also focus on humanization by making your automated messages show the unique personality of your brand or your team.

For example, you can film a short but fun intro video with each person on your client-facing team. In the video, have them introduce themselves, share some fun facts and show off their unique personality. You can use these intro videos in the first email you send new leads to introduce them to the sales rep they’ll be in touch with once they book a call on someone’s calendar or as a link in each team member’s email signature. The best part is, you can use automation to make sure each new lead receives the intro video at the right time.

Final Thoughts

There are hundreds of ways you can outclass your competition with genuine human experiences. Regardless of the options you choose, you’ll discover that no matter how much your automated sales process may provide you in the future, those who maintain the human element ultimately win. 

The post How to Personalize Your Automated Sales Process appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

If you’re like many businesses, your sales reps often find it difficult — if not impossible — to connect with potential buyers at the right time. This is not a product of being lazy or unmotivated. On the contrary, it’s usually because they’re overloaded with work. The problem is, they’re often working on the wrong things. Most of the work they’re spending time on — such as writing and storing notes about leads, scheduling calls, setting follow-up reminders or entering data — is low-value compared to the value of time spent conversing directly with customers.

Using automation to facilitate these important interactions with potential customers can have a significant, positive effect on connection rates, conversion rates and even your overall revenue. You might object to the concept of automating your sales process on the grounds that it seems less human, irritating for leads, a distraction from building sales skills, a recipe for more dropped balls, or even something that you just don’t think your business is ready for yet but, ultimately, none of these objections hold water.

Sales force automation solves the biggest challenges facing sales teams today and, with the technology in place, your efforts to turn leads into customers will see greater success.

The biggest challenge for modern sales teams: consistent follow-up

The majority of marketing leads — 79%, in fact — never turn into sales. It’s tempting to place the blame on marketing for this. After all, how is your sales team supposed to convert unqualified leads into customers? However, data shows that sales is equally responsible for this dismal conversion rate: An estimated 93% of leads need six calls to convert, but about 44% of salespeople give up after one follow-up or rejection. Additionally, 49% of marketers claim their sales teams aren’t working efficiently with their marketing teams. 

The art in following up with leads comes with persistence and timing. Daniel Disney on LinkedIn compiled a list of eye-opening sales statistics, including follow-ups. Only 7% of companies respond to leads within the first five minutes of shown interest, and more than half did not respond after five business days. This is especially problematic considering that slow (or nonexistent) response times have a massive cost. Sales teams who connect with a customer within the first hour after they show interest are eight times more likely to receive a response. There is a massive 450% difference in the number of responses between following up within the first hour and the second. Imagine receiving 450% more responses from potential customers just by refining your follow-up time. This is an opportunity that you cannot afford to ignore.

To solve the problem, automate your sales process

Automating portions of the sales process can save sales reps’ valuable time and ensure that timely follow-up occurs consistently. Sales force automation technology automates many of the interactions with the leads in your sales pipeline, including:

• Automatically sending your leads an email with follow-up information when they submit an inquiry on your website
• Creating tasks to notify your team to call or email a lead immediately
• Automatically routing incoming leads to distribute them between your team for better response times 
• Assigning a lead score that quickly shows your team how qualified each prospect is so they can focus on the best ones first

Sales force automation eliminates or reduces time spent on ineffective prospecting, data entry, call scheduling, or administration by handling basic tasks for your team so they can better prioritize and focus on conversations with leads.

For example, with lead scoring in place, your team will no longer have to do extensive research to figure out who they should call and when. Lead routing makes it possible to automatically assign leads to different people on your team for follow-up, reducing first response time and sending leads to the right person immediately. Also, automated email funnels that nurture your cold leads will send more hot leads your way over time. Overall, automating your sales process can produce serious ROI for your business.

By using automation to nurture leads, you can significantly improve your company’s revenue, since nurtured leads make 47% larger purchases than non-nurtured leads. Surprisingly, 65% of companies haven’t established lead nurturing strategies (consistent follow-up for leads at every point along the buyer’s journey), but those who do emphasize it generate 20% more sales leads.

Companies that invest in automation can see up to a 451% increase in qualified leads, 70% faster sales cycle times, and a 54% improvement in meeting sales goals. When businesses align their sales and marketing lead generation efforts — which involves using automation to escort leads generated by marketing throughout the sales cycle — it can lead to massive gains in revenue. In one study by CSO Insights, 89% of companies who aligned sales and marketing saw increases.

Success stories abound in businesses who have revolutionized their team’s efficiency using sales force automation. For example, Basic Bananas, Australia’s leading marketing education organization, used Ontraport, an all-in-one automation platform, to streamline the menial tasks their team was spending time on so that they could focus on the tasks with a bigger impact. They say, “Menial tasks are automated within Ontraport, so our team spends their time working on the most meaningful tasks, which make the biggest impact and have the most fulfilling outcome.”

Don’t hesitate – automation myths debunked

With so much promising data suggesting that automating the sales process can lead to faster customer acquisition and growing revenue, why are so few companies investing in it? Even of those who do have some sort of automation in place, most companies are still underutilizing it and failing to invest time and resources into fully automating the sales process.

There are several reasons why entrepreneurs, managers and sales teams still hesitate to fully embrace sales force automation technology.

Objection 1: Robots can’t build relationships.

Many still believe that automation technology is inherently cold, inauthentic and impersonal, especially sales technology that takes advantage of artificial intelligence to manage and personalize interactions with leads.

As Steli Efti of Close.io puts it, “… people crave human interaction. Even when you’re just emailing back and forth, you instinctively picture another person reading your messages. The possibility of AI writing back is jarring because it interrupts that natural, sub-conscious thought process… Despite AI’s growing popularity, many people still find it unsettling — especially salespeople.”

Any talented salesperson will tell you that sales is all about relationships. Getting to know each prospect and taking the time to connect with them personally will win their trust, maximizing the odds of a successful sale. To many, the idea of automating any of those communications seems like a disaster because it would remove the human element of sales.

“Robots aren’t buying your product, so they sure as hell shouldn’t be selling it. Who makes purchasing decisions? People. And until that changes, you’ll need people to close deals,” Efti said.

You might also worry that by automating crucial interactions with leads, you and your team could miss out on valuable insights about your customers and their needs that can only come from direct interactions. Every time you pick up the phone and get on a call with a lead or customer, you have the opportunity to learn something new about their pain points, their objections to your product, or even reasons they may choose to buy from a competitor. Automating all your interactions with leads and customers can serve as a risk to valuable lead intelligence.

Response: Let robots do what they do best, and let your team spend more time with leads.

By automating the most simple and predictable tasks that you or your team spend time on, you can actually create more valuable, personal connections between your brand and your clients. This opens up more opportunities to learn from your leads.

When approached thoughtfully and intentionally, sales force automation can actually lead to a higher number of human-to-human interactions and maximize the quality of those conversations as well.

Sales force automation is designed to allow your team to spend more of their day speaking directly with leads and customers. According to a 2019 study by FinancesOnline, sales people on average spend about a third of their time selling directly to leads. So what are they doing with the other two thirds of their time? They are writing emails (21%), performing data entry tasks (17%) and prospecting for leads (17%). These are all tasks that can be done in less time using automation.

A good sales force automation strategy shouldn’t focus on eliminating all direct conversations with leads. On the contrary, the primary aim of implementing sales force automation should be to handle the least productive and most repetitive tasks that take up your time (and your team’s time) so you can have more quality conversations with prospects and learn from what they share with you.

Even if you could use sales force automation to attempt to replace human sales reps (which is now nearly possible with chatbots and AI technology), that doesn’t mean you should. People crave human interaction and, by using technology to make room for more of it, you can close more sales.

By providing each lead with personal attention and customizing the sales experience based on their preferences, you’ll also start off the relationship with future customers on the right foot. This means you’ll have an easier time retaining them, fewer complaints and refunds, and an overall higher customer lifetime value.

Objection 2: Automation will irritate my leads.

Right now, you might be thinking, “OK, so even if sales force automation can make more time for selling, that doesn’t mean that the interactions it does manage will go well. Why should I trust an automated system to be sensitive to what my prospects need? If anything, it seems like an automated system might end up irritating them.”

This is understandable, especially because most automated sales funnels include an unrelenting stream of tone-deaf emails imploring the recipient to make “time for a quick chat” or answer a “quick question.” This kind of pressure often doesn’t match up with the level of interest the recipient has previously displayed. It’s not uncommon to see sales reps reach out over and over again to begin a sales conversation with someone who just wanted to download a free white paper but has no interest in buying anything.

