Today’s guest post comes from Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo from Business Made Simple. Join Erin and Melissa tomorrow, April 6th, at 11:00 am, PST, for a live Twitter Chat. You can find and follow us at: @insightlyapp #LoveYourCRM. You can also follow Erin and Melissa at: @businessmadesim.
If you don’t have sales, you don’t have a business. The trend in sales is the higher the price, the longer the sales process. Managing a longer, more detailed sales process can be tricky. Insightly can help you stay on top of all the important details and make a huge difference on your bottom line. Here are 3 essential steps to creating a sales system that pays big.
Lead Collection
Capturing information is the first step in the sales process. This information can be helpful in many ways (market research and understanding your customer) but the most important reason you should collect leads is to market to them. Not everyone will buy from you, but studies show that it takes 5-7 touches before someone takes action to purchase. That statistic is especially true with larger ticket items.
Insightly makes lead capture simple. For online leads, simply integrate an insightly web form onto your website and have your online leads added directly to Insightly. Once they have been added to Insightly, you can organize and tag them based on custom tags you create.
Maybe you’re old school and collect business cards from your sales prospects. Paid insightly plans include a business card scanner that will enter your contacts information for you. You can also add them individually to Insightly by creating a new contact. If you are adding cards in bulk, simply input all the data into a spreadsheet and upload them to Insightly. Now that you have their information, use that information to educate them on your product or service. That leads us to the next step of the sales process.
Lead Nurture
When it comes to purchasing a high ticket item, consumers tend to research before they buy. When someone is spending thousands of dollars, or hundreds of thousands of dollars, they want to know they’re getting “the best bang for their buck.” The consumer needs to know they can trust you. You do this by nurturing your lead.
Once a consumer knows who you are, the next step is to educate (nurture) them on your product or service. Companies often use their lead nurture approach as a “lead magnet” to attract and nurture prospective clients. This can be done in many ways, depending on your product or service. Here are just a few:
- Free consultation
- Free trial
- Live workshop
- Online webinar
- Monthly e-newsletter
- Weekly tip email
- Video e-course
- Free content such as swipe files or a template
Mailchimp is a great way to deliver lead nurture content to everyone on your email list. Because Mailchimp integrates with Insightly, you can easily add new leads or contacts to your email marketing campaigns from within Insightly with just the click of a button.
The Insightly email template feature also allows you to send personalized content to the masses. Insightly email templates offers less design elements than Mailchimp, but it’s a great way to deliver essential content to the masses without spending hours playing copy paste or using BCC and increasing your chances of ending up in the spam folder.
Asking for the sale
For larger ticket items or services, asking for the sale can involve consulting time, developing proposals, putting together bids and estimates, and creating reports. Insightly’s activity sets and pipeline features are great for helping you utilize best practices for each client. Here’s an example from the real estate industry.
Task Who When
| Set appointment to meet with new lead | Eva | Day 1 |
| Book meeting room if not holding at their location | Eva | Day 1 |
| Send pre-meeting survey | Peter | Day 1 |
| Start a folder for client in Google drive–>Clients. Create spreadsheet with client name | Eva | Day 1 |
| Send reminder email to complete survey if they haven’t already done so | Peter | Day 5 |
| Pull properties from MLS based on their survey responses | Peter | Day 5 |
| Add survey results and MLS properties to their client file | Eva | Day 6 |
| Follow up to ensure engagement agreement was signed | Joan | Day 14 |
When you use pipelines and activity sets, your sales process begins to run like a well oiled machine. Set tasks for more custom client activities such as specific follow up dates. Insightly will remind you on the day you need to call a client to follow up. Remember, the fortune is in the follow up.
Larger ticket sales can be a lot to manage, but using Insightly can help you stay on top of multiple opportunities at once. Easily import new leads into Insightly using the business card scanner or their easy upload features. Use email templates and Mailchimp integration to make sure your
leads are being nurtured until they’re ready to purchase. And instead of managing the sales process in your head, activity sets and pipelines can help ensure you utilize best practices to manage every detail.
****Alternate chart for activity set example*******
Day 1
- Eva will set an appointment to meet with new lead
- Eva will book a meeting room if needed
- Peter will send the pre-meeting survey email template
- Eva will create a new client file in the Google Drive
Day 5
- Peter will remind client to complete survey if they haven’t already done so
- Peter will pull properties from MLS based on survey responses
Day 6
- Eva will add survey results and MLS properties to the client file
Day 14
- Joan will follow up to make sure the engagement agreement is signed
Today’s guest post comes from Erin Mathie and Melissa Bamfo from Business Made Simple. Join Erin and Melissa tomorrow, April 6th, at 11:00 am, PST, for a live Twitter Chat. You can find and follow us at: @insightlyapp #LoveYourCRM. You can also follow Erin and Melissa at: @businessmadesim.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
