The biggest failure in converting prospects is forgetting stuff. Now, stuff can be follow-up’s, what you spoke about in the last meeting or to send a quote over to the to seal the deal. These may all sound obvious, but a typical small business loses £7 per month because of these exact reasons. 

Therefore our recommendation is to set aside 10 minutes in the morning to log in to popcorn, where you can review all the meetings you have, when you are meeting them and what you are meeting them about. That way you will never forget to follow anyone up and you’ll never forget any details when you talk to them. 

Then, set aside 10 mins at the end of the day, to log back into popcorn and add notes on all the contacts and inquiries that you have had throughout the day. You can then add your Reminders, Tags and move them to the right Pipelines (which you will have set up in the last onboarding session).

By doing this you will always know exactly where all your prospects are in your sales process, when you need to call them and why you need to be talking to them. 

When a contact is in your pipeline typically you can be confident that they are in their buying cycle, but what about all your contacts that are not ready to buy or are in your general marketing campaigns. You need to keep nurturing and tracking them to identify when they re-enter the buying cycle, or you’ll end up missing loads of easy sales opportunities. 

The easiest way to nurture this is to send a monthly newsletter/communication to all your contacts. popcorn CRM will then automatically track their behaviors across both email marketing and your website, when you see increased engagement and return visits to specific pages of your site, they will be flagged up as ‘Hot’ prospects in popcorn. You then have the opportunity to decide how to do nurture them further. 

To do this, you could choose to set an automation that moved the contact back into a pipeline so that you know that you need to give them a call, or it might be that you set up a series of emails that are triggered when they visit a specific page on your website, or you could run a ‘Filter’ on your whole database that flags up any contacts who meet specific criteria. A good example of this would be to ‘Filter’ all the “Hot’ prospects, that have been tagged as being based in ‘Birmingham’ and have recently looked at the pricing page on your website. give you a very specific set of search results that you can target and nurture further 

The biggest failure to convert sales for any small business is a lack of follow-up. Typically Small Business owners are brilliant at following up on new leads and converting immediate sales opportunities. But where they miss loads of opportunities is when someone says ‘give me a call in 6 months’, because it is not immediate, it gets forgotten about. Or one of the most common reasons for the lost of sale, is when small businesses don’t follow up in a timely manner. This typically happens when a quote has been submitted and the prospects is talking to a couple of companies, the one that engages at the right timescale, usually wins the business. 

The  easy way to fix this is to always add / update notes and reminders  after every conversation or when ever someone moves into a new column of your pipeline. that way you always know when you need to follow up and as a visual reminder, if you see a contact in your pipeline that does not have a Bell next to it, you know that there is not a reminder set against them. 

Another great tip is to ensure that your pipeline reflects the the true stages that you follow, that way you can easily see where everyone is. 

Social media is a really powerful tools that is often miss used by small businesses, yes it is brilliant for brand awareness, when it comes to generating new enquiries, it is over-saturated with Stuff. 

The best way to use social media for lead generation is to incorporate it as part of your process. A great example of doing this, is when you identify a new prospect, start ‘Liking’ and ‘Commenting’ on their posts. This will show they that you care and will help to build the relationship. 

We’ve all had that prospect who goes silent, usually, it is because they have dropped out of their buying cycle and are too embarrassed to respond to your calls or emails, but a quick message on Social media will often prompt a response, allowing you to restart dialogues and define a follow-up timescale that suits them. 

One of the most common questions we get asked is ‘How can I automate all my prospecting?’ and the answer is simple – DON’T!  

We have seen this happen on so many occasions, businesses use automation to manage everything from initial enquiry, right through to nurturing and post-sale follow-up, but what happens is that when you remove people from the process, no one takes ownership. and when this happens, details get missed and things drop through the net. 

If you are going to start using Automation in your business, start by doing small tasks, then build up on them, but always build them around a person who manages the process, as that human touch will make all the difference.