Offer the best possible experience to your inbound leads during the connection stage with these 4 tips
After the identification phase where you have found active leads to work with, it's time to move on to the second phase and get in touch with your inboundleads, i.e. all those people who have visited your company's website and have identified themselves in some way, and in your first conversation with them, you will have to offer your help in a personalised way, taking into account their context, their interests and their demographics.
In your first conversation with them, you will have to offer your help in a personalised way, taking into account their context, their interests and their demographic data. Moreover, you will have to do it following the three fundamentals of inbound sales: humanity, usefulness and comprehensiveness. Let's see in this article how you can achieve it!
Establish categories according to the interests of your inbound leads
Personalised attention is one of the main characteristics of inbound sales, which is why you need to collect information and data about your leads to better understand their situation and context, so that you can offer each potential customer the specialised help they need instead of general messages that are rarely satisfactory.
In this case, as they are inbound leads, you can find out what topics each one is interested in or what problem they are looking to solve by analysing their behaviour with your company, i.e. by checking which pages they have visited, which document they have downloaded, which emails they have opened from your newsletter, what they share on their social networks, etc.
The objective of this research is to place each inbound lead in different interest categories, i.e. issues that concern your clientele and that your company can help them with. Each business has different interest categories because they adapt to the problems of their potential customers.
It is important that you associate the various categories with some of your company's own content (ebooks, blog articles, YouTube videos, etc.). This way, you will have a library of materials that you can share with your inbound leads when you contact them. To do this, you should be able to place each potential buyer in their corresponding interest category, something that will become easier as you gain experience with your customers.
Get in touch with inbound leads as soon as possible
One of the most effective strategies for inbound sales is to phone your leads. Not only that, but you should do so within five minutes of them becoming inbound leads. Investing time in calling interested people at the right time is far more effective than traditional mass calls.
If you achieve this level of speed, you have a better chance of getting the lead to move on to the next stage of the buyer's journey and become a customer. To do this, use the call to learn more about their problem and offer help through your company's content tailored to their interest category. Remember that the goal of the connection stage is to set up a meeting or another call where you can go deeper into the challenges of the inbound lead.
In case it is not possible to contact the lead so soon, you can leave a voicemail, call later or send an email. In these cases, remember to mention who you are and the interaction they had with your company in case they have forgotten.
Carefully craft your messages to make them engaging and human
As we saw before, your relationship with inbound leads must be human, useful and integral; and this also applies to your communication with them. In this sense, we recommend you to follow the following six tips to write messages or have conversations with your leads:
- review the content created by your company. In order to be able to send relevant materials to each potential customer, it is necessary that you first make an inventory of your company's content. In addition, you could classify it according to the different interest categories to discover if you need to create more content on any of them. Another solution to the lack of material is to look for content from outside your company that can also be of help to leads, as long as it does not belong to your competitors.
- send short messages: communications should be short: voice messages of about 15 seconds, emails with a maximum of 200 words..
- talk more about the buyer than about yourself. There is a rule you must follow: mention the lead twice as often as you mention your company.
- ask a final question in your emails, so you are more likely to get an answer.
- be helpful and natural- remember that communications are between people, not robots - so be human and natural to offer help to leads rather than directly offering them a sale.
- personalise the message as much as possible. Always remember to use the information you have about your leads. This way, by adapting the messages to each specific case, they will see that you care about them. This is also useful for the subject lines of the emails, where you can include the name of the person you are addressing.
When contacting inbound leads or sending them content, think about which channel you will use, at what time and how many times you will insist if they do not reply. It is normal to try a maximum of five times.
Use tools that facilitate your communication with inbound leads
Although technology is a new challenge for marketing and sales teams, it also offers tools that make their job easier. Let's see which ones you can use to improve your relationship with leads:
- email templates: Having different email templates prepared is very useful for saving time and not writing the same presentations from scratch. Create a template for the different situations that may occur or the different buyer personas of your company and, when sending the email, remember to adapt it to the context of the lead
- a CRM is a customer relationship manager that reflects their activity with the company and collects information about them that will be very useful to you. It also helps you to speed up the lead acquisition process by receiving real-time notifications that help you to get in touch with them as quickly as possible.
- meeting scheduling: It will help you to schedule the next appointment with your lead to move on to the exploration stage. It is useful because it takes into account the rest of your pending obligations, as if it were a diary.
Take advantage of tools like HubSpot to optimise your work, but not to depersonalise your communications. Remember that each message must be unique and tailored to the person you are addressing, so avoid other tools like group correspondence or automatic dialling systems that make personalisation impossible.
and this is all you can implement during the connection stage! Try to offer the attention you would like to receive in order to transfer your inbound leads to the next phase: the exploration stage. And remember that this change will happen when your potential customers accept that you help them with their challenges in depth.
