*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.

00:00 Failure to follow-up leads to lead decay.

05:37 CRM pipelines categorize lead flow and opportunities.

07:57 Automate lead response for prompt follow-up.

11:09 Simple tweaks for better website results, checklist.

*This may have been autogenerated and may not be 100% accurate or grammatically correct.

Hey. It’s Marlon here from marlonmcpherson.com and today I want to talk about why business leads fall through the cracks. The issue is I see a lot of business owners where they always say they need more leads right? Especially local service based businesses. We need more leads, more leads, more leads and they think that is the problem. Well unfortunately I don’t think that’s the problem in a lot of cases because I actually see that they do get traffic coming to their website and they are getting leads coming through the website. But the real problem is that because they’re so busy doing a lot of the work in their business themselves, they fail to do this one thing very effectively. And that’s what I’m gonna talk about coming up. I do content like this to help you build and grow your online business, especially around your website and your online presence as a whole with your content.

Marlon McPherson00:00:51 – 00:01:50

If this is something that you’re looking to do, you’re in the right place to stick around. Now we’re talking about service based businesses, especially, let’s say, high ticket ones that you do, services that are worth a few 100 of pounds or dollars or a few 1,000 of pounds. Right? So one lead is is worth a lot or a client is worth a lot, every time you close one. So it’s not a case where you need tonnes and tonnes of leads to make these businesses work. You just have to have the right things in place to make sure that you’re utilising those leads. Right. So going back to what I said earlier, which is where you have a situation where it might be a one man band, which is okay, when you start things out like this, you might need to do everything in a business, you’re doing the accounting, you’re doing the operations, the service delivery, you’re doing customer services, and you name it, marketing, etc. That leaves very little time to do anything else in the business.

Marlon McPherson00:01:50 – 00:02:56

And as a result as a result of that being so busy, because you’re being so busy, what happens is that you fail to follow-up effectively with leads. That’s what I see happening in most cases. Right? So some businesses, they might leave it for a few hours before they get back to a lead. Others might leave it for days, others might leave it for even longer than that or not get in touch or reply to them at all, which is obviously not good. And this problem needs to be fixed because you’re basically wasting those leads that are coming through. And if you leave it too long, what happens is that there’s this thing called lead decay. Lead decay is where essentially if say the lead is hot right now when they get in touch with you, by the time you leave it for a few minutes, a few hours, a few days, they’re getting colder and colder, maybe less interested or maybe they just forget about you because they’ve moved on to speaking to other businesses and they’ve already gotten the information that they need. You probably contact them after a while, and they forget that they’ve even reached out to you.

Marlon McPherson00:02:56 – 00:03:58

So you need to strike while the iron is hot, so to speak. So you can actually get on top of it whilst they’re still hot, or at least they’re warm enough to go through with what it is you want them to do for that next step for you to actually close them as a client. Okay, so we want to avoid lead decay. Now, ideally, you want to follow-up within the first few minutes of a lead coming through your website, whether this is through a form or chat widget or even via email, you need to get in touch, I would say within the first 3 to 5 minutes. Yeah, it sounds really drastic, right? And it’s almost impossible for some business owners that are solo business owners to do this, you don’t have a team behind you doing it, etc. Right? How are you going to follow-up within a few minutes? Well, there’s a solution for this and it is called systems automation. Right? Now I’m gonna speak about one specific solution. And, in future content, I will touch on more specific aspects of it.

Marlon McPherson00:03:59 – 00:04:50

But what we need to do is to actually put all leads in one central location where we can manage everything and see what’s going on and see what stage they’re at in the process. Okay. So for example, what I have with my, I use a number of different tools to do this, but I have it where when someone fills in my contact form on my website, for example, they go straight into a database somewhere as a new lead. I see that come through, I even get a notification to say, hey, you’ve got a new lead come through. I can look at it and in, you know, to say, okay, this is legit or whatever the case might be. That’s irrelevant at this point. But the point is, you want to centralise where you put your leads, and use software tools to do so. Now, a typical way to do this, or the most effective way that I know of to do this is by having a CRM.

Marlon McPherson00:04:50 – 00:05:37

A CRM is simply, is short for customer relationship manager, or client relationship manager. And it’s where you collect all those leads. And you can then have all the contact details have all the notes related to them in that one central location. So at any point, you can go to a leads record, or a contacts record, because even your clients, if they become a client, they will be still there. And you can see the history of how they came into your world and what you did, what conversations you’ve had, and so on and so forth. If you try and do this manually somewhere in a notebook or whatever, it doesn’t work. If you want to scale things up, it might work if you only have a very small amount of contacts. But you want to ideally make sure you digitise this.

Marlon McPherson00:05:37 – 00:06:44

Now, inside a CRM, you could have a pipeline, what’s called a pipeline is basically the stages that you categorise where your leads flow through from becoming a lead through to them becoming a client. And you want to, to have it so that you can understand where things are, and what’s happening at what any given point in time, you want to be able to look at at what’s happening. So the pipeline is just a set of stages, right? Most CRM tools, there are lots of them on the market, by the way, most of them have this pipeline system, they might call it something else is where the opportunities are basically where you have a lead come in. And there’s an opportunity for you to actually have them become a long term client, make a certain amount of money from them becoming a client, etc. It’s just an opportunity. And you want to close as many of those or turn as many of those into sales as possible. And this is where you would manage it in a CRM. The pipeline aspect of it it’s just really you could have it as to be as many stages as you want as necessary, or you could have it to be as minimal as possible.