In an article from Readwrite, Brad Anderson writes, “Automation exists to enhance the customer experience… Automation tools don’t exist to improve numbers. Instead, they exist to benefit real human users by making processes simpler and more accessible.”

Response: You might already be irritating leads. Automation can help.

What you don’t want is an automated sales funnel that mindlessly sends out follow-up emails to everyone on repeat, regardless of their stated preferences or behaviors displayed. That is a waste of time and money and will harm your business’s reputation. It goes against everything that sales force automation stands for.

The key is to find a balanced blend of automation and human, personal elements when interacting with potential leads. One of the best parts of an automated sales funnel is that it allows you to create personalized, dynamic experiences for every individual contact you touch. With today’s sales force automation technology, you can customize the messages your leads receive based on specific actions they’ve taken, questions they’ve asked, or demographic data. This means you can ensure that contacts will only receive emails with information that is truly helpful to them so that you can avoid annoying contacts who are not ready to make a buying decision. Using automation technology to customize these communications is actually far more efficient than having an individual from your team manage it all.

Although the level of sensitivity built into your automated sales funnels may never surpass that of human intuition, when you automate your follow-up you can guarantee that it will be executed according to your specifications every time.

Objection 3: It’s a distraction from what really matters: developing sales skills.

Another worry that many entrepreneurs and sales managers share is that the current focus on sales force automation is diverting attention away from an important priority: training their teams to improve their skills. They argue that by automating basic sales functions like timely follow-up, lead nurturing, and lead scoring, they are neglecting to invest in their team by teaching them to perform those important tasks.

Essentially, the argument is that by placing an emphasis on automating everything, leaders are failing their teams. Sales reps need to have their skills sharpened constantly, and the opportunity to manage their own pipelines and be accountable for follow-up is a crucial part of learning. They worry that automation could lead to a poorly trained sales team and disappointing sales numbers.

This worry becomes especially alarming given the recent attention that Artificial Intelligence in sales has been earning — if sales teams become overly reliant on technology to do their jobs for them, what’s stopping it from making human sales reps completely obsolete?

Response: Sales force automation + quality sales training = success.

Sales force automation deserves a place on every healthy sales team because it allows individuals to be more successful in their given roles. It should not reduce their responsibilities or their understanding of the sales funnel. Rather, it should be a tool for them to maximize their reach and build stronger relationships with leads and customers.

Improving your consistency and defining the correct process for each situation with sales force automation will make it easier to train new people, measure trends in your performance over time, and optimize your best practices for a consistently higher conversion rate.

Even with sales force automation in place, you can and should still train your team. In fact, the technology can actually make training your team easier. Instead of placing your focus on making their follow-up more consistent and handling scheduling and administrative tasks more efficiently, you can focus on how to actually perform an effective sales call or conversation because that’s the part where humans shine. Sales force automation opens up time for your team to master these conversations because they’ll be spending less time on admin tasks and more time on the phone with leads.

Automation can also refine your processes by quickly revealing which sales strategies are the most effective and allowing you to train your team on what works best. By automating your follow-up processes, even if they involve manual (non-automated) steps, you’ll be making them more consistent. When there’s a process, you can identify the places where it is not working and optimize accordingly. You need everyone on your team to be following the same process in order to gather this data. Eventually, when you figure out what works, you can use that information to train your team. This is a far better option than having different sales reps using different strategies and improvising every time.

Creating and automating processes will also yield useful data that will reveal which salespeople stand out, allowing you to incentivize them accordingly and provide more training for those who struggle.

Finally, automated sales processes reveal valuable KPIs for your sales team’s performance, and notify you quickly when something goes wrong, providing additional training opportunity. Sales force automation makes it easier to compare your team’s performance, measure trends in your performance over time and optimize your best practices for a consistently high conversion rate.

Objection 4: Automating the sales process will lead to more dropped balls.

If sales force automation creates more human interactions, gives your leads more of what they want and makes your team more successful, what’s left to worry about? Well, for one thing, what about the possibility that relying on automation could eventually lead to your team taking less ownership over the sales funnel?

Similar to the concern about a lack of focus on sales training, this objection is tied to the underlying fear that over-reliance on technology will reduce individual responsibility on your team. Even though automated systems do not forget about tasks or commit human errors, it is still humans who program them — which means they are still imperfect and prone to mistakes. In fact, since your team members will assume that the automated system is handling all the details correctly, they may fail to notice these issues when they do occur.

There’s another old saying that also describes the scenario perfectly: “If a tree falls in the forest and no one’s around to hear it, does it make a sound?” Or, in our case, “If a lead falls through the cracks in an automated system and no one is around to notice it, will they ever receive follow-up?”

As your team gets more comfortable with an automated system handling everything, more errors might occur and get swept under the rug with no one to notice.

Response: Automation is a productivity tool, not a replacement for responsibility.

This concern is only a problem for those who abdicate responsibility when they choose to automate their sales process. Automation is not meant to be a replacement for human intelligence, just a supplement to it. Even with automation in place, sales managers and small business owners still need to oversee the sales funnel and constantly search for opportunities to improve. No matter how diligent your team is, as your business grows they won’t always be able to follow-up consistently with every lead and customer without a system that shows which outstanding tasks need attention.

Safeguards can be built into the systems to prevent leads from getting lost in the shuffle. For example, task automation reduces the risk of inconsistent follow-up by assigning tasks to individuals on your team and providing oversight on their completion. If a sales rep fails to perform an assigned task within a specified number of days because of a personal emergency, automation can inform his or her manager to make sure that the lead or customer receives the information they need.

According to a Technology Advice article, repetitive, low-level cognitive functions are the tasks within sales that are predicted to be replaced entirely by automation. This is how automation should be used, helping your team be more productive by reducing the workload on mundane, time-consuming tasks and eliminating “the need for salespeople to spend so much time prospecting and qualifying leads.” Instead, salespeople could focus more on what’s important to customers: personal connection and the human touch in the sales process, features that can’t be replaced by automation. 

Ultimately, this concern is not something that you need to worry about when considering sales force automation because tasks can be ignored or swept under the rug even when your sales processes are executed 100% by people. If anything, sales force automation will reveal these trouble spots faster so that you can fix them.

Objection 5: We can’t automate yet because our processes aren’t working.

After hearing all of the previous rebuttals to sales force automation objections, you may have one final concern. “How am I supposed to automate my sales processes if my team isn’t even reliably converting leads into customers? Why would I want to automate a process that clearly isn’t working?”

Or perhaps you aren’t even sure you have processes to automate.

This is a concern that plagues most businesses who consider sales force automation for the first time. Especially in the early days of a startup or during periods of rapid business growth, it can be difficult to clearly document processes, train the team on them and optimize them. Throwing automation in the mix can make things worse if you’re not careful.

If automation is throwing you off or overwhelming when its sole purpose is to contribute to productivity by handling the tedious tasks, then perhaps you need to take a different approach. Reuban Yonatan, CEO at GetVoIP, warns against using automation as a bandaid or automating too much too quickly. He advises that “automations will not fix existing problems, so it’s important for marketing teams and executives to identify what those problems are first.” Moreover, “if your marketing team isn’t capable of managing the automations, or the automations aren’t as optimized as they should be, you could end up with some serious issues down the road.” 

Ultimately, automating a bad process leads to even worse results. So are you justified in waiting to try sales force automation until you finally figure things out?

Response: Your processes will never be perfect, but automation will help you iron out the kinks.

If you keep waiting until your processes are perfect to go ahead with automation, you’ll be waiting forever. Even if you just wait until they are “OK,” you’ll be wasting time that you could be spending on actively improving them. By making sales force automation a priority, you can accelerate the development of effective processes by getting data on what’s working and what’s not, much faster.

When you start automating your sales process, no doubt you will find areas where you need to fix or improve the customer experience — but don’t let that stop you. The process of implementing sales force automation is the best time to re-examine your existing processes, make improvements where possible, and automate them so that you can optimize them going forward.

By focusing on creating repeatable, successful sales processes as you implement automation in your business, you’ll stimulate growth and change much faster than if you just deal with ineffective processes when they begin to create a problem you can no longer ignore. Think of it as a spring cleaning for your business processes. In the end, you’ll have a clean, organized collection of processes that you can automate, which will make your follow-up more consistent, make it easier to train your team, and easier to see areas for improvement.

The benefits of sales force automation for your business

With no remaining credible objections against sales force automation, is it time to consider implementing this technology in your business?

