Lead Optimize Outsourced Marketing

This is a how-to for those of you who sell complex items or services and want each lead from your web site’s contact form(s) to be answered personally.

Answering contact form leads personally and quickly develops a professional and service-oriented reputation in your prospects’ minds from the very first time they make contact with you.

For the purpose of this article, we will cover the basic how-to’s and pros and cons of three methods for responding to contact form leads. You may find that some mixed version of all three works well for your company.

1. Respond, Introduce, and Distribute to Salespeople
2. Forward Leads Straight to Salespeople
3. Online Sales Specialist (or Team)

1. Respond, Introduce, and Distribute

Method #1 is the most complex way to handle sales leads but is excellent when you want to ensure a fast response to your contact form leads in a reliable and consistent way and/or your company has too many leads for one salesperson to effectively handle alone. It is also excellent for companies who do not separate their salespeople geographically or by product categories as it allows the leads to be distributed to the salesperson who is most capable of selling the lead.

The Responder
With this method, you will have one designated contact form lead responder. That person must be knowledgeable of your products, an excellent written communicator, well-tempered (for when people ask ridiculous questions - and they will), and objective (he or she will be distributing sales leads to salespeople). Your responder is your front line PR for sales leads from your website and can have a huge impact on your site visitors’ perceptions of your company and its products.

The responder will capture each contact form lead and respond (probably by replying to the contact form email) succinctly and personally, addressing the prospect by name and answering questions the prospect might have asked in the form’s comments box. The responder will not usually get into pricing. That is the salesperson’s job. The responder might even subtly up-sell the prospect on complimentary products and, in doing so, give ideas and suggestions passively to the salesperson who will be receiving the lead.

The responder is the gateway between the leads and the salespeople - between marketing and sales - and should filter the leads. Bad or valueless leads should not get through to salespeople. Salespeople should get good leads. If there is a lead whose value is tough to decipher, the responder might want to reply by asking for more information in order to direct the customer to the best salesperson for his needs/project.

This responder job is excellent for site designers or someone in the online marketing area because it helps them fine-tune the site to generate the kinds of leads the company desires.

The Introduction
After addressing the needs or wants of the customer, the responder should introduce the prospect to his salesperson who has been chosen specifically because he is the salesperson with the most experience on projects like his and will be able to help him most quickly and accurately. Yes, this should be stated, especially on your more technical inquiries (and only if it is true).

The Distribution
Now that the basic questions have been answered and the best salesperson has been introduced through the response the lead needs to be distributed. The responder can send the response to the prospect and forward the contact form lead to the respective salesperson or the responder can copy the salesperson directly on the initial reply. I prefer the latter as it allows the salesperson to see the full details of the transaction thus far.

Additionally, there will be times when the prospect replies directly to the responder with questions instead of waiting for the salesperson to contact them. This sometimes indicates an eager purchaser. In my experience, the best response is something to the effect of, “Great question. I have copied your salesperson, Bob Smith, on this reply and he will contact you shortly to discuss your project and answer any questions you might have.”

The respond, introduce, and distribute method is my favorite because it generally leads to a fast initial response time and offers a uniform and reliable response to visitors who contact the company through the site’s contact form(s). This method is also very flexible and works whether your salespeople are divided into territories, products groups, or not at all.

2. Online Sales Specialist (or Team)

An online sales specialist handles all of the contact form sales leads from end-to-end. An online sales team might do the same thing but, functionally, that works almost just like method #1 so for this exercise, let’s say there are few enough leads that one person can handle all aspects of your contact form leads from initial contacts, through order facilitation, and lead follow ups.

The Responder = The Salesperson
Basically, an online sales specialist is the responder from the first method but he introduces himself and does not distribute the leads to other salespeople (unless that is technically the best thing to do). The online sales specialist typically needs to be fairly tech-savvy, great with professional written communications, and must be able to handle the complexities of your company’s orders from end-to-end. In other words, if he is not going to be distributing leads based on what they are, he needs to be able to handle them all, which probably requires a great deal of technical knowledge of your products or services.

The Weaknesses
The weaknesses of using this method are fairly obvious. For instance, why would you use it? Unless you are a very small company or you want a division that is totally focused on online sales (for whatever reason), there is no reason to have this. In fact, giving all leads from your company’s website to one person or one group of person’s might be considered a waste of resources during downtimes when the phones are slow in other areas and there are qualified people who could be taking care of online orders.

Online Sales Specialist Specialists
If your website is divided into categories and each has its own contact form you can designate a person with a great deal of knowledge in that area(a specialist) as the online sales lead specialist for that category of products or services. For instance, if your law firm has three specialties - estate, immigration, and intellectual property - you might designate a specialist from each of those areas as the responder to leads from the respective contact form. Obviously, if leads arrive through the wrong contact form they should be forwarded to the proper online specialist.

3. Forward Leads Straight to Salespeople

As the heading implies, this method is rather simple and involves forwarding leads directly to the appropriate salesperson. It does still require a gateway person between the leads and the salespeople, although the gateway can be set up electronically by territory or product category. If the forwarder is a person, she should cull bad leads with a polite and effective response or might even try to sell them herself or perhaps give them to a trainee for the educational value sometimes found within chasing one’s own tail.

This method is used effectively by companies all over the world but allows for no guidance from a responder as in method #1 although this might not be important to you. The important part is that the salespeople to whom the leads are forwarded respond quickly.

For companies that have a huge volume of sales leads or separate their salespeople into clearly divided territories of product categories (or both), this method will probably prove to be the most time-saving because when there is only one salesperson who gets leads from the west coast there is no point in scrutinizing the details to choose the best salesperson for the lead.

Customize for Your Leads

The methods above are not the only options available (by far) and we did not even cover customer relationship management software, writing styles, or sales techniques. These are simply some models around which you might consider structuring your contact form sales leads distribution. Choose the best method for your business, your salespeople, and your customers - probably some mixture of the above.

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