When we talk about Inside Sales, it is common for some doubts to arise:
“What is the best time to call the leads I’m generating?”
“Is it too soon to call someone who hasn’t asked to speak to my company yet?”
“What if I don’t call? Can I lose business opportunities?”
When I started my career as a Digital Marketing consultant at Rock Content, I had several questions like these, and lately they have appeared more and more in my clients’ routines.
Well, to answer the question in our title, the first and most important thing we need to keep in mind is:
The best time to capture inbound leads varies from company to company
So, in this text, we are going to discuss what factors you should consider when deciding the ideal time to contact your leads, as well as which approach may be more interesting depending on their stage in the buying journey.
Also, even before understanding the ideal moment, it is essential that you have your company’s sales funnel defined hire sales representatives.
That way, you’ll know exactly what your prospects’ buying journey is, you’ll be able to request the right information, qualify them based on that information, and contact them more assertively.
Do you already have your sales funnel mapped out? Do you already know what a qualified lead is for your company and want to understand the ideal time to approach your leads? Then let’s continue!
You must take into account the following variables:
Volume of leads that your company generates X size and routine of your sales team
Does your company generate a significant volume of leads ? How many of them are actually qualified? Is every lead worth pursuing, or are there leads that won’t turn into customers anyway?
If you generate a very large volume of leads, it is possible that there are contacts left over for your company to work with, right? Based on that, it is probably ideal to know if your sales team can work with all of them in their available time .
To know what scenario you are in, just do the math:
How many leads am I generating today? X How many leads can my sales team handle per day/week/month?
The idea is to equalize these two numbers british student data so that you don’t lose business opportunities and so that salespeople don’t sit idle. If either of these two situations is happening to you, you have two options.
1.
The first possibility is to hire more sales representatives so that they can serve all the leads that are generated hire sales representatives.
NOTE: If your salespeople only call people who have asked to speak with you, you may be missing out on opportunities to speak with people who haven’t asked yet, but are on the buying journey.
In Rock Content’s first year, for example, we generated a very high volume of leads, but we only had 3 salespeople. It didn’t make sense to contact all of them, so our reps focused only on “hand raises.”
Today, with a sales team of more than 70 people, we are able to address a much larger volume of prospects who are not yet at the decision stage.
These contents may also interest you:
How to generate leads on your corporate Instagram profile
What is Cost per Lead and why is it important to calculate it?
Why LinkedIn can be a great source of qualified leads
What is Lead Magnet content and how to create it on your corporate blog
What is an MQL lead?
2. Qualify the leads
Qualify leads more and more and only pass amazon’s cash on delivery service: all you need to know on to sellers those that are most qualified/closest to the purchase decision.
This qualification can be done manually or using lead scoring, for example.
Product or service of your company X complexity of the sale
If you sell beauty products online, it is unlikely that a lead will not be qualified by you based on their profile characteristics.
A 15-year-old girl from Buenos Aires can make a purchase for herself, just as an older man from Bogotá can buy a gift for his daughter or wife.
On the other hand, if you have/work in a B2B company, which sells ERP software, for example, your sales cycle will likely be much longer and more complex, and many of the leads generated may not be qualified.
These factors must be taken into account when approaching them, since they affect the time this will require from your salespeople. For a more complex sale with a higher average ticket, a representative needs:
- Study the lead completely (go to Linkedin, see their engagement history and get any information possible to facilitate contact and rapport building);
- Qualify the lead as much as possible to understand if it is really worth contacting them (find out the company they work for, their position b2c fax , the number of employees, if they meet all the criteria necessary to purchase the solution, etc.);
- Create a personalized approach;
- Hold follow-up meetings to accompany the process hire sales representatives.
All of that takes a lot more time than, say, calling a lead to sell beauty products, right?
With all that in mind, let’s talk a little about each stage of the purchasing journey , its particularities and how to work on each one depending on the criteria we discussed.
