The ultimate lead prospecting guide

Building your business can often be the hardest part of running your own firm. Not only do you need to be able to manage your current customer base, but you also need to find the time to reach out to new customers to get them on board.

If it has been a while since the last time that you started a lead prospecting campaign, or you aren’t getting the results that you would otherwise expect, then you may want to reassess the way that you go about finding prospects. Agile CRM offers all of the tools that you need to manage your prospecting efforts. Find out how some of the best Agile CRM customers find new leads using our intuitive cloud-based CRM.

Get To Know Your Ideal Client Through 360-Degree Lead Prospecting

When you start to look for more clients, the first thing that you want to do is to develop a more rigorous system for locating your ideal client. That ideal clients are those that are interested in the products or services that you offer (no hard sell needed here!), they are an easy client to work with, they are likely to be a repeat customer, and they have a strong potential for providing you with referrals to your business. The question is, where do you find these “ideal” customers?

The best thing you can do is to research each of your current customers thoroughly, and design your ideal customer around a combination of traits that each of your best customers share. Agile CRM allows you to do this easily by creating a 360-degree view of each of your contacts. We pull in data from your own notes, social media, and web activity of each of your contacts. This will allow you to prospect more effectively and to spend your time more wisely, targeting only the customers that you know will turn into real leads.

Take Notes: Export Your Prospecting Knowledge To The Cloud

A big part of prospecting effectively is taking notes on the leads that you do generate for your business. Since you are dealing with a huge range of different customers (or potential customers) on a daily basis, you need to be able to switch gears seamlessly, and taking good notes will allow you to properly track each prospect more closely, giving you the information that you need to make each contact with them meaningful to them and useful to your business.

That being said, taking notes doesn’t automatically guarantee that you will be able to use those notes effectively during conversations with your client. You want to be able to prospect effectively, which means having access to your notes when you need them most.

Our sales CRM organizes those notes and other supporting documentation so it’s always at your fingertips when you need to speak to a client, prospect, vendor, or anyone else who is related to your business.

Follow Up On Time, Every Time

Missed meetings or contacts that dry up are the bane of a lead prospecting professional. They cost you money, and they waste your time, and without fixing your follow-up problem, all your prospecting is going to amount to very little in the long run. Agile CRM makes following up with your prospects easier than ever, integrating with your calendar software to keep you current on the meetings that you have, and helping you track your touch points with prospects more closely so that you can keep on top of your prospects and close more deals.

You also can set up complex (or easy) automation that flags contacts and sends notification when action is needed.

Spend Your Time On The Right Prospects

Lead prospecting isn’t about reaching out to every potential customer that could possibly want to work with your business. While this will get you in front of the right people eventually, it’s also a huge waste of your time. Not every deal is created equally; some deals will be higher revenue, others will be easier to close, and some will be great leads in a couple of years, they just aren’t right now.

One way we help with this issue is by allowing you to score each lead that you generate, segmenting your lead pool and allowing you to more closely track which leads you should be spending your time on. This will allow you to shorten the sales cycle and spend your time working with the right leads, not just the one that’s right in front of you.

Track Your Prospecting with Numbers, Not Hunches

Peter Drucker, the great management consultant, made the point that “what gets measured, gets managed.” Truer words have never been spoken, but that doesn’t mean that all businesses adhere to this important mantra. Far too many companies approach their lead prospecting from the goal of doing more each time that they meet, but they don’t have numbers to track those metrics. Without clear goals, and a good way to track those goals, you will never get your lead prospecting campaign to deliver real results.

Agile CRM provides you with meaningful reporting and analytics, allowing you to track even your most nuanced prospecting goals closely. This will allow you to create more structure around your goal setting, and it will allow you to more easily manage under performance and reward out performance as a result.

Prospecting isn’t a difficult part of running a business, but for many it can be hard without the right tools in place. Agile CRM makes it easier for you to track your lead generation activity easily, and with our segmenting and advanced lead reporting tools we can make it easier for you to have the necessary information in front of you when you need to reach out to a lead that you haven’t connected with in a while.

If you are looking for more information about how you can tackle prospecting in a more efficient manner, then you should sign up for a free trial of Agile CRM today and see for yourself.