We all know the importance of following up on your leads and enquiries. They’re the starting point for a potential long-term relationship with a paying customer, but many creative agencies consistently fail to follow up these valuable leads.
Your sales team may do a good job of focusing on follow-up for a while, but then things tail off again and the motivation is lost. By discarding those leads, you really are throwing the baby out with the bath water – you’re missing untold golden opportunities to help prospective clients who need your creative and design services. And that’s bad business in anyone’s book (not to mention a terrible way to manage bath time!).
In our experience of working with creative agencies, there’s usually two root causes for this failure to follow up. So, we’re going to highlight both causes and explain how they’re avoidable.
And if you look after those leads, the sales will take care of themselves.
1. You don’t have a proper system to track and report on leads
Without an effective system, your lead follow up WILL fall away. Fact.
If you’re serious about growing your agency, you need to have plenty of leads in the pipeline at any point in time. However amazeballs your creative offering is, you won’t manage to convert every single lead into a sale. You’re not superhuman (although we’re sure you’d look lovely in a superhero cape).
So, having lots and lots of leads on the go, and all at various stages in the pipeline, means there’s far too much for you to remember. Even with the cape on, you’re going to drop the ball occasionally. And that’s why you need a system.
An effective system not only stores valuable data on the progress being made with your leads, it also prompts you when it’s time to follow up. And that’s great news for those of us with brains like sieves (lead, what lead?). An effective follow up system might be an all-encompassing CRM that is set up to track your leads activity. That could be clicks through to your website, open rates of emails you’ve sent out during marketing campaigns or social media interaction through Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest etc.
Or it might be something much simpler, a gauge to show where leads are in the pipeline, any intelligence you’ve built up on them and the next steps you’ll be taking to make contact or build on your initial relationship.
The important thing is that you’ve got a systematic process in place to help you manage those leads.
That’s number 1. Ok, deep breath… now for number 2!
2. You don’t have a ‘follow up’ culture instilled throughout the agency
This doesn’t just involve the sales team. It involves EVERYONE in the agency focusing on leads, from the CEO down to Rover, the office dog (he’s very keen on leads when it’s walkies time anyway).
Involving every single person in the business may sound obvious, but we’ve seen far too many agencies where leads are seen as being ‘the sales team’s problem’. And that’s just short sighted.
It’s about motivating the whole team to be proactive. This could mean following up on promises to clients, agreeing on action points during your weekly internal meetings or looking for new opportunities to provide more creative services to your existing clients.
Get a system and take responsibility!
So, how do you get on top of those leads and start converting them into customers?
It’s pretty simple, really:
1. Get yourself some spangly new software that gives you a top-notch system to manage the lead processes and reminds you to follow up on enquiries.
2. Build an engaged team of superhuman lead experts throughout the whole agency, who are all eager, motivated and primed to spot the next lead opportunity (capes being optional)
An effective lead pipeline and follow up culture can make a MASSIVE difference to the growth of your creative business and the cost of acquiring new clients – not to mention your stress levels!
Do you need a hand with kicking your lead management into shape? Unsure how to get your people on board with following up on enquiries? Want to borrow our Superman cape and run around your office?
Drop us a line and get in touch.