There are many benefits that you stand to gain from doing so. Here’s a quick recap:

• Sales Force Automation creates more loyal customers.
• It increases sales conversions.
• It provides better oversight and training for sales teams.
• It creates more time for your team to sell.
• It prevents inconsistent follow-up.
• It implements more effective sales processes.
• It reduces time-consuming, mundane workload.
• It reveals trouble spots and important KPIs.

Final thoughts

Sales force automation is a powerful tool. When used intentionally to build relationships with customers and leads, it can lead to serious business growth while saving your sales team valuable time. By now, it should be apparent that the next question to ask yourself is not whether you should invest in sales force automation, but whether you can afford not to.

The post Why You Can’t Afford to Ignore Sales Force Automation appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Does your sales follow-up process feel hard to manage?

As a hardworking business owner, you and your team have dedicated countless hours to attracting new customers and getting the word out there through your marketing channels.

Once you’ve generated leads, you need to begin the time-consuming process of following up with each one. You know how valuable each prospect is, and you work hard to try to reach out to every potential client, but you often feel swamped by the sheer number of emails your follow-up entails.

No matter how much you’ve tried to simplify the process of manually following up with your leads, it still feels like you’re constantly trying to piece together a system that doesn’t quite yield the results you’ve expected. So how are you supposed to keep track of every customer that enters your sales cycle?

The truth is, you can’t keep track of everyone — and you shouldn’t have to. It’s hard to manage a manual process and will only become more difficult as your business grows.

Start converting more leads with a fast and reliable sales process

Considering that it takes about five follow-up messages to close a sale, it’s not surprising that manual follow-up quickly becomes tiresome. Not only do you have to actually remember to follow up with each lead throughout the length of your sales cycle, but you also have to record all of your interactions, such as how many times you’ve already followed up and what the outcomes were for each interaction.

In today’s fast-moving market, using such an old-school follow-up process isn’t simply too slow. With the amount of businesses vying for consumers’ attention each day, it’s crucial that you have a system that not only ensures that the follow-up happens, but that it’s almost instantaneous. Research shows that you’re nine times more likely to convert a lead if you follow up within five minutes of their first inquiry. Not only that, but 25-50% of sales go to the vendor who responds first, so a timely follow-up is crucial to stay competitive.

As a business owner, what you need is a process that you can rely on — one that ensures that no lead gets left behind. With an automated system, you’ll never have to worry about losing leads due to slow, inconsistent follow-up because there won’t be any human error. An automated system starts working as soon as a new lead enters your sales funnel so your leads always get the quickest response.

According to Automated Marketing and Sales Follow-up Made Easy, “Automation doesn’t sleep, forget or take breaks. If someone opts in to an ebook in the middle of the night, your delivery sequence isn’t in the middle of its REM cycle — it’s making sure there’s a copy of your ebook delivered to that new lead’s inbox within minutes.”

How does automation affect your customer relationships?

You might be hesitant to use automation in your sales process because you fear it will remove the human element that customers desire, but leaving the majority of follow-up to automation doesn’t have to mean losing the opportunity to deliver an individualized experience.

On the contrary, it actually allows you to build closer relationships with your prospects. When you have a system that works based on your customers’ behavioral patterns in your sales cycle, you can tailor your follow-up to send the right content at the right time, thereby creating more opportunities for personalized experiences.

You don’t have to work around the clock to deliver excellent customer service. You can actually do less work and deliver even greater results by giving your customers what they want, when they want it.

Make the switch to an automated follow-up system

You need a process that costs less time and effort — one that you can be confident will move your business forward, rather than hold you back. You no longer have to struggle with time consuming follow-up, while also trying to juggle all of the other tasks required to keep your business growing. With the right software, you can automate and streamline most of this process.

All you have to do is set up your process one time to kickstart the most reliable and seamless follow-up that propels your business growth. Using a sophisticated system allows you to see the bigger picture, to see where your leads are in your sales cycle. This can help you determine if your sales and marketing efforts are effective.

Your business is bound to see positive results

Many business owners have wrestled with a faulty process and have found that using an automated system is the only way to handle the repetitive tasks that are involved in client follow-up.

Christo Hall, co-founder of Basic Bananas, explains why he prefers using an automated follow-up process: “Personally I prefer to spend my time surfing than chasing loose ends and cluttering my mind wondering about whether people have been followed up with and are looked after, so I let our automation friend Ontraport do the follow-up. Unlike a human, it never drops the ball.”

By switching to an automated follow-up system, business owners are not only able to simplify their personal and business life, but they make a bigger impact on their customers through every targeted and calculated interaction.

Start making a bigger impact on your bottom line

With an automated follow-up process, you’ll be able to:

• Deliver relevant, timely messages to highly targeted audiences so you can build closer, long-term relationships with clients
• Provide consistent and pleasant experiences with a system that works around the clock so that you don’t have to
• Deliver personalized experiences and give your customers what they want so you can increase your overall conversion rate
• Increase revenue by nurturing leads with consistent follow-up that builds trust so you have more repeat clients
• Systemize and automate your processes so you can scale your marketing and sales teams
• Let the automation do the repetitive work for you so that you can save time to focus on what matters most

Ready to revolutionize your business with an automated follow-up system? Check out our free guide, Automated Marketing and Sales Follow-up Made Easy.

The post Stop Losing Leads to Slow, Inconsistent Follow-up appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

You take pride in your business’s ability to offer an authentic customer experience, but individually reaching out to contacts on your list is no longer an option at your stage of growth. You’re trying to figure out how you can keep your loyal customers from receiving irrelevant offers and emails, but that kind of personalization is time consuming. With a growing contact list, you need to be able to streamline your sales cycle so that you can continue interacting with customers authentically, and do so at scale. All business owners reach a point at which they need to balance growth with sales strategies that still feel genuine and personalized for their audience and customers. If you’re feeling like you’ve reached the point in your business when the human element is beginning to get in the way of scaling your processes, you’re actually in an exciting place. 

Customer expectations are rising

If it feels as though it’s becoming increasingly difficult to please your customers, you’re right — it is.

As Gary Beck, Chief Strategy Officer for marketing agency Endai said, “Today’s consumers desire products tailored specifically to their wants and needs. People-based marketing achieves this by customizing communications to consumers based on what is most relevant to them and most likely to create engagement and purchases over time.” 

This means that you have to have a way to speak to your audience on their terms. The Ford business model, where “you can have any color as long as it’s black,” is out, and businesses that can’t keep up fall by the wayside. The Harvard Business Review found that “organizations that don’t know what their customers want risk harming relationships and even losing them, rather than driving ongoing value for both the consumer and the organization.” It’s brutal, but it’s happening: Customers will go where they know they’ll be catered to.

Get ahead with personalized customer journeys

There is actually an easy way to improve the customer experience. Implementing a customized and systemized customer journey is essential for setting your business apart from the rest.

According to Mapping and Personalizing Your Customer Journey, “Because each lead and customer you encounter will behave uniquely and have different interests and needs, there’s no such thing as an effective one-size-fits-all customer journey.” When you take the time upfront to set up a personalized sales process, you not only save time down the road responding to your customers and leads’ needs, but you also make them feel cared about throughout their experience with you.

Customers prefer personalization

People like to feel understood and cared about — so much so that 71% of consumers become frustrated when their shopping experience is impersonal, according to a report by Segment. Additionally, 44% of consumers say they’re likely to become repeat buyers following personalized experiences.

By creating a customized and dynamic experience that accounts for each stage of the customer lifecycle, and matching your sales offers to the appropriate customers, you dramatically increase your chances of locking in that coveted customer loyalty.

The wisdom of creating a personalized customer  journey

Planning and personalizing your customer journey will allow you to:

• Assess your current marketing and sales processes so you can identify which parts of the customer lifecycle are already giving contacts a personalized experience
• Match your contacts with categorized products so that loyal customers will receive different offers than entry-level contacts
• Define the different paths contacts will take in your marketing and sales funnels so that they get the most personalized experience possible
• Decide what to do with customers after they buy each of your products so that they’re more likely to engage with your brand as lifelong, repeat customers
• Sprinkle human interactions into your sales process where appropriate so that you can strengthen your relationship with leads and customers
• Replace repetitive tasks in your sales process with automation so that you can free up time for more effective and efficient human interactions

Ready to leave your one-size-fits-all customer journey behind for good? Check out the Mapping and Personalizing Your Customer Journey worksheet to help you get started with a plan you can begin implementing right away.

The post Keep the Personal Touch as Your Customer Base Grows appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Regular and necessary tasks that sales reps typically perform every day could easily take over a rep’s entire job, leaving little room to actually connect with leads, build relationships, and make sales. In fact, the average salesperson spends only 36% of his or her time selling directly to leads.

