Why You Don’t Really Need More Leads

Okay so obviously this title is pure clickbait—most of us aren’t going to turn down new leads. But the point of this blog post is to bring your attention to another source of new revenue that I guarantee you are doing nothing to nourish:

Your existing lead pool.

And before you get the wrong idea, this blog post isn’t about marketing to your current clients or trying to get more repeat business; it’s simply about trying to close or book more of the leads you already have. About improving your lead-to-sale conversion rate, if you will.

If you’re anything like our typical client, you likely have a team of people answering your inbound phone leads. But you likely don’t have a lot of time to listen to the way in which they handle your calls to know whether or not it hinders or helps you get more booked jobs. And for every job that they can’t close, all money, effort, and time you spent to acquire that lead is wasted.

Let me give you a little bit of background.

At Blue Corona, we granularly track all of our clients’ marketing strategies, which includes call tracking for every campaign. This is pretty standard these days (although no one else was doing it 8 years ago when we started). What’s not standard is that we record and listen to every inbound calls that come in. This may sound tedious, but it’s the only way to know whether or not the calls are leads, recover lost leads, and attribute revenue to each call/strategy.

But something else happened when our team listened to all of those phone calls; we started picking up on all the mistakes that call handling teams make that cost them leads. We realized this was a huge leverage point for our clients; by closing more of their inbound leads, they’d get a much better return on ad spend for each marketing strategy across the board (as long as those strategies were producing qualified leads to begin with).

If I had to guess, I’d say very few businesses invest in strategies to monitor, analyze, or improve the way their calls are handled. To compare, I’d also guess most are investing thousands of dollars every month on marketing to make their phone ring. Doesn’t make sense does it?

Where Do I Start?

Start by tracking, recording, and listening to your inbound calls. If you don’t have time to do this, you can hire a company to do it for you.

Once you’ve done this, you can begin a call handling audit. Your audit should answer questions like:

• Whether you have a large number of missed calls.
• If your CSRs are polite and knowledgeable.
• If your leads convert into sales or appointments (If not, why? Is it due to a CSR error?).
• What is your CSR close rate and who are your best CSRs.
• What obstacles your CSRs face.
• If there are any ways your CSRs can improve.

Next, you have to train your CSRs. And you know what? Simply recording the calls and letting people hear how they actually sound on the phone can be a powerful teaching tool itself.

Another Place You Can Start

Blue Corona hosts free webinars on the last Friday of every month. On May 26, 2015, we’re hosting a webinar called “How to Squeeze More Revenue Out of Your Existing Lead Pool.”

In the webinar, two of Blue Corona’s marketing specialists will walk you through the top mistakes CSRs make on the phone. By learning more about these common pitfalls in this webinar, your CSR will have a better understanding of the different types of customers and the confidence needed to book the appointment—allowing you to get more from every marketing dollar you spend and squeeze more revenue out of your existing lead pool.

Read more or click below to save your spot.