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How to Convert a “Lead” to “Prospect” to “Paying Customer” – The Find the Capital Way!

How to Convert a “Lead” to “Prospect” to “Paying Customer” – The Find the Capital Way!

By on Jun 10, 2013 in From Find the Capital, Sales and Marketing | 0 comments


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Article by, Lisa Virkus – Founder and CEO of Find the Capital

So many Sales and Marketing Consultants focus their energy on Marketing advice. Rarely do any of them focus on the Sales side of the business. Why is this? If I was to speculate, it’s because these “Consultants” have never actually sold anything themselves. It’s easy to market. Selling is another thing…

Find the Capital has an advisory practice that helps companies looking to grow their business implement our proven system for generating new customers known as the FTC Ultimate Marketing System. In this article, I’m going to do something other Consultants rarely do….teach you our proven system of how to identify Leads and then Convert them from Lead to Prospects to Paying Customers…The FTC Ultimate Marketing System way.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use our industry as the example (i.e. Sales and Marketing Consulting). Let’s say your in our business and using an email “Drip Campaign” as your main prospecting activity. Under this prospecting method, you send out a weekly email to your database of contacts. The emails you send are providing your contacts with important articles on how they can grow their business. The emails are put together in a formate that allows your reader to click through on a topic, which redirects them to your website for the full article. Why is this important to have them “click through”? It’s simple. Most email campaign companies like Constant Contact or Campaigner allow you to see who clicked through to read the rest of the article. Point being is if a person has taken the time to click through, this may be a good indication they are looking for your services. So in this example, let’s assume your sent the following email out:

Dear Contact,

We all know LinkedIn is the number one social network for business people. Then why is it you are not generating any business out of it? In this weeks Growing Your Empire article we are going to focus on 5 Simple Steps to Marketing Your Business on LinkedIn.

LinkedIn can play a significant role in the effective marketing of your business. LinkedIn’s value as a marketing tool gets a lot of buzz from most companies’ finance departments, especially because they see LinkedIn as a free way of marketing the business. Marketing your business on LinkedIn involves….

Click Here to Read On!

We hope you enjoy this weeks Growing Your Empire.

Sincerely,

You send the above email out to your database of 2,000 contacts. Two days later, you pull the report from your email campaign company, which highlights 45 people that took the time to click through and read the entire article. At this point you know these people may be interested in using LinkedIn more effectively and might enjoy your Advisory Services that help them do so. Under the FTC Ultimate Marketing System, these are steps you take to convert that contact from a “Lead” to “Prospect” to Paying “Customer”. And equally important how you track them on your contact management system.

Step 1 – Initial Contact

  • For the contacts that clicked through, change their “contact category” via your contact management system from “General Contact” to “Lead”.
  • You then send them the following personalized email:

Dear Contact,

I hope this email finds you well.

I wanted to take a moment and check in. We recently send out an informative article about 5 Simple Steps to Marketing Your Business on LinkedIn. Did you know our company has one of the top 1% most viewed profiles on LinkedIn? To put it simple, LinkedIn has been one of the most important business generators for our business. This said, our Advisory Practice is helping companies just like yours implement the same strategies we use to generate massive Lead Flow through LinkedIn.

I’d enjoy the opportunity to get together and learn more about your business and how we may help you grow your LinkedIn presence. How’s your schedule over the next few weeks?

Sincerely,

When someone responds asking for a meeting, you change their contact from a “Lead” to “Prospect” and schedule a meeting accordingly. The goal of this meeting is simple. It’s to meet with the prospect, learn more about their business and how they currently use LinkedIn. It’s important to make sure you really ask questions and listen. This is not the time for you to talk. It’s a time to listen… Once you have a better understanding of what they are doing, you give them an overview of how you can provide value.

If they sign up, you change their contact category from “Prospect” to “Customer” and provide them your services. They are now, as we say, a “Paying Customer”!

In the event they don’t sign up for your services, you send them a thank you email for their consideration and let them know you’d enjoy the opportunity to help them when timing is right. At this point, you change their category form “Prospect” to “Pitch and Miss”.

Why is it important to have all of your contacts properly categorized? It’s simple marketing. If you are consistently running an effective marketing campaign to your contacts, you want to know what type of relationship you have with them as you may run targeted campaigns from time to time. For example, you may run a specialized campaign to everyone you once tried to sell your services to but failed to close them. Hence, why you want to know who your “Pitch and Miss” people are.

What do we do with the people that did not respond? Here is the FTC process.

Step 2 – First Follow Up (2 days after the initial email was sent)

For everyone that didn’t respond, you forward them the actual email you send them in Step 1 with the following message in the body:

Dear Contact,

I’m just following up on the below email I sent you a few days ago. I’d enjoy the opportunity to learn more about your business. Any interest?

Sincerely,

At this point you will most likely get more people to respond either with “I’d like to learn more or timing is not right but thank you for the follow up.” At this point you either process them from “Prospect” to “Customer” or “Pitch and Miss”.

Step 3 – Second Follow Up (2 days after the second email was sent)

For everyone that did not respond in your first follow up, you again forward them the actual email you sent them in Step 2 (so they can see an email chain of how you diligently follow up) with the following message:

Dear Contact,

Just being diligent in my follow up on the email I sent you a few days ago. Please see below. As I mentioned I’d enjoy the opportunity to learn more about your business. This said, I don’t want to be a pest so at this point I’m going to assume timing is not right for you. If I’m incorrect, please let me know. I’d enjoy getting together.

Sincerely,

You’d be shocked how many people will get back with you on the third email. I believe it is for two reasons. First, following up with someone shows them you are serious about getting their business. Second, when you tell someone you are moving on, it makes people wonder what they are missing…

At this point you process the “Prospects” to “Customer” and for the people that do not respond, categorize them to “Pitch and Miss”.

As you can see our system is pretty simple. This said, why is it more people are not successful with their prospecting campaigns? We’ve found this is also pretty simple. Most people start to implement a system, but never follow through. They send the first email, get frustrated with the lack of response and never send the second email… Furthermore they fail to properly track their contacts via a contact management system. So their prospects end up falling through the cracks as they get lost in the process.

The best advise I can give, is develop a strategy and run it consistently for 3 months. If it is not working, make adjustments. I hope you found this article helpful and best of luck with your marketing moving forward. If you would like to learn more about the FTC Ultimate Marketing System and how it may help you Grow Your Empire, simply click the learn more button below and enjoy the short video!

 

Click Here to Learn More

 

Alternatively, if you would like to learn more about all of our services, simply reach out to us below.

How can we help?

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    How to Process a “Lead” to “Prospect” to “Paying Customer” – The Find the Capital Way! | Triton Capital Advisory - [...] Click Here to Read On! [...]

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