Sales force automation (SFA) solves that problem by automating those repetitive, mundane tasks so that sales reps are set up for successfully turning qualified leads into customers. 

Some businesses fear that SFA may diminish the human touch of sales, becoming robotic and detached in nature. However, done right, it has the ability to boost the connection your sales team creates with your leads. With 64% of surveyed companies seeing an increase in sales after investing in SFA, it’s clear that lead nurturing not only doesn’t suffer with the tool, but actually thrives. 

Here are seven sales tasks that you can start automating today to save time and money:

1. Personalize Pre-Written Emails to Save Time

Drafting Emails → Pre-Written Emails With Merge Fields 

How many hours have you spent hunched over your computer, writing email after email, inundated and exhausted? Many sales reps believe that drafting individual emails is key —  your leads can sniff a pre-written email, which will undoubtedly have negative consequences for your business. Yet maintaining personalization without writing each email is possible with SFA.

In Ontraport, you can use pre-written emails with merge fields. A merge field will autofill information from your contact’s record, such as their name or location. Simply pre-write emails for specific situations or points of times in your buyer’s journey, then include merge fields within these emails. Consider what emails you can expect to send repeatedly to your prospects and customers: thank you emails, welcome emails, FAQ emails, check-in emails. Then write emails with appropriate merge fields for these situations.

Imagine sending a check-in email to your leads, addressing each by name and asking each how the weather is in their hometown? This small detail can ensure personalization while negating the need to write each email, saving you and your team a lot of time.

2. Immediately Score Leads to Focus Your Time on Hot Leads

Prioritizing Leads →  Lead Scoring

Prioritizing leads is yet another sales task that is essential in a successful sales strategy. Without prioritization, you may end up ignoring high-quality leads while emphasizing attention on low-quality leads. Prioritizing leads manually consists of sifting through data, such as call notes, to uncover which leads are the best to pursue — a process that is incredibly important but incredibly inconvenient.

Using automated lead scoring will save you loads of time and uncover your most engaged leads. With lead scoring, you assign point scores for actions taken by a lead. These actions can include making purchases or subscribing to your newsletter, among other behaviors, or demographic information. Ontraport’s lead scoring can also assign points for actions that can’t be tracked manually, such as website clicks or opened emails. Total points are then automatically compiled, calculated, and presented in an organized list. This allows you to focus your time on your more qualified leads, which translates to more human contact and a stronger connection with those who are most likely to buy from you.

3. Boost Your Revenue by Focusing on Your Leads

Taking Notes and Logging Calls →  Task Automation

You should never let a good lead go cold. Sometimes follow-up calls are missed or forgotten, and sometimes a good lead simply goes unnoticed. After connecting with high-quality leads, many sales reps have to input a follow-up call into a spreadsheet or calendar. The first task to tackle each day is checking these calendars or spreadsheets to see who is up for a follow-up call which can be time consuming and inefficient. You can organize follow-up tasks for all your leads through task automation. 

After making a call, your sales team can simply log the call and its outcome. This will trigger alerts for non-automated task follow-ups, such as additional phone calls or discussions to have with coworkers about the lead or sale. Say your sales rep calls one of your hottest leads, but he or she doesn’t pick up so your rep leaves a message. With SFA, the rep can simply mark the outcome as “left a message,” which will automatically set up an alert to make another call in a week. Now your whole team knows that the lead has been contacted and that follow-up will take place at a later date.

Good leads may also come from abandonment — leads may begin filling out an order form, only to abandon it halfway through. Some sales teams simply do not have any tools to address this problem, whereas some rely on an abandoned form email. But if the order form was for a very large sale, wouldn’t you want more than just an email to close the sale? With task automation, you can create rules to trigger alerts when specific actions are taken. If a prospect abandons a high-priced order form, task automation can notify one of your sales reps to make a call and push for that sale. Gone are the days of good leads getting ignored.

4. Convert More Leads by Sending Them to the Right Rep

Matching Leads With Reps →  Lead Routing 

No two sales teams are alike. Some sales teams are composed of sales vets, while some are mixed bags. Sales managers are stuck spending valuable time assessing each lead’s quality and interests in order to assign the lead to the most appropriate rep. With SFA, this can be done in seconds.

Ontraport’s lead routing is available in two methods. The first is round robin: This evenly distributes leads among your sales team. The other method is weighted random, which assigns leads based on percentages you assign to each rep. For example, you might assign 5% of incoming leads to your new, inexperienced sales rep while assigning 25% of incoming leads to your top sales rep. Remove the burden of tedious sorting, and let automation save you time.

5. Segment in Seconds to Get Your Leads What They Want

Building Lists/Segmentation →  Groups 

Every sales team is familiar with sorting leads into groups. You might segment leads into an “already made a purchase” group or sort leads based on which of your products and services they’re interested in. Segmentation ensures that you get your leads what they’re looking for — why market an event in California if your lead lives in Oklahoma?

Building lists manually, however, is usually a tedious task. For some sales teams, sifting through individual contact details to weed out your targeted criteria is as manual as it gets. For some, it’s uploading lists into spreadsheets and working some magic to get information sorted. Regardless of the method, it takes up time that you could be spending on nurturing leads or fulfilling more important tasks.

Ontraport’s group functionality simplifies the process into a single step. With a CRM like Ontraport, all of your contacts’ data is in one place, which you can then segment based on any factor you choose with a few simple clicks. You can also assign certain groups to certain sequences and follow-up funnels to be sure they’re always automatically receiving targeted information from you.

6. Stay in Contact With Your Leads, No Matter Where They Are

Collecting Manual Opt-ins →  SMS

Gathering information from physical events, such as workshops or summits, can be a tedious task for many entrepreneurs. Some rely on online sign-ups for the event, but this proves ineffective when some of those sign-ups fail to show up. Many entrepreneurs rely on paper and pen, collecting contact information by passing around a clipboard. This method is time-consuming, since your sales team then has to input all of that information into your system. Why spend the time and money organizing this out-of-date collection method when you could gather this information with a tool every prospect has in his or her hand or pocket — a cell phone.

With SFA, you can automate SMS marketing, one of the best methods of staying in contact with your leads. During your live event, you can have the audience opt in to receive more information from you or subscribe to your newsletter by sending a text message to a unique number. Their message will automatically transfer their contact information to your database.

Sending SMS messages goes beyond just contact information collection. You can send specific messages for promotions or for appointment reminders. Using SMS is essential for every sales team: Messages sent through SMS have an open rate of 90%, a staggering difference from email’s average of 20%. Two-way SMS communications also gives you the ability to send and receive personalized messages.

7. Keep an Eye on Your Sales Successes With the Metrics Dashboard

Building Reports →  Metrics Dashboard

As an entrepreneur, you need to keep tabs on your team’s performance, even when the team consists only of you. You can track how often a rep is following up, how many leads he or she has converted and more, then compile it into a report. Compiling these reports regularly, though, is tiresome. You should be spending your time focusing on leads, not sifting through employee performance data.  

Instead, use Ontraport’s  Metric Dashboard, which provides you with a real-time snapshot of your team’s performance. This dashboard is easy to use and customizable, creating user-friendly displays of measurable stats. These stats can include the number of contacts who carried out an action, conversion rates, and the average time it takes a prospect to become a customer. This dashboard gives your team an easy glimpse into what’s working in your sales strategy, and what’s not — and it’s all done automatically so you don’t have to spend your time compiling another report.

This is just the beginning of how automating your sales processes can save you time and lead to higher sales closing rates. There are many SFA tools out there for small businesses, making it more accessible than ever. Find the right SFA tool for your business, leverage it, and let the system do the work for you.

Have you used any of these sales automation tools? How have they helped your business? Leave us a comment below!

The post 7 Sales Tasks You’re Better Off Automating appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

When Ontraport was first created, and before it evolved to encompass marketing automation and a variety of other features, its core functionality was focused around sales force automation (SFA). Today, with the ever-growing list of new features focusing on other business areas, many Ontraport users aren’t fully taking advantage of all the unique tools created around sales automation.

Because of the positive impact they can have on your marketing and sales process, such as bringing in more sales and making better use of your team’s time, we want to introduce you to some of Ontraport’s key SFA features. Here are some definitions you’ll want to know before getting started:

• Lead Scoring assigns point values to contacts based on their actions within your campaigns or other attributes they’ve provided to you about themselves, such as their geographic location or job title. The more a contact engages with your business or fits your target demographic, the higher the point value they’ll have.

• Lead Routing allows you to automatically assign contacts to people on your team for follow-up. Once you’ve created your lead router, you can add contacts to it when they enter the database or take a qualifying action.

