5 Steps To Consistently Close Inbound Leads

We all know that exciting feeling, the buzz of seeing a fresh lead fly into your email inbox, DM’s or give you a call.

BUT are you following a repeatable process that maximises your chances of winning sales from inbound leads?

Here’s a 5 step process that will get you on the right path…

Or, if you prefer to watch rather than read, here’s the video version.

1/ Research

Once the lead hits, check out the prospect on LinkedIn - you can quickly find out their job role, company size, website and gain some basic info on them to help you pre call/email so you aren't going in blind.

No need to spend more than a 3-5 minutes tops on this.

2/ Speed

According to a HubSpot article by Chris Getman, only 37 percent of companies respond to their leads within an hour.

10 minutes to 60 minute is the optimal response time according to insidesales.com 

I recommend linking inbound enquiries to go to the relevant sales reps emails direct so they maximise their connection rate and can hop straight onto them and book a call if the lead comes in.

I’ve seen companies not provide leads to sales people for a day or longer and quite frankly it’s a joke. More importantly this poor practise is seriously harming their business & bottom line. 

Why should the lead go straight to the relevant sales rep or business owner? Let’s say a lead comes in 7pm or 8pm at night (after standard 9-5 working hours) the sales professional/business owner can reply to the lead and get the call booked that evening for the following day.

Or, if they only left an email - the conversation can start that evening, putting you ahead of competitors that may only call the next day.

Plus you are showing your prospect you are serious and keen to help them.

3/ Get the prospect to open up

I recently heard this line as a great opener after your intro...

“What motivated you to get in touch with us today?”

The prospect may say “I saw your ad on Google/Facebook or was recommended..” or something else.

To which you can say something like “Great, I know I often see lot’s of ads but rarely click them, what would you say was the main driver for you wanting to reach out to us?”

Then shut up. Let the prospect open up about their situation and they may tell you way more than you expect (and may even cover a lot of the next step, below)! Be sure to take notes.

4/ Qualify

One important thing to remember is that not everyone who gets in touch with you is qualified to do business with you, and you with them!

They may not have a problem your solution fixes, they may not have budget, or it could be something else!

I’d suggest a simple upfront contract at the start of calls, something like:

“Lisa, looking forward to chatting through your [service] enquiry today, I will have a few questions on your requirements and you may have a few questions for me too, it may be that we are unable to help you which is fine, if you feel this please do let me know and if I feel this I will do too and aim to refer you to someone I trust to help, is that OK?"

“We may agree that we can help here, if so are we OK to spend some time discussing next steps”

Get a yes for both and then get stuck into the call.

Here’s a few things to take note of...

Goals/pains: what are the current issues they are having and what are the impact of the issues they are having (be sure to take clear notes to re-cap later).

If you sell CRM software for example, it might be that the prospects current provider doesn’t integrate with GMAIL, until you ask questions around the impact you won’t know this is an issue and you wouldn’t learn that Lisa is frustrated from spending an hour every day manually adding contacts into the CRM and it’s wasting her and her teams selling time. 

Where do they want to get to: Understand their average order values (if relevant), where they want to be with your service e.g. to increase sales by X 1 years time because they can focused on prospecting not managing CRM and what will happen if they don’t invest in your offering. E.g. they are forever wasting 1 hour per day, 5 hours a week, 20 hours a month etc.

Decision makers: If you know they are the sole company owner e.g. of a business then you may not need to ask. However, I recommend asking: “As well as yourself, who needs to be involved in this project” - It could be they are the marketing/sales manager and for your demo/presentation their CEO, Head of IT, Marketing Director all need to be involved.

Time-line: When do they want to get started, get this to the exact date. Wishy washy replies will hurt your sales pipeline and leave you none the wiser.

Budget: If you or the prospect haven’t ruled out working with each other, re-cap all the goals you just noted down and the pain points and where they want to get to, then ask “Based on this, what have you allocated to attack these goals”.

If they say something like “I am not sure” or “I was hoping you could tell me”.

Try the bracketing technique e.g. Well for a basic solution customers often invest “A amount to B amount” or for a mid level solution it’s “C amount to D amount” or if you wanted the fully fledged option it would be “E to F amount - which of these, if any can you see making sense for you?”

The prospect will then give you all you need.

5/ Set next steps

For transactional sales you may now be able to go through your solution (only explaining the points that address their pain points and goals) and close the deal over a call / email and ask if it makes sense to proceed. If they say anything but yes then ask “What about X didn’t make sense” - then be quiet and allow them to help you understand what needs to be shown to win the business.

For bigger solutions the next step may be to book a demo. If you are on a call send the calendar invite and get it booked whilst on the call e.g. “Lisa, looking forward to the demo with you, is Tuesday or Wednesday morning or afternoon best this week?”

Send the invite while on the line and ask them to accept it there and then and say you will fill in the agenda for the meeting and the video link etc. later that day (and be sure to do so).

Go get 'em!

That’s it, follow these steps closely and you are well on your way to making best use of your time with inbound leads and winning more business!

If you found this guide useful, please do let me know in the comments and I will do one how to nail on presentations / demo’s!

Are you tired of constantly hunting for new customers?

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Would you like to learn more about our unusual approach that brings ideal clients straight to you?

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Happy selling!

Sam