Capitalize On Your Leads
As a small-business owner, your sales leads are often among your most valuable assets, especially if they’re the result of consumers contacting your company. When someone takes the time to reach out to you, they have an active interest in your goods or services – an interest you can nurture over time and ideally convert into a sale.
While your leads are valuable, you can only realize their potential if you can manage them effectively. Unfortunately, many startups and established small businesses simply don’t have enough workers to keep track of their leads and make the most of them. To capitalize on your leads, qualified or otherwise, you need a lead management tool that allows you to store, organize and sort your data, and track your most promising leads as often as necessary.
Managing Leads Effectively
Depending on the complexity of your business and the number of sales leads you have, your customer relationship management software, or CRM, may be as simple as a spreadsheet you share with your sales team. Even if you haven’t made the switch to cloud computing, you can still use Google Drive or a file-sharing service to share your lead database with the people who need access to it.
If you’re not ready to invest in a more sophisticated CRM at this time, you can still take steps to manage your sales leads more effectively. Here are some basic lead-management tools you can use in your small business:
- Your Inbox: You can choose from various providers to upgrade your email services. These upgrades typically enable you to make better decisions about the emails you receive and how and when you respond to them. They also allow you to automate various time-consuming tasks. For instance, Boomerang will make sure your most important emails are at the top of your inbox. You can also use Boomerang to schedule and send mass emails to your sales leads on a specific date in the future.
- Sales Functions: Some of your current apps may have simple sales functions, but you may have to look for them. Depending on your apps, you may be able to share contacts or communications with specific groups of employees by defining the group within the app.
- Smartphones: Certain apps can make it as easy to manage relationships as it is to manage contact information with your smartphone. These apps retrieve updates from social media, emails and other sources and keep your contact information up to date accordingly.
- Social Media: You can use various tools to monitor your company’s social media activity. These tools can help you identify new leads, interact with clients and prospects, and discover what specific consumers are saying about your goods, services and company. There’s also software that acts as a social media listening service. This software mines for keywords and phrases that consumers are using all over the internet and identifies people who may have an interest in your goods or services.
Lead Management Phone System
Even if you don’t have the resources to invest in a CRM, you can still manage your sales leads more effectively and efficiently with a small business virtual phone system from AccessDirect. Our cloud-based lead management phone system ensures you’ll be able to respond to every inquiry as quickly as possible. Our Find Me/Follow Me feature and text integration will allow you to get your leads the information they need when they want it.
Our lead management solutions can accommodate separate phone numbers for tracking on separate lead sources, provide advanced notifications via SMS text, email or web interface, and transcribe your voicemails in emails or texts. Our small-business VoIP has even more features that will help you improve your lead management, and it works seamlessly with many CRM platforms, including Salesforce, Highrise and Zoho.
While you don’t have to implement a costly CRM to improve your lead management, there are still some basic things you can do to improve how you handle your leads. One of the smartest things you can do is implement a virtual phone system from AccessDirect. Your upfront costs are minimal with us, and you’ll just pay a low monthly fee instead. Contact Access Direct to learn more about our affordable small-business VoIP solutions now.