• Notes and Tasks  Notes are important pieces of information about your leads that salespeople add to their contact record, and tasks are set up in your Ontraport account to notify your team to call or email a lead immediately.
• Custom Objects  In cases where your business needs to manage more than just contacts in Ontraport, custom objects allow you to create and store different kinds of data sets to match the way your business really works. For example, if your business does B2B sales, you might need to keep track of which contacts work for which companies so you can manage opportunities for each company and contact.

We asked our experts — Ontraport Certified Consultants — which SFA features within the software they find most valuable and how they use them for their clients’ systems. Here are their insider tips that you can apply to your business.

1. Notes and Tasks

“One of my favorite sales force automation [features] within Ontraport is the Notes and Tasks section. To me, this is a very underutilized feature. This section allows you to marry automation with manual tasks and keep everyone in the loop.

For example, let’s say you offer a product or course that includes a payment plan. You have a customer on the payment plan whose payments have begun to decline. If we have everything set up in the re-charge settings, this would initially be the way in which we could automate contacting the customer via email to let them know about the declined payment.

But, what if they never respond? What if the recharge attempts expire, resulting in the transaction being listed as a ‘Write-Off’?

This is the point where a manual task comes into play. By adding a task for a team member to manually contact the customer via phone, Facebook private message, etc., it raises the likelihood of you recouping the declined payment and getting the contact back on track.

And not only can you create a task for a team member to follow up, but you can:

• Use the notes section to keep everyone on the team up-to-date on the correspondence.
• Incorporate the proper task outcomes that could trigger a NEW automation that could result in something like canceling their open order and revoking access to the membership site until all past due balances are settled.

Using the Notes and Tasks section will help you and your team to be more efficient when it comes to follow-up and connecting the manual to automation in a seamless fashion.” ‒ Akilah Pitts, Ontraport Certified Consultant and Systems Strategist

2. Custom Objects and Tasks

“I’ve done a couple of setups lately that use custom objects to track and automate leads. Custom objects is a complete game-changer for anyone who receives more than one lead per customer.

Also, I always say that tasks are one of the most underutilized tools in Ontraport, so my clients use plenty of those as well. One of my clients even had an automated task that would send a text and a voicemail if a prospect missed a scheduled sales call.” – Neil Kristianson, Marketing Automation Specialist, Email Splat

@the_nak

Neil Kristianson

Email Splat

3. Tasks, Lead Scoring and Lead Routing

“One of my clients uses an embedded web form and the answers are reviewed at salesperson assignment. Another uses a task for a follow-up sales call as new leads receive a tripwire to drive research from inside sales for qualification. Others have used a form and routed the follow-up based on certain field values; higher values signify a qualified lead, and lower values trigger follow-up or sending a different offer.

Additionally, some clients run a regular fulfillment list of high lead scores for weekly review and reach out directly where appropriate.” ‒ Kevin Switala, Chief Propeller Head, Wild Fig Marketing

4. Lead Scoring and Sales Reports

“We add to the contact’s lead score based on email opens, clicks and site revisits. We send a ‘Friday at 5’ report to sales teams so they know who to focus on.” ‒ Chad Root, President, Spearhead Sales & Marketing Services

@chadroot

Chad Root

Spearhead Sales and Marketing

5. Lead Qualification

“If you’ve ever spent time qualifying a lead, you know how mindless and time-consuming it can be. Because of this, you want to make sure that you’re prioritizing outreach to each lead based on his or her likelihood of purchasing.

By comparing page visit data, email activity, phone calls and incoming communication like emails or chats, you can effectively prioritize your list based on interest.

In Ontraport, you can pull up the opportunity, view all of the communication that’s been sent (including inbound emails from the lead to the sales rep), notes from your sales people, page visits, marketing UTM sources, phone calls, and sales data. Rather than logging into four different places that don’t really talk to each other (meaning a few of them are always out of date or don’t have the whole picture), you can look in one spot for all of the necessary info.

Even better, since all of your data is in one place, you can view the overall health of your business in one reporting dashboard. Good businesses make decisions on data via the big picture, not just the tunnel vision version of their stats that their tool has decided to report on.”  

‒ Brendan Dubbels, Business Development Director, Ontraport

@automationaces

Brendan Dubbels

Ontraport

The post 5 Underused Sales Force Automation Features in Ontraport appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

To do so, it’s important to recognize the strength of your relationship with leads at each stage of the sales cycle. From unqualified, to marketing qualified, to sales qualified, each type of lead requires a different kind and level of nurturing. Here are the do’s and don’ts of following up with each one:

Unqualified Leads

Leads who opt in to your list but haven’t yet taken any qualifying actions to bump up their lead score (such as consistently opening your messages, visiting your web pages, etc.), are identified as “unqualified” leads. According to Datananas, this is the stage where you find out if the lead’s interest in your brand will “materialize or whether it’s just curiosity.”

Because they are so new to your brand, it’s important that you communicate with them differently than you would a qualified lead or customer. Here’s how:

1. Email Nurturing

Don’t: Let Your Leads Go Cold

Capturing leads for your sales funnel takes a lot of time and effort so, once you have them, it would be a mistake to lose traction by not following up.

This is one of the biggest challenges for modern sales and marketing teams: After working hard to earn a lead, the nurturing abruptly stops. In most cases this isn’t because they’re lazy or inattentive but rather because they don’t have the right (or any) automation set up, and it’s too difficult and time consuming to manually follow up with every lead individually.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, another common mistake marketers and salespeople make is scaring off leads by asking for too much too soon. Finding the middle ground between quality and speedy follow-ups is imperative for engaging leads and earning customers. Always remember: The customer lifecycle’s five phases are like marathon mile markers — so pace yourself; nurture each lead slowly through each step, until you reach the finish line (the sale).

Do: Stay Top-of-Mind With Regular Emails

Keeping your brand fresh on your leads’ minds doesn’t have to consume your days. Even setting aside as little as 30 minutes each week to write and send a newsletter to your subscriber list will allow you to begin establishing your brand as a reliable source for weekly value.

If you want to take it a step further, you may also decide to write a series of educational emails about your product or service. These educational emails are not a hard sales pitch. They focus on keeping your subscribers aware while nurturing your leads towards the next phase in the relationship.

2. Leveraging Your Existing Content

Don’t: Make Every Outreach a Sales Offer

Your relationships with customers are all about give and take — but mostly give. Ontraport Campaigns Manager Sam Flegal says, “Contrary to popular belief, marketing isn’t just about selling. The best marketing actually happens after you’ve already given your prospects and/or leads so much value for free that they are actually happy to hear from you when it comes time to tell them about your product.”

Why is it so important to give more than you receive? Because when every outreach is a sales offer where you’re asking them to do something for you, leads begin to think, “What’s in it for me?” Instead, prove your value, and they’ll come to you for a purchase when it’s time.

Do: Use Existing Content to Offer Free Value Upfront

Your leads, especially new ones, are just beginning to get to know your brand. By giving you their email address, they’ve made the first step, and now it’s up to you to prove they made the right choice.

An effective way to do this is by offering them free, yet valuable bonus content. To do this, you don’t have to reinvent the wheel; all you have to do is set up an automated bonus content email funnel linking leads to your already-written content. This can be anything — blog articles, ebooks, video tutorials, webinars, podcasts and more.

3. Personalizing Your Regular Marketing and Sales Messages

Don’t: Send Generic Follow-up

It’s easy to skim past a generic email in your inbox or ignore a cookie-cutter voicemail. Think about the way you check your emails: Do you click on every email in your inbox, no matter how much it looks like a mass eblast? Or do you skim through subject lines looking for a select few messages that catch your eye? Many of us do the latter.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t ways for you to pique their attention. Maintaining your voice, establishing trust and providing solutions to your leads’ needs will enable you to capture their attention. Punchy subject lines and personalized, targeted body copy are also good ways to stand out in a crowded inbox.

Do: Become the Brand Known for Personalizing

Earning a place in your leads’ hearts means building and maintaining connections with them over time. A great way to do this is by creating relevant experiences for them with personalization. This makes it clear that their preferences matter and that they are not just a number.

As your list receives and reads more personalized messages from you, they’ll start thinking, “Wow, this brand remembered I’m interested in X,Y, and Z. They took the time to understand my preferences!” Customizing the way you address your prospects’ interests will pay off. And the power of personalization extends beyond just making your leads feel good — in 86% of leads, it actually influences them to make a purchase. There are lots of ways to sprinkle personalization into your strategy, but Facebook retargeting, targeted content, behavioral segmentation, cart abandonment campaigns, cross-sells and membership site pathways are some of the most effective.

