How to Manage Leads and Appointments

In order for a business, whether big or small, to grow, there needs to be a healthy level of collaboration and delegation that exists. Regardless if you’re talking about an individual employee or an outsourced agency, nobody would like to work for a micromanager especially when it comes to fields that require a lot of work and creativity such as the aspects of marketing, PR, or design. Now, since you can’t split your team nor your body in half to make sure that everything is going as planned, you have to take an extra step and partner up with a team of professionals who can do the job for you.

In this article, we’re going to talk about why you need to consider hiring an outsourced lead generation team as well as how to effectively manage the leads and appointments obtained from your outsourced agency.

Outsourcing Lead Generation

If you can’t afford to hire experts to help you, outsourcing is the best answer. This is no stranger to the world of marketing. Lead generation companies may specialize in one area, but oftentimes they are quite the multi-facet experts who can cover a lot of services such as content marketing, email marketing, SEO, social media, appointment setting, etc.

While you may think you’re hiring a company to get you more sales, investing in a lead generation agency can bring a lot more benefit to your organization than just new business.

So, you thought of hiring an outsource agency to handle the marketing and lead generation aspects for you. This is all good and dandy, but when everything is said and done, you are also left with a fresh database of leads and appointments that your outsource agency provided you with.

How To Convert New Leads And Appointments

Establish a Lead Qualification Process/Criteria

Your lead qualification is the process of marketing and sales teams working together in order to determine the likelihood of prospects ultimately making a purchase. It happens at every stage of the sales journey and it ultimately decides if your prospect will push through the funnel and down the pipeline.

Lead qualification saves you time, energy, and ultimately your bottom line. It occurs very early in the pipeline, ideally when you’re making initial contact or even beforehand. It helps you determine:

Whether or not the prospect is in the right industry and territory to benefit from your product.
If they have a need that your product can solve.
If the person you’re talking to has the budget and authority to make a purchasing decision.
If there is some way you can provide value over your competitors or the prospect’s current vendor.

This process is highly critical and will save you from harboring too many cold leads. So, if you don’t have a lead qualification process or criteria already established, then it’s high time that you start on one now before diving into the lead generation process.

Use Sales Tools and Apps

Needless to say, without customers, your company won’t last long. So, it’s important to spend time and money on sales and marketing-related activities and tools.

Let me put it this way if you spend all of your time and effort just cold calling, you may not be happy with the end result. The good news is that there are other options to consider wherein you can still incorporate the good old cold emails, calls, and social selling.

Here are two great examples of great sales tools that will boost your results, improve efficiency, organization, and help you generate more revenue.

HubSpot

When it comes to sales and marketing tools, Hubspot is considered the cream of the crop. With this free solution, which is also a great place to start, by the way, you are able to gain access to tools that boost every aspect of your sales strategy.

You can also collect data related to visitors, broken down by the company, as well as the pages that they are viewing. This gives you a much better idea of who is and who is not interested in your product or service, which then allows you to target the right type of prospects who are the decision-maker in the sales process.

Another great tool from HubSpot is their free Meeting Scheduling Software that allows you to schedule your appointments all while not missing out on any back-and-forth emails. It helps you also manage your calendar to make sure that you stay productive and on top of all your contacts and meetings. In addition to its great features, it also allows your prospects to have more flexibility in scheduling their time with you and your team. As your prospects schedule their meetings with you, they will automatically add to the HubSpot CRM, so you don’t have to worry about your database’s growth and staying organized.

LinkedIn Sales Solutions

Being the largest professional business network, it only makes sense that it’s only crawling with sales opportunities in digital marketing.

While you’re mining for prospects on your own, you’re better off considering the many sales professional tools provided by LinkedIn Sales Solutions.

For example, Sales Navigator is a popular choice. With this tool, LinkedIn hopes to make sales prospecting easier than ever before. And, that’s exactly what you’re looking for.

This tool helps in many ways, including:

Receive custom lead recommendations.
Access to an advanced search to find the right leads for your business.
The use of InMail to contact any LinkedIn member.
A dashboard for measuring and tracking your social selling results.
Real-time sales updates for customers and prospects.

Use Video to Introduce Yourself

This one might be a little new to some, but video can be used for introducing yourself as well aside from the usual video content that you would create and post on your website and social media platforms.

A great way to introduce yourself to your new leads is by recording a short video introduction of you where you can talk about your company, but most importantly personalizing them to your leads. Add details that you’ve gathered about them and their business, and even point out specific pain points to give it a personal touch.

Your leads will appreciate it more as it shows them that you truly did your research. It shows your authenticity and genuineness to help them.

Provide Feedback to your Agency

At the end of your campaign, don’t forget to have a debriefing with the outsourcing agency that you have partnered with. Since you’ve worked together as partners, it’s only fair that you provide them with honest feedback. Commend them if you feel like they have truly done their part well and you are satisfied with their service, and provide them with honest feedback on how they could improve certain areas of their service or work ethics, and even what you would prefer them to do differently the next time you partner up with them again.

The Takeaway

Finding the right outsourcing agency, doing a campaign, and nurturing all your leads afterward is really not an easy feat, but with the technology available to us today, it’s great news that businesses don’t have to weather through it alone and that there are ways to generate leads without compromising the quality of your service. We hope that the tips we provided you in this post will help you not just pick out the right lead generation service for you, but more importantly, help you successfully manage your leads and appointments obtained from your lead generation partner.