Remember to Convert Leads to Opportunities

Your content marketing, paid advertising, and cold calling all have one common goal: increasing the number of leads in your CRM. Each new lead could represent thousands of dollars in potential business. To realize this potential, however, you need a highly efficient workflow for processing new leads.

Insightly makes it easy to organize your leads, thanks in large part to an intuitive conversion process. What is lead conversion? Here’s a simple example.

Let’s say you own a small heating and air company in Missouri. To create awareness for your business, you advertise in the local newspaper and send out postcards. Your advertisements encourage consumers to visit your website and request a free consultation. As a result, it’s not uncommon for your sales manager to have several new leads in Insightly each morning. Upon establishing contact with the lead, the sales manager asks several questions to gauge interest. If the prospect is willing to schedule the free consultation, his lead record is then “converted” in Insightly.

Keep an Archive of Work Instructions

Speaking of guidelines, does your company have a centralized repository of policies and procedures? If not, perhaps it’s time you set one up.

For many years, quality assurance has been a major topic in the corporate world. Take a page out of the big business playbook and adapt this approach for your organization (with less red tape, of course). What’s the benefit? Work instructions reduce your risk of employee turnover. As one employee leaves, his or her replacement can hit the ground running.

Work instructions do not need to be overly complicated. A typical work instruction document could be as brief as one or two pages (including screenshots and explanations). The main goal is to provide a summary of the work being done. Though each department could feasibly have dozens of different work instructions, here are a few possible ideas for your sales team:

• When to add a new lead
• Rules for qualifying a lead
• Requirements for marking an opportunity as won
• De-duplicating records
• Adding new user accounts

If you’re an Insightly customer, the Help Center can be a great reference for answering many of the “how” questions you may have. Just be sure to also clarify the “why” when building your in-house work instructions.

Shake Up Your Work Patterns

It’s easier to stay motivated on certain days than others. If you find yourself feeling especially under-motivated, perhaps it’s time you shook things up.

Here are a few approaches for keeping your workday fresh:

First things first – Write out a list of all the stuff that you must get done today. If you’re using a task management system, consider filtering so that only today’s due dates are visible. Next, turn off all email notifications and sign out of your instant messenger. Begin working through those items until you’ve completed the list. As you cross through items on your last task, you’ll likely feel a tremendous boost of motivation. There’s nothing better than getting everything done.

Fun things first – It’s a simple fact that some work tasks are more fun than others. It’s occasionally OK to frontload your day with the stuff you actually enjoy doing. For example, if you decide to put in a few extra hours on a Saturday morning, you might choose to book your upcoming flight and hotel before doing your month-end report. Get some momentum by saving the worst for last.

Dreaded things first – What’s hanging over your head? Wouldn’t it be nice to get it done and stop worrying about it? On days like this, it can be effective to start with your most dreaded task. Need to talk to your boss about a mistake you made on an expense report? Confront this situation head-on so you can move onto a better part of your day.

Establish Best Practices for Using Leads

Here are a few questions to consider when developing your best practices:

• What buying signals must be present before a lead can be converted?
• Which criteria will be used for determining lead rating?
• What happens if a lead record is mistakenly created for an existing customer?
• When should a contact actually be changed to a lead?
• How will we deal with duplicate lead records?
• When should we (if ever) delete a lead?
• Should we set up a team that is specifically focused on lead management?
• When converting leads, how can we ensure accurate record linking?

By considering these questions and defining some basic guidelines, you’ll empower your team to take action without constant handholding. In addition, you can rest easier knowing that your data structure is in good hands.