Marketing Qualified Leads

As your relationships with unqualified leads mature, many will naturally become marketing qualified. This is when your reps can begin to contact them for introductory sales conversations.

During the initial conversation, your rep will find out whether the lead meets BANT (Budget, Authority, Timeline, Need) criteria and, depending on the results, will either pass the lead up to another sales rep or continue nurturing. During this second phase of the sales cycle, your leads are more familiar with your brand than before but perhaps still not ready to purchase. Here’s how to better communicate with your marketing qualified leads:

1. Balancing Repetition and Variety

Don’t: Be Extreme With Repetition or Information Overload

When engaging with your marketing qualified leads, it’s important that you don’t introduce too many new ideas or become too repetitive. Crossing the line in either direction can be confusing or redundant, resulting in the relationship actually moving backwards.

Do: Have a “Harmonious Blend of Repetition and Variety”

To avoid leaning too far in either direction, before calling or emailing a client, think about what you have to say: Does it sound stale, over-rehearsed or like the benefits to your product or service are too limited? Does it sound overwhelming or too lengthy?

If either one of the questions above are true, dial it back until it sounds right. According to Invensis, “People believe what they hear repeatedly, so make sure to reiterate how your product/solution can address their problems. But mix it up by using a variety of communication channels including phone calls, chats, emails, etc.”

2. Maximizing Your Time With Follow-up

Don’t: Reinvent the Wheel Every Time You Follow Up With a Lead

Salespeople talk to a lot of leads, so when you’re spending countless hours a week preparing to speak with each one, it adds up. There are only so many hours in a week; the longer your prep time, the fewer leads you’ll be able to connect with.

Do: Template Out Your Qualifying Conversations and Emails

Chances are that, at this early stage of qualifying leads, a lot of your follow-up will follow a similar format. You’ll start off the conversation to test the waters: Do they meet your basic BANT criteria? Are they less qualified or closer to buying than you thought?

These conversations can be templated to not only save you time, but to ensure you hit all your talking points. This doesn’t mean reading a script word-for-word; it’s simply a guide to ensure the conversation stays on track, without a lot of prep time beforehand. This leaves room for personalization and real conversation to happen in phone calls and for you to fill in the blanks to specifically target your leads in emails.

Templating isn’t just limited to early stages in the sales cycle, either. It can be applied at any time and is especially effective if you have detailed segments in place so that you’re able to touch on topics your leads are specifically interested in.

3. Passing on Valuable Info

Don’t: Gather Important Info about Your Leads and Keep It to Yourself (or Your Team)

When people share information about themselves with a brand, they expect it to stick; they don’t want to have to repeat themselves to the next person they speak to. When leads tell you something about themselves (what kind of company they own/work for, their interests related to your brand, etc.), it’s important that you don’t leave those notes in a notebook or in your head where the rest of your team can’t access them.

Do: Save Valuable Info From Leads in Your CRM to Reference Later

Enter that information into your CRM so that others can both reference and use it for marketing segmentation later.

The more you know about your leads, the better you’ll be able to market and sell to them in the future. You’ll also be able to provide them with a more streamlined service experience once they do become customers.

Sales Qualified Leads

In this final stage of the sales cycle, your hottest leads are sales qualified, meaning they’re ready to be converted to customers. This is when you should add product demonstrations, touchpoints with top account executives, and sales offers to the mix. If all goes well, they’ll become a client; if they’re not ready yet, you can continue lead nurturing until the conversion happens.

1. Sales Calls and Emails

Don’t: Just Email or Call to “Touch Base” or “Check In”

By the time your leads are sales qualified and you’re on the verge of closing a sale, each email and call where you’re asking for something from a lead must be strategic. This means that you should avoid “touching base” calls or emails, and only reach out to them if you have a specific reason to.

Do: Always Contact Your Prospects for a Specific Reason

Having a specific reason for reaching out to your prospects gives them a reason to respond. Leads want to know what your point is and to be able to identify it from the subject line or the first few seconds of the call; otherwise you may lose your chance. Sales Hacker says, “I even start all my calls with this specific phrase: ‘The reason for my call today is…’ I love this intro because it forces me to think of the reason for my call. If I can’t come up with a good reason, then I try to figure one out.”

2. End of Call or Email

Don’t: Leave a Lead Wondering What the Next Steps Will Be

It’s important not to leave your leads hanging when your calls or emails are complete. They were willing to share their time with you, so nurture them, and complete those conversations via phone call or email with a clear call to action, or CTA.  The more you can effectively strengthen those relationships, the easier it is to kindle consumer interest.

Do: End Each Call and Email Conversation With a Clear CTA

Getting into the habit of thinking about what you’d like to see happen in your next meeting or interaction with a prospect, and summarizing it into a quick CTA at the end, is a great way to continue moving closer to a sale. It gives your lead clarity on what you’re expecting and wanting, and it also keeps the ball rolling.

3. After the Call

Don’t: Assume Your Lead Will Remember Exactly What You Talked About

Starting a new sales conversation without a recap of the previous one leaves room for three things: for your leads to forget about the call altogether, to forget the details of what you talked about or agreed upon, and to no longer feel accountable for what they may have agreed to in the call. This ultimately loses your momentum and can jeopardise the sale.

Do: Follow Up With a Recap Email

According to MindMave, your recap email should have three main components: a “thank you,” a “common ground reference,” and a “key takeaway.” This lets your leads know you appreciate their time, reminds them of the important topics you covered in the call, and it gives them a quick reference point to look at next time you speak.

4. Sales Follow-up Timing

Don’t: Delay or Drop the Ball on Responding to a Lead-initiated Message

When it comes to communicating with leads, timing and persistence is everything — and forgetting or delaying your response to a lead who reached out to you could result in losing it all. In fact, JDR Group says that one of the most common sales mistakes is taking too long to follow up.

Do: Respond Right Away to a Lead-initiated Message

Instead of letting leads go cold with a delayed or nonexistent response, reply to them as promptly as possible, preferably in the first hour but within 24 hours should still be okay. Doing so will show your lead that you care, answer any questions or roadblocks preventing them from purchasing, and ultimately move the sales relationship forward.

Once your leads are sales qualified and you send your first offer email or make your first call, don’t stop there. On average it takes five follow-ups after the initial contact to make a sale, so consistency and follow-through are key.

Do you have any additional automated sales follow-up do’s and don’ts? Share them in the comments.

The post Sales Follow-up: Are You Doing It Right? appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

In most businesses, a designated salesperson reaches out to set up a time (if the requestor hasn’t already chosen one) then calls the lead on the scheduled date. If they’re like 44 percent of salespeople, once they fulfill their initial request, the interaction with that person ends.

The problem with that is, in most cases, your leads won’t be ready to buy your product right away. In fact, 80 percent of sales require a follow-up system of five touchpoints, but only eight percent of reps actually make it that far. By failing to use a follow-up system, the majority of businesses are kissing a painful amount of potential sales and revenue goodbye.

That begs the question: If a follow-up system is so crucial to making sales, why are only eight percent of reps doing it effectively? For most, the roadblock is time. When done manually, sending leads personalized offers is both time-consuming and difficult to keep track of. This leaves sales reps with a mess of cold leads and dropped balls to sort through and not enough hours in the day to finish.

Sales automation takes that hassle away. Instead of spending countless hours sending the same messages to different leads, sales automation allows you to create post-sales call offer funnels in advance and let them run on their own 24/7. To take it even further, because automated sales follow-up system is set up in advance, you can weave in a variety of communication channels to reach your prospects in the right place at the right time.

Here are three simple and effective sales follow-up systems by channel you can use:

1. Follow-up system: Email

Sales emails have come a long way since their first appearance in consumers’ inboxes in 1978. In 40 years, email has transformed from a channel for bulk-distributing unsolicited offers to a means for brands to deliver their most hyper-targeted, thoughtful sales offers.
If you want to acquire more customers and nurture them into larger sales at scale, email is the way to go. According to a survey by Direct Marketing Association and Demand Metric, “Email had a median ROI of 122% — more than four times higher than other marketing formats examined, including social media, direct mail, and paid search.”

Email is also advantageous because it’s highly scalable — your sales reps can automatically follow-up with every lead they talk to. You can create a follow-up system with emails that can be tailored and personalized using the data you have about each lead in your CRM and sales force automation platform, and you can set up your platform to automatically deliver those emails to leads at just the right moment, right after they’ve performed an action or after a specified duration of time.

