How to prioritise active leads to increase your sales (steps)

Pay attention to the identification stage to find active leads by following these 5 steps

A common practice among sales teams is to contact everyone who fits the company's target market. The truth is that this strategy is invasive and unprofitable. What is the point of sending the same message to tens or hundreds of people with whom you have never interacted before? Most likely, users will ignore you and identify your brand as a nuisance. Therefore, instead of seeking the attention of an entire target audience, you should focus your efforts on active leads. Active leads are those prospects of your business who might already be interested in the products or services you offer.

Active leads or buyers are those prospects of your business who might already be interested in the products or services you offer. Therefore, they are users who are actively looking for solutions to their problems and who can become prospects if your business offers them help. OCCAM wants to make it easier for you to take care of active leads during the identification stage with this article, where we present the five steps necessary to prioritise this type of contacts and achieve inbound sales. Let's get started!

1. define the prospect compatible with your brand

To find and differentiate active leads from passive leads (i.e. people who do not plan to buy), the first thing to do is to define the target audience for your company and its products or services. To do this, there are two mechanisms:

• design the ideal profile for your customers. Depending on the nature of your brand, your customers may be other companies or a sector of the general population. Whatever the case, you should set the ideal profile based on their interests and demographic (gender, income, place of residence...), temporal or legal factors. The more defined it is, the better.
• create the buyer persona of your business. You can establish more than one, but all of them must meet the profile designed before. In this sense, a buyer persona is a fictitious and generalised representation of your ideal customer, something similar to an archetype or a character.

2. identify active buyers or leads

Once you are clear about your ideal customer profile and you have chosen your company's buyer personas, you can start looking for active leads. But how can you do this? Which users should you consider active buyers? Well, all those who interact closely with your company through your website's chatbot:

• the chatbot on your website.
• a phone call.
• a form on your website.
• an email.
• private messages on social networks.

These contact or interaction mechanisms involve identification by potential customers, which turns them into inbound leads. At this point, your goal is to satisfy their queries or needs as quickly as possible and ensure that they remain active throughout the buyer's journey. Otherwise, it is advisable to regularly update your database to eliminate passive users who have not shown interest for a long time.

3. interact with your prospects on social networks

Social selling will help you position yourself through different channels to reach the potential customers most interested in your activity. Moreover, interactions with your followers will encourage them to become active leads. On the other hand, by being present on social networks, you can increase your reach and authority by looking for active buyers. To do so, follow the five recommendations below:

• seek out the thought leaders in your industry and attract their attention. You should be very aware of the reference users on social networks who talk about topics related to your brand. These leaders can be journalists, influencers, employees of other companies similar to yours, research institutions, etc. Thus, your goal is to approach them and get them to share your content.
• join relevant LinkedIn or Facebook groups. Look for groups on these social networks on topics relevant to your company and participate in the conversations. Ask questions, answer other members' questions, share useful content, etc. If you don't find any groups, you can consider creating one.
• identify the blogs that your prospects read, share articles on social media from those blogs, leave comments on the websites... In fact, you can try to forge a relationship with the creators of the blogs to try to publish posts with them and establish a guest blogging strategy.
• Create content on your company's blog. To drive conversions and make it easier for your prospects to go through the buyer's journey, it is very important that you write your own educational articles on your website. You can find ideas in the most frequently asked questions you receive or in topics of great interest to your prospects. You can then share this content in groups, on your company profiles, to a specific thought leader, etc.
• be active on social networks. Post messages on your prospects' favourite social media sites three times a day: once in the morning, once at midday and once in the evening. This way, your followers will see that you are an interesting profile that offers your own content and shares useful material from other sources. This way, you can find leads for your business among the users with whom you interact the most.

4. set up your CRM to help you manage active leads

A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is software that helps businesses track their interactions with existing and potential customers. If you don't already have this tool, you can take advantage of the free CRM offered by HubSpot. You can then use it to prioritise active leads by following these steps:

1. have your website automatically send active leads to the CRM in real time.
2. set up the CRM to notify you of each new lead.
3. if the new contacts meet the characteristics of your ideal customer or buyer persona, find information about them and add it to the CRM.
4. if the new contacts don't have the potential to become customers, then move them to "unqualified" status and separate them from inbound leads.

Take advantage of your CRM's capabilities by creating lists that help you nurture leads throughout the buyer's journey. To do this, remember to keep your database segmented.

5. gather enough information about your active leads

Once you've identified active leads through social media, your website or any other avenue, it's time to research those who match your ideal customer. The goal is to offer them a more personalised relationship, so you need to record data about your contacts in your CRM, which falls into two categories:

• context about prospects' interests- to dig into this, analyse your leads ' behaviour with your company - what content have they downloaded, what pages have they visited, what blog have they subscribed to, how did they become leads?
• demographic context of the prospects. In this case, you can take advantage of the data that your leads include in the contact forms, download forms, subscription forms, etc. In addition, if you think you are missing important information, you can do some Google searches to find the data you are missing.

You now know everything you need to help your leads to follow your company from the identification stage. Now, let's get down to work!