Why contractors need to track their leads—and how to do it
Sales leads that lead nowhere are time-consuming and frustrating. But don't underestimate the value of leads that don't pan out. Understanding why your leads aren't converting to sales will help you figure out the formula your subcontracting company needs to close deals. The first step to understanding your leads is tracking them. Followup CRM is a customer relationship management software that tracks leads, along with much more data, in one convenient, centralized location.
Here are three reasons why tracking leads is important for subcontractors:
1. You can identify the characteristics of successful and unsuccessful leads, which will help predictions for future leads.
2. You'll get a better understanding of your sales pipeline and uncover any gaps that may be causing quality leads to drop off.
3. Your team can prioritize certain sales behaviors or clients based on historical lead information.
Identifying subcontracting sales leads destined for success
The lead data you collect, track, and analyze will help you piece together a profile of an ideal lead and use this to forecast the likelihood of a successful sale. You can prioritize leads that show potential based on similar successful clients, and you can refrain from investing too much time on leads that share many similarities with previous unsuccessful leads. This is called a Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL).
Followup CRM has records useful information for understanding your company's ideal lead, such as:
- Where the lead came from
- How many proposals were previously delivered vs. contracts secured
- The type of contracting industry (flooring, roofing, electrical, etc.)
- Notes on interactions between employees and clients which can provide personalized details about the client
If you find that many of your successful leads came from trade shows then you can strategize with your marketing team about investing more resources into your presence at trade shows. Without tracking your leads, you wouldn’t have known to improve your marketing plan and may have missed out on countless high-quality leads.
Understanding how your sales pipeline may affect your contracting leads
Sometimes the problem isn’t that your leads are low quality, but that your sales pipeline may have a hidden flaw, allowing high quality leads to drop off the radar. If you don't track how leads move through your sales pipeline, you won't know what's broken or how to fix it.
By using Followup CRM to track your leads along the sales pipeline you can:
- See on every prospective client's profile whether the lead is hot, warm, active, or cold
- Check if the lead has been qualified (MQL)
- Check if the lead has moved on to a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), meaning they are now ready for your sales team
- If someone referred this lead
- Pull reports to see at the client, employee, and company level:
- Lead Recap Report
- Sales Behavior Summary Chart
- Sales Pipeline Chart
- Marketing Status Chart
The reports you can pull on Followup CRM have been designed with your specialty contracting needs in mind, because we are a CRM made by subcontractors, for subcontractors. Get a 10,000-foot view of how all your leads fared in the last quarter or a detailed look at one specific lead's history of accepting bids. Both are incredibly important for converting leads to sales.
Prioritizing top prospective leads for revenue growth
Getting familiar with what successful leads look like will help you and your team work smarter not harder. If your team is like most small to medium-sized subcontracting businesses, your sales team is managing several clients and prospective leads, as well as other tasks. Using a CRM platform like Followup CRM gives your team the tools to effectively organize all these moving parts and understanding for which sales behaviors and leads they should be prioritizing in the pipeline. If your team can easily decide which lead is more likely to end in a closed deal, they can reschedule other tasks to allow more room for nurturing that lead.
Business owners also have access to see the improvements, or mishandling, by their sales team by viewing what actions were taken and when along the pipeline. If you find that most leads go cold after a certain estimator on your team completes his or her on-site visit, then there is an opportunity for employee coaching to improve sales behaviors.
With Followup CRM we provide the tools so you can:
- See which employees were involved (estimator, account manager, and take off person)
- Check which leads are currently in the pipeline but haven't converted to a sale yet
- See which leads are top prospects
- If contracts have been signed by both parties yet
Followup CRM can help you turn your cold leads into sales by understanding your qualification process, your team's sales tactics, and so much more. Check out our features and tools with a free video demo.
