Never Lose Track Of a Lead: Virtual Assistants & Lead Management

Leveraging Automations and Virtual Assistants To Keep Your Pipeline Running 

Entrepreneurs and executives are always striving to generate leads, close sales, and increase revenue. But turning a cold lead into a hot, closed sale can be a daunting task, especially when you lose track of those valuable leads and miss out on potential sales. It's not just the sale that you're losing - it's all the time and energy you spent researching and obtaining that lead in the first place. 

That's where a streamlined sales process comes in. By staying organized and maintaining clear communication with prospects, you can ultimately close more deals and boost your bottom line. The best sales processes incorporate automation and a second pair of eyes to ensure everything is running smoothly and efficiently. With a top-notch sales process, you can focus on what really matters - growing your business!

The Challenges of Managing A Sales Cycle 

Lead Tracking & Data Management: Many entrepreneurs fall short because they haven’t defined their sales cycle or sales process. They have no idea where a lead came from and where they are in their communication with the lead causing confusion on what the best next steps would be. Getting organized with effective data management is key to creating a more effective sales process. 

Consistency: Consistent touch points with your leads are more likely to close a sale in a timely manner than random, inconsistent conversations. Introducing automation can help ensure a consistent cadence and alleviate the manual follow up tasks. 

Defining Your Sales Process

Establishing a solid sales process is key to effectively managing your leads. By understanding the necessary steps to take with a prospect in order to close a sale, you can build a roadmap that guides your interactions and ensures you stay on track. Typically, this involves breaking the process down into stages such as Prospecting, Nurturing, Qualifying, Pitching, and Closing. Not only does this create clarity and structure, but it also allows you to identify areas for improvement in your sales process, ensuring your time and energy is always well-spent. 

It's important to note that your sales process should be tailored to your unique selling points, industry, and services. If you're struggling to establish an effective process, consider partnering with a business or sales coach who can help you design a customized roadmap to success.

I’d recommend connecting with:

• Stephanie Marguno with CultivateAdvisors 

• Jake Shannon with No1 Coaching 

Choose a System That Works Best For You

Your CRM is the first and most important system you should have in place. This is another area that is dependent on your specific industry and services. Your CRM or lead management system should allow you to:

• Easily see where a prospect is in your sales cycle

• Quickly find their contact information

• Easily categorize or tag them based on the likely service they will buy

• Easily add notes to track personal and important information to refer to 

Check out this recent LinkedIn Post on a quick checklist to pick the right systems for your business. 

Here’s a few CRM’s we recommend: 

• Dubsado - For simple, small businesses looking for creative ways to send proposals and contracts, we recommend Dubsado. 

• Hubspot - overall, Hubspot is not actually my favorite tool to recommend. But I am all about keeping your expenses lean and Hubspot’s free account is pretty robust. While I wouldn’t use it for proposals and invoices, it is a great tool to track contacts, tag them to accounts/companies, and track deals through a pipeline. 

• Keap - Keap is an all in one tool that doesn’t come up short in many areas. You can set up your Keap account for emails, scheduling, proposals, invoices and more. 

• Monday.com - While initially a task and project management system, Monday.com has worked to develop a CRM product line that is easy to manage and helps smooth the transition from Sales to Service Delivery with your clients. 

Once you’ve chosen a system, you want to ensure you follow a process to effectively implement it. This includes mapping out how your sales cycle will function within the system, accurately migrating any data into the system, training whatever team you may have in place, and automating where applicable. 

If you already have a system in place, then make sure you’re fully utilizing the platform. What features are you not using? What additional data can you track? What other workflows and automations can you implement? 

Automating Your Sales Cycle 

Automating your sales process can help you save time, reduce possible errors, and help you maintain a consistent communication cadence with your prospects. By automating routine tasks like follow-up emails, call reminders, and appointment scheduling, you (and your sales team) can focus on more strategic activities like building relationships and closing deals. 

When you start to automate, it’s important to start small and identify specific areas where automation may have the most significant impact. Automating too much at once can cause you to feel like you don’t have control of your sales cycle and make you less likely to use your software (thus falling back into the pitfall of losing track of leads). It’s helpful to create a flow chart of your sales cycle and all the action items within each phase or stage. From there you can start to highlight areas to automate and create an action plan. 

Efficiency Beyond Automations

Another huge pitfall many business leaders fall into is not clearly defining roles and responsibilities within a process. This can lead to losing track of leads or duplicating communication with a lead and damaging your brand image. Our goal is to effectively manage leads so that we can close a sale. Taking the time to review the sales cycle and relevant action items allows us to see where we can use the most help and where it makes sense for team members to have ownership of a lead or prospect. 

If you’re a solopreneur, this is where a virtual assistant may be a solution for you. Virtual assistants can help manage data entry, provide reminders that your system automation may not support, and provide more personalized support such as proposal creations and contract drafting. 

Introducing communication protocols is also critical to ensure that everyone is on the same page and can work together effectively. This might involve regular meetings or check-ins, using collaboration tools like project management software, or setting up automated notifications for key actions or milestones.

Setting up a sales cycle that never loses track of a lead requires a strategic approach and careful planning. Start by: 

• Identify Your Sales Cycle Stages 

• Determine Criteria For Moving Leads For One Stage To The Next

• Choose The Right CRM or Lead Management System 

• Automate Parts Of Your Sales Process

• Create Clear Roles & Responsibilities With Your Team (or Virtual Assistant) 

This framework will help you build a streamlined and effective sales process that delivers results. However, it's important to remember that sales process management is an ongoing process that requires continuous improvement. Regularly reviewing key performance metrics, gathering feedback from team members and customers, and staying up-to-date with industry trends and best practices can help you identify areas where your sales process can be improved and make adjustments accordingly. By prioritizing continuous improvement, you can stay ahead of the competition and achieve long-term success in sales.

Want to learn more about automating your sales cycle or introducing a virtual assistant to support your sales process? Reach out to us today and let's start boosting your sales game!