Example: the post-sales call follow-up message

After your sales team calls each prospect, interested in purchasing or not, you should always follow up afterward. You can do this with a summary of what you discussed and any useful resources that will support your company’s authority and expertise on the topic.  Here’s an example of a follow-up system message you might send:

Example: following up with leads stuck in your sales pipeline

Simply sending one follow-up email after your sales call or consultation is typically not enough to nudge a sale. Remember, most of your qualified leads won’t be ready to buy your product right away. Planning a regular cadence of follow-up after-sales calls is crucial.

Your goal should be to remind them frequently of what you have to offer. When they are eventually ready, your business will be fresh in their memory. Here’s an example of how you can follow up with a lead who has been in the pipeline a while without taking action:

2. Follow-up system: Postcards

Email can be the most common and recommended way to follow up after a sales call. However, you can also follow up with a thank you note or by sending a postcard. Or you can plan to use a postcard later in your follow-up system process.

In a crowded digital marketplace, a personal touch here and there is a great way to stand out. With 54 percent of customers surveyed by AdWeek reporting that “they want to receive mail from brands they’re interested in,” sending a postcard by mail might be exactly how you can ensure your business stands out.

Postcards are great for a follow-up system because:

• They’re inexpensive.
• They have eye-catching qualities.
• They are often read.
• Results are easily measurable.
• Customers find them trustworthy.
• You can automate and personalize them.
• They are a physical form of communication that adds a real personal touch (which can help your business stand out).

You can also use postcards for continued nurturing before and after the contact becomes a customer. Here are some examples:

• Birthday offers
• Anniversary (with your business) reminders
• Holiday promotions
• Contract expiration reminders
• Cross-sell and upsell offers
• Update contact info requests
• Event invitations
• Appointment reminders
• Thank you cards
• Proposal follow-up
• Demo follow-up
• New product announcements
• Recurring service reminder

Don’t be intimidated by the perceived difficulty of sending clients and leads postcards. They’re easy to implement into your automated follow-up system. All you need to do to get started is set a task outcome in your sales force automation platform. The task will subscribe contacts to a thank you note fulfillment list. You can customize your postcards to include your contact’s name and any other information you’d like.

3. Follow-up system: SMS messages (text messages)

Although we don’t recommend replacing more traditional communication channels such as emails and phone calls altogether, your sales team can add SMS to your follow-up funnels post-sales call for a convenient, on-the-go and quick way of communicating between other forms of communication.

With nearly 80 percent of the world’s population having access to mobile phones and SMS, it should be no surprise that 78 percent of US consumers state that text messaging is the most efficient way to reach them for purchases and updates.

Here are just a few reasons to add this underused communication channel to your marketing follow-up system strategy:

• 90 percent of SMS messages are read within three minutes of receipt.
• The response rate for SMS is higher than mobile advertising.
• Consumers prefer to schedule or change appointments via text over other communication channels.
• 98 percent of SMS messages are read, compared to only 20 percent of emails.

When many people think of SMS messaging for sales, they think of the spam-mail from random 777 numbers that they didn’t opt-in for, but there’s a lot that this communication channel can do without annoying customers or leads.

Here are just a few of the potential uses for SMS messages:

• Webinar or appointment reminder messages
• Scheduling or changing appointments
• Purchase confirmations or receipts
• Coupon offers
• Polls and contests

With an understanding of the channels to follow up, you can consider which is best for your audience. Then map out your immediate and long-term sales follow-up.

The post Follow-up system: 3 simple ways to convert more leads today appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Not only does the overall number of sales you close reflect your job performance, but it’s also crucial in the modern age to use different data metrics to make positive changes. If you want to see improvement, you need to start measuring.

If you oversee a sales team, you need data to make strategic decisions to assure that your team is happy, productive and effective. If you’re a salesperson, sales reporting data allows for better sales forecasting. With data, you can quickly and easily understand past and current sales trends and the number of opportunities in the pipeline.

According to research from McKinsey, companies rooting marketing and sales decisions in data see 5-10% revenue growth, often within the first few months. These companies aren’t just referencing data here and there — they’ve incorporated it into their everyday routine. Having the analytics laid out daily allows sales leaders to identify each team member’s specific skills and adjust workloads accordingly.

If businesses want to maintain a competitive advantage and continue to grow, decisions need to be data-based. By using analytics to inform daily decisions, you are able to see patterns and make decisions to increase your bottom line.

The real question lies in choosing what analytics to actually look at. Total sales by time period, sales by product, sales by lead source, revenue per sales, deal size, number of deals in the pipelines, conversation rate… the list goes on. There are so many stats to measure, and the ones you use depends greatly on your industry, your business type, and your goals. We asked sales experts what works for them and gained some insight that can be applied to any business. Here’s what they said:

1. Time Spent Selling

Instead of powering through calls just to hit quota, it’s important to remember the goal of sales is to build meaningful relationships and ensure your product or service will make a positive impact on your customer. That’s why CloserIQ founder and CEO Jordan Wan says, “The number of calls that are greater than five minutes is one of the most important sales statistics for motivating your team. Most sales organizations track call volume and minutes but, to encourage reps to focus on quality conversations instead of burning through a lead list, add a definition of quality to calls.”

@jordanxwan

Jordan Wan

CloserIQ

The benefits of focusing on quality sales conversations are hard to ignore. According to RAIN Group President Mike Schultz, “Sellers that maximize selling vs. administrative time win more, achieve more, and feel more motivated as they are not frustrated by wasting time.”

@mike_schultz

Mike Shultz

RAIN Group

2. Revenue or Percentage Quote Achieved

“It’s important that the things you measure are tied to desired business outcomes. So, Revenue or Percentage Quota Achieved for the quarter and year-to-date still work well for direct sales,” says Antivia CMO Bryan Motteram. “For business development teams, focus more on number of new opportunities created (for example). However, whatever you measure, it’s making this information visible that motivates a sales team. Display these metrics in a leader-board. Put this leader-board front and center on a big screen on the sales floor. One thing’s for sure, your sales people will all want to be top of that leaderboard!”

@BryanMotteram

Bryan Motteram

Antivia

3. Probability Adjusted Pipeline Value

While it’s important to keep long-term goals in mind, tracking small steps along the way is crucial in seeing overall progress. “Most CRMs allow you to assign a probability for each stage of your sales process. Weighing your deal opportunities by these probabilities can help you better assess the expected revenue close to help forecast and improve pipeline management conversations,” explains CloserIQ Founder and CEO Jordan Wan.

4. Leads Contacted to Leads Closed Ratio

Healthy competition is a great way to challenge one’s routine and reenergize efforts. “One great statistic to measure and motivate a sales team is the lead/close ratio,” shares Jacob Dayan, CEO and founder of Community Tax and Finance Pal. “This is essentially a statistic of leads contacted to leads closed per employee. Not only does is help measure the efficiency of individuals on your sales team, after seeing this number, employees will start to figure out ways to improve their number. This will promote innovation and efficiency that will ultimately help your bottom line. Finally, teams can use the historical leads/close ratio to plan monthly and quarterly strategy and identify a number of leads they will need to contact to hit their sales numbers, based on their historical leads/closed ratio.”

@communitytaxllc

Jacob Dayan

Community Tax

5. Percentage of Reps Over Quota

It’s a sales industry standard to set quotas, but the actual definition behind these goals varies from company to company.  As CloserIQ Founder and CEO Jordan Wan says, “For some teams, it’s a stretch goal while for other teams, it’s the median (or minimum performance expected). Regardless of your definition, you should have a realistic understanding of what percentage of your team is actually attaining quota. If your % is too low, it can be discouraging for your team to believe it’s an attainable measure.“

6. Number of Thank-You Messages From Customers

Thank you messages aren’t just a sweet sentiment; they can serve as an indicator of good work. Cristian Rennella, VP of Sales and Co-Founder of El Major Trato says, “After 9 years of work and being able to learn from mistakes and successes in order to motivate our salespeople, we finally arrived at the solution: Measure the number of thank you messages that we receive from our customers. The sellers who receive emails, calls, or different messages (whatsapp + facebook messenger) of gratitude from customers satisfied with the sales and service process, are those who have 46.7% more sales than the rest! For this reason, being able to measure and follow this statistic each month is fundamental for our company to continue growing long term.”

@crisrennella

Cristian Rennella

El Major Trato

The post Sales Experts Weigh In: How to Use Sales Data to Improve Your Business appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Wouldn’t it be helpful to know which ones were highly engaged and which weren’t? Those who are highly engaged are more likely to ultimately buy your product or service, so why not speed up the sales cycle for those leads and let the others continue along the nurturing path until they’re ready?

While you’re able to see overall engagement rates throughout your funnel, to understand an individual’s level of engagement within your campaigns, you need lead scoring.