Marlon McPherson00:06:45 – 00:07:20

And you just simplify the whole thing. So for example, you could just have 3 stages. One is where a new lead comes in, they’re all fall under that category. And when you have conversations, do you track those conversations by adding notes and stuff, and then you move them to the next level, let’s say your next step is for you to give a quote. That quote, you might have that as a stage to say this is they’re at the quote stage. And then the next stage after that would be the close stage or the sale stage or the win stage. This is where you win them as a client because they’ve signed contracts and paid you money. Right? So now they’ve become a client.

Marlon McPherson00:07:21 – 00:07:57

And you could categorize maybe have a 4th category that says lost. So obviously, the ones that don’t become a client, you put them in a loss stage. And you could decide what to do. After a while, maybe get rid of them out of your system. Or you may want to, if you see it as a potential, you could put notes there. And go back to them and follow-up at a certain stage, maybe in the Future, 6 months down the line, or however long down the line. It just depends on how you run your business, the nature of your business, Steps. So having a dedicated, so having a CRM, in place a system in place with a pipeline is going to help you manage things.

Marlon McPherson00:07:57 – 00:09:18

Because every time you have a conversation, when a lead comes in, you’ll be able to be on top of it. Now the beauty of this, this is how you’re going to be able to follow-up within a few minutes. The beauty of this is that you can have simple automation that sends out replies to a lead almost instantaneously, you can do it straight away, or you can give it a couple of minutes and then have the system send out this information straight away to them with a reply. So let’s say for example, a typical way if your form doesn’t have this, you should get this implemented. If you have a website form is once they submit a message, once they submit something on the form, typically what you will see is a message on the screen on their browser, right? What What you want to do if you’re not doing this is to have an automated email go out to them. You can do this via email or even text message as well in some cases, But having even just one automated email that goes out to say, hey, we’re acknowledging that you’ve submitted this form and you requested this information. And within that email, you’re gonna talk about some next steps and what to expect and that you will follow-up with them within the next 24 hours. And you might even ask them a question to say reply to give us this information, this additional information so that we can come back to you with even better responses within 24 hours.

Marlon McPherson00:09:18 – 00:10:12

So then people know, okay, we’re getting some kind of reply or response back immediately. That means this business is showing some professionalism, they’re showcasing the stages or what the next steps are. And they’re actually trying to engage by asking for more information. And if promised that they’ll get back to us within 24 hours, therefore they’re setting expectations. That’s what’s going on in the mind of the potential customer. Right? So you need to at least have that one email. Now, you could either take it a step further by having a series of replies via email and or text messages as well, over, let’s say, the next few hours to say, hey, you’ve requested this. Here’s a link to an FAQ with that speaks specifically to the things that typical, new customers might want to find out or potential customers might want to find out.

Marlon McPherson00:10:12 – 00:11:09

So sometimes they might want to find out pricing, right? Obviously, they want to find out what your process looks like. They want to find out how you work and what they should be expecting, what you should be expecting from them that type of thing as much information as you want to put or as little as you want to put. But it’s just a matter of having some engaging communication going on and having a set of resources that you can point them to whilst you wait whilst they wait for you to get back to them. So this buys you time, but it still keeps them engaged. But this is how you can instantly get in touch with them or reply to them by using automation. Now, this might be mind blowing to some people. To some people, it might be something that they’ve already been aware of, but they just haven’t implemented it yet. Now if you’re struggling with stuff like this and you wanna find out more about how you can actually make your website actually work for your business and make it more profitable for your business with doing stuff like this in terms of following up.

Marlon McPherson00:11:09 – 00:11:56

And there’s some little tweaks, simple little tweaks, simple little tweaks, you could change as well, to help you produce better results from your website. I have a free checklist that you can actually grab over on Marlonmcphersoncom. Just go to marlonmacfersen.com/checklist is 4 Steps, 4 steps that you can go through and see whether or not you’ve got certain things in place. And, go and make certain simple adjustments in some cases. And that could mean the world of difference. Go ahead and grab that you’ll also enter my email list and I’ll be sending you some additional resources as a result of that as well. Hopefully that can help you out if you’ve got any questions or comments about this, or if you wanna see, how I use, one of my CRM tools and how I’ve got it set up. I can show an example if enough people comment on the YouTube video.

Marlon McPherson00:11:57 – 00:12:17

I’ll make that video or I might do it privately to my email list. So just reach out in the comments if you’re, listening to this in on audio, just reach out via the website. Just send me a message or whatever, and I’ll get back to you. Now hopefully this has been helpful. Share it with someone that you think might need it, and I’ll catch you in the next one. Speak to you soon.

I’ll make that video or I might do it privately to my email list. So just reach out in the comments if you’re, listening to this in on audio, just reach out via the website. Just send me a message or whatever, and I’ll get back to you. Now hopefully this has been helpful. Share it with someone that you think might need it, and I’ll catch you in the next one. Speak to you soon.

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