If you don’t have more leads than salespeople, then you’ve got a problem! On the other hand, when leads are flowing in, you’ll need a way to keep lead assigning fair. By their very nature, successful salespeople are competitive souls.
To guide you on your way, we’re sharing 6 lists that you can use to manage your pipeline of leads. 4 calling lists, 2 for profiling. While the specifics of each list will vary between industries, the essence of them are useful for every kind of company.
Lists to call from
1. New website visitors
Your email and social media campaigns should be designed to bring readers onto your website. No-one ever just reads an email then calls to ask how soon we can set them up as a customer.
As we’ve covered before, website traffic is a key indicator of how successful your campaigns are. When you have a new campaign going out, this list should be the first place your sales team go. Several studies have shown that leads who are called within 5 minutes of expressing an interest are far more likely to convert than leads who are left waiting.
At the other end of the scale, use this list to weed out leads that are of no value. In our case, a local primary school is nowhere near our ideal customer profile. Spotting a website visitor like this early on means that we can qualify them out and keep our lists clear for genuine prospects. Even if the dud lead visits the website several more times, we don’t need to pay them even a cursory glance.
2. Renewing in 5 months
Whatever it is you sell, there are natural times when leads are more amenable. In our case, marketing software contracts are typically 1 or 2 years long. They often contain a clause that the buyer must give 8 weeks’ notice if they wish to leave. This leaves a small window when they could be thinking about changing supplier.
We pull contacts into this list at 5 months because our sales cycle is typically more than a month long. When you’re setting this list up for yourself, adapt the timescale to your situation.
3. 20-Point Movers
Following on from “Renewing in 5 months” is our “20-point movers” list. If there’s a surge in website activity from a particular lead, we want to know why! The two most likely scenarios are an approaching contract renewal, or a new manager looking to shake things up. If either of these happens it’s a good opportunity to restart or revitalise the conversation.
Why set this level at 20 points? This is the points score in a week which would qualify a lead as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead).
4. Key Sales pages visited
The only weakness of the above list is that it is possible to accrue 20 points by visiting a large number of low-value pages. This list gets around that problem by gathering up the accounts which have visited particularly important pages. These include the “book a demo” page and specific pieces of content which have historically tipped leads into a genuine buying interest.
The way to create this list is to look back over the journey that your current customers took. If possible, identify the one or two pages that turned them from leads to prospects.
Lists to profile from
In last week’s blog, we told you about the perfect time to call. The overall conclusion was that there are a few windows where you can expect success and chunks of the week where you’re better off shouting from the roof of your office. So how do your Sales team make the best use of their time in the off periods?
Profiling is our term for scouring LinkedIn, company websites and other useful sources to gather information. Any useful insights can then be fed into sales calls.We’ve built several lists to help our salespeople target their profiling efforts.
1. Hot Leads – Size Unknown
One of our Killer Values is that a company should have 30 or more employees. Out of all the Killer Values, this is the one that is most likely to require research. It’s usually pretty obvious whether a company is B2B or B2C. The front page of their website will tell you, and sometimes even their company name.
That said, with LinkedIn, Endole, CompanyCheck and other online tools, it shouldn’t take you long to find out the size of a company. This means you can work quickly through a list like this, building up a good set of calls for the next dialling period.
2. Big Enough – No Marketing Contact
GatorLeads can show you the name of the person who is browsing your website from a particular company. The only problem is that that person isn’t necessarily the decision maker that you are after.
Anyone who has spent time in a Sales or Business Development role will know that knowing the name of your lead makes a huge difference. Calling with no name is the fastest way to get cut off by a gatekeeper, and it’s a toss-up whether having the wrong name is even worse.
Give responsibility for this list to anyone who isn’t familiar with using LinkedIn, as it’s a very effective way to teach them!
Planning for success
Depending on how your sales team is organised, there are all sorts of ways to divide your data into lists. If there’s one that is delivering incredible results for you, then please let us know!
If you need further guidance, our guide to getting started with lead scoring will show you how to spot the leads you need to pay attention to. Or speak to one of our experts about diving straight into the Gator swamp.
