One of the best ways to increase your sales and your company’s productivity is to assign different lead priority to your leads. This will help you weed out the leads that may not be as important, or likely to respond, leaving you the time to pursue the ones that will. By organizing your sales pipeline, you are in effect making it easier to make sales.
In order to segment leads, it is important to come up with a system that will work for your organization. Each company is different, but within specific industries, you’ll be able to find similarities that will cross these boundaries. Let’s look at a way that any company can segment leads for greater effectiveness.
Separating the Wheat from the Chaff
The first step is to work out a lead priority system. If you have a sales manager and a sales team, you may want to make them part of the decision so that they can help you come up with a system that will work for everyone. You can divide your leads up however you would like, but it is easy to split them into three different groups – High Priority, Medium and Low.
Your first priority should be the newest leads since they will be the ones that are most likely to respond. Any leads that are gathered through permission based marketing should also be ranked in the high group since again they will be more responsive.
Your medium group can contain leads that have expressed interest in the past, but never made the final jump towards a sale. With a little extra effort, they are more likely to be convinced. The medium group can also contain leads that are not quite as fresh, but still not aged.
The final group, the Low Priority group, should contain aged leads and other leads that have not panned out in the past, but have the potential to in the future. The only exception to this rule would be for the debt industry where in some cases, aged leads may be more important.
Setting up a System
Once you have your lead priority assigned, you can begin to work out a system to follow up with them. In order to make sure that each group gets at least some attention, you can split them up into how many hours will be devoted to each, or even days. For example, you can focus on high priority and medium priority leads four days out of the week, and low priority leads on one day.
It is important to find a system that will work for your organization and this is where your sales manager or team leader will play an important role. Work with them to come to a solution that everyone can use.
Lastly, you may want to consider using a lead CRM program to manage your leads and their priority. This makes it easier to schedule follow-ups and you’ll be able to keep track of everything that is going on in one easy to use place.