Your leads are your future
Your leads are your next customers and your best referral sources. Here is a quick five step way to get the most out of every lead.
(1) Design a Good Sales Funnel
A sales funnel is the way a lead becomes a customer. Its called a funnel because it get narrower. Based on our data of over 494,350 pool customers about 15% of households that request a pool quote will purchase a pool within 5 years. This means that 85 out of 100 leads will not buy a pool, no one knows which 15 will buy a pool. You need a sales funnel that keeps as leads active and engaged in your business so that you can capture as many of those 15 sales as possible.
Your funnel should:
- Allow as many leads as possible to fall into your sales funnel.
- Keep your leads active and engaged with your business.
- Tell you to know when a lead becomes a hot prospect.
- Help you close the deal.
- Build your word of mouth and referral business – filling up your funnel.
- Give you the information to get better at all the above.
(2) Keep your leads active
One out of seven pool leads will turn into a project, by only about 25% ( 1 out of 30 leads) will close right away. A good sales funnel will keep all of these leads active and engaged in your business. This could mean up to 3 more projects from the same leads. If you just keep your leads active in your sales funnel you can triple your lead to sales rates.
(3) Build a social community around your business
The quote above is from a personal friend and social media expert Brian Franz. He most certainly gets it. Smart phones, Facebook and social media has changed the business game. You must use mobile web, Facebook and “content” keep your leads active. Is this worth your investment? We think so because keeping your leads active can triple your revenue from the same leads.
(4) Use social media to keep your leads active.
Keeping your leads active means nurturing your leads. Nurturing leads is all about quality ‘touches’. This means how are you building your brand awareness with your leads. This use to be very expensive and difficult. Television, radio, newspapers and direct mail use to be the only way to connect with your potential customers and build brand awareness, loyalty etc. Today there are many inexpensive branding channels like web search, social media and email. Seeing a nice picture of your pool on Facebook, or learning something interesting about your business in a blog post is the modern day television commercial.
The key to doing this well is know what you are doing and automate to nurture all of your leads. Use social media engagement and drip marketing to keep your leads active.
(5) Create a consistent, evolving content strategy.
Content is another way to say ‘stuff you share’. It can be pictures, stories videos, status updates or other stuff. Creating a winning content strategy is figuring out what you are going to tell your leads, when are you are going to say it, and how are you going to say it. Content strategies are effective if they are designed and implemented well. A well developed media campaign will keep your leads active and engaged.
A winning content strategy should:
- Keep leads entertained and engaged to build brand awareness, trust and loyalty.
- Slow-cook leads into prospects by reinforcing the desire to get a pool, addressing the logical questions about getting a pool, and building familiarity and trust.
- Create triggers so that you can identify when it is time to treat an individual lead like a prospect.
- Build referral channels. One of the best thing about qualified pool consumers is that they know other pool people. Creating incentives to share content and information about your business will feed the above objectives and also continue to fill your pipeline with new leads.