Lead scoring assigns point values to contacts based on their actions within your campaigns or other attributes they’ve provided to you about themselves, such as their geographic location or job title. For example, you can assign 15 points for a visit to your sales page, 10 points for opening your email, and 5 points for visiting a blog article. The more a contact engages with your assets, the higher the point value they’ll have — giving a clear signal to your sales team that they’re highly interested in what you’re offering. The scores also degrade based on inactivity each day, so lead scores reflect real-time engagement levels as leads’ interest levels wane and bounce back, as is often the case.

Sales reps can view a list of leads, based on score, to find the hottest leads at any given time and follow up appropriately. The sooner a rep reaches out to someone who’s in the midst of engaging with your brand, the higher the likelihood of a sale; otherwise, people tend to move on, get distracted or find a competitor. In addition to using lead scoring to uncover these super-highly engaged leads, you can also set threshold scores that, when reached, automatically prompt a certain follow-up task such as a sales call.

Lead scoring is an effective way to ensure you’re reaching those who are most likely to buy, when they’re most likely to buy, leading naturally to an increase in overall sales and revenue for your business. To get started with lead scoring, here are the steps for setting up your own lead scoring system in your Ontraport account:

1. Identify Your Qualifying Criteria

To come up with an effective lead scoring system, it’s important to pinpoint where your hottest leads are coming from and what criteria they have in common. You can find out by talking to your sales team and looking at all your previous sales.

Attributes Vs. Behaviors

When looking for your qualifying criteria, there are two different types of information you’ll want to consider: attributes and behaviors.

• Attributes, also known as demographics, are the information leads provide to you when they fill out a form. Attributes can be their job title, geographic location, age, the size of their company or any other details that you’ve discovered make them more likely to purchase from you.
• Behavioral information tells you all the tracked actions leads take — such as visiting your website, clicking a link from an SMS message, or opening an email — after  becoming part of your Ontraport database.

Make a list of the top three behaviors and three attributes that are most common among your existing customers. Once you have your list, you can use that information to find more people like them through lead scoring.

Selecting Your Score Conditions in Ontraport

First, access lead scoring in your account by going to contacts > settings > lead scoring in the top menu. Then use the “lead score conditions” dropdown menu to select which attributes and behaviors you want to award points for. Because there are so many customizable options available, you can get as creative as you want with them.

To add attributes to your lead scoring system, select one of the following three customizable conditions:

• Field is this value: for adding information from contact records, SMS merge fields, shared fields, transactions, credit cards, partner data, system information and coupons

• Contact has tag: so that you can add points to entire segments or groups of contacts
• Contact doesn’t have tag

To add behavioral information to your lead scoring system, you can select from a variety of conditions, including:

• Marketing campaigns: date added, amount of time on campaign

• Fulfillment lists: subscribed or not subscribed

• Email: opens or link clicks

• Sales: amount spent on a product, amount of product ordered, subscribed to product
• Sites/pages: has visited a WordPress site or landing page a certain number of times, does or doesn’t have access to WordPress membership level

Once you’ve added the attributes and behaviors you want on your lead scoring system, you can prioritize them by their level of importance.

2. Rank Your Criteria and Assign Values

If you’ve ever followed a cooking recipe, you know that even the simplest batch of chocolate chip cookies can be ruined if the recipe doesn’t specify ingredient amounts. After all, nobody wants a cookie made with too much baking soda and not enough sugar.

The same thing applies to your lead score values: If you rank a lead who subscribed to your email list as high as a lead who frequents your sales page, your sales team is sure to be disappointed when they call a lukewarm lead who’s not ready to buy. In other words, the person who just joined your email list is likely less ready to buy than the person who has been regularly visiting your sales page, so don’t ascribe them the same value. To avoid confusion, sort your list of scoring criteria from most to least important.

When assigning scores to attributes, look at each of your data fields, identify which ones are the best indicators that you’re dealing with a hot lead, then assign points to that value according to how important a factor it is. For example, if you sell surfboards and know that people from California are more likely to buy them, you can assign a higher point value when California is selected as the person’s home state. Or, you may sell life coaching services and know that people in their 30s are more likely to use your services, so you assign a higher value to the 30-39 age range.

For behavioral information, assign larger numbers to tracked actions that indicate stronger buying interest and lower numbers to actions that indicate less interest.

When you’re satisfied with each score value, be sure to click Save in your Ontraport account.

3. Set a Score Threshold

Before your sales team gets started calling any lead with points, set a threshold number that reasonably estimates when a lead is ready to buy. Depending on how many points you assign to each action, your threshold could be a score of 10, 50 or even 100. It doesn’t matter what the number is, as long as it indicates when a lead is hot enough to call.

To find the score threshold that works best for your business, try looking back at previous sales records. Do you see a purchasing trend with people who visit your sales page more than three times and open your offer emails? If so, make your score threshold the sum of those two actions.

Or have you noticed that people who opt in to your email list under a specific segment convert almost immediately? If so, make that your threshold. The score threshold you set will be the number you’ll later add to any campaigns triggered by lead score and the number that tells you when to call a hot lead.

Finding out the threshold that represents your average hot lead also gives you the ability to spot the standout individuals who are engaging with your brand so much that they’re sure to convert if called.

4. Set Your Score Degradation Percentage

When it comes to leads, new activity is more valuable than old activity. That is, a person who visits your website and clicks on your links today is more likely to buy from you now than someone who took those actions three months ago. You can set up score degradation to automatically decrease (or degrade) a contact’s lead score by a percentage every day. For example, you can set the total score of a lead to degrade 3% daily so it is easier to see the actively participating leads.

To figure out the right degradation rate for your lead score, use the info you have about the average time it takes from when contacts enter your database to when they become customers. Use a higher degradation rate if it takes less time, on average, for a lead to become a customer. This way their score will degrade quickly so that you can focus on the newer leads that you know are more likely to buy. Use a lower degradation rate if you know that, on average, it takes your leads a long time to become customers.

Because score degradation is meant to bury leads whose actions have gotten outdated, it only affects behavior scores, not attributes.

Going back to the surfboard sample, let’s say you’ve awarded points to leads who live in California. Assuming they don’t move out of state, these leads will always keep those points, because their demographic information automatically makes them more likely to purchase your product.

5. Put Your Lead Scoring System to Use

Now that your lead scoring system is set up, it’s time to put it to use with the rest of your Ontraport account. There are a few ways you could do this:

Sort Your Contact List by Lead

Want to give your sales team the ability to see the hottest leads in your contact list at any given time? In your Ontraport account, go to your contact list and add a column for lead score. Then, click on the Score column to sort your list from highest to lowest score.

Add Leads to Your Follow-up Campaigns

Once leads’ scores have broken your set threshold, you can also automatically add them to sales follow-up campaigns. In any campaign, you can add leads based on score with triggers.In trigger settings in the left sidebar, select “Any contact in account” and “If contact is already on map, then ignore this trigger.” Then, in the description, name your trigger something you’ll be able to easily find later. In this example, the trigger is called “Add leads with a score above 25.”

To specify how your trigger will be activated, click the orange “add trigger” button, select “a field is updated” and set that field to “score.”

Next, you’ll want to add a condition so that the trigger is only activated if the condition is true. To do this, click the “Add condition” button, select “Field is this value” and add “Score” as your field. Because this field is recognized by Ontraport as a numeric value, you can choose the condition “Greater than or equal to” and add your score threshold.

When you’re finished, click “done” and save your campaign.

Add Leads to a Lead Scoring Campaign

Want your lead scoring system to trigger a sales task when contacts meet your score threshold? You can easily set this up with the “Simple Lead Scoring” pre-built map in Ontraport’s Campaign Marketplace, available for free to Ontraport users.

Once you’ve opened the campaign template in your own account, all you have to do is set your score threshold and publish your campaign.

6. Continuously Self-Assess and Improve

You may notice over time that leads who download your free lead magnets or open your weekly emails aren’t as hot as you thought. Sales reps are calling, but people aren’t buying as often as their scores implied. To keep your scoring process fluid, as you notice scores that are inaccurate, make changes as needed. The more you adjust your system to reflect reality, the more effective it’ll be.

Make a note on your calendar to review your scoring process monthly or quarterly to make sure your process never goes out-of-date.

Final Thoughts

Now that you have a lead scoring system set up in your Ontraport account, your sales team will have the tools they need to identify your hottest leads at any given time.

Have you used lead scoring in your business? Share how it’s made a difference in the comments below.

The post How to Create a Lead Scoring System in Your Ontraport Account appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.