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  • 10 Expert Tips to Improve Lead Quality

    Quality leads create more conversions.
    But what exactly does “quality” mean when it comes to leads? Put simply, quality leads are those with a higher likelihood of moving down the sales funnel from awareness to interest to intent to conversion.
    Finding quality leads doesn’t happen by accident. To achieve this goal, brands need a lead qualification process that effectively pinpoints key characteristics that make potential customers more likely to become loyal buyers.
    To help you get started, we’ve got 10 expert tips for improving lead quality.

    Lead qualification typically takes the form of stock questions that depend on your offering. For example, if you’re selling insurance you might ask questions about age, current health conditions, and previous medical histories. If you’re selling a B2B service, you might ask a lead if they’re the one in charge of the decision-making. If not, you may need to speak with someone else.
    An effective lead qualification process helps eliminate leads that aren’t currently in a position to buy, in turn allowing sales teams to focus their efforts more likely prospective purchasers. This also lets businesses funnel prospects that aren’t quite ready for sales into future marketing campaigns so they can stay in the loop about any updates and reach out again when they’re ready to take the next step.
    3 Reasons Why You’re Getting Bad Leads
    So why are you getting bad leads in the first place? If prospective customers are interested in your product, what’s standing in the way?
    Three causes are common culprits of bad leads:
    1. Poor quality pay-per-click (PPC) leads
    Are your PPC purchases returning leads that are actually qualified to make purchases or just providing more generic lead details? If so, consider more specific PPC guidelines or changing PPC providers.
    2. Ineffective offers and calls to action
    Have you covered your entire sales funnel, or are you only offering early-funnel conversion opportunities? Are your offers for free materials that have nothing to do with your business? Do you have calls to action on your website? Are they shiny and compelling?
    3. Lack of targeted landing pages
    Do your landing pages conform to best practices? Does the text actually describe the offer? Does the text help to qualify WHO should be filling out the form? If the answer to those questions is “yes”, you should consider adding more qualifying fields to your forms. Find out from sales what their top 3 qualifying questions are, and put them on your forms.
    1. Define Your Audience

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    Getting more qualified leads means making sure you know who your audience is and what they’re looking for. Start by creating your ideal buyer persona. Maybe you’re looking for a business decision-maker with access to capital and the drive to solve specific pain points within their organization.
    While the ideal audience will differ for every company, defining this audience goes a long way toward improving lead quality.
    Here, tools like Google Analytics can help pinpoint your audience.
    2. Choose Your Keywords

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    Along with your audience, choose keywords that align with what your brand is trying to sell and what qualified leads want. Achieve this goal with keyword research: See what comes up when you search your target keywords, such as the top-ranking posts and the most popular questions.
    Using this data, create content, forms, and offers that reflect buyer preferences and align with your offerings.
    Consider solutions like Google Ads to find your ideal keywords.
    3. Create Targeted Content

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    Targeted content helps you get ahead of potential questions or concerns. By creating landing pages and FAQs that address common issues and answer common questions before your sales team connects with leads, you can reduce the amount of time staff spend covering common ground and instead let them focus on the details of making a sale.
    Try HubSpot’s survey tools to find out what your audience wants.
    4. Develop Detailed Forms

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    By developing detailed contact forms, marketing teams can reduce the risk of sending unqualified leads to sales times.
    First, ensure that all relevant form fields are required. These may include company name, contact email address, the full name of a potential lead, and their position within the organization.
    It’s also worth creating forms that allow potential customers to describe their current pain points along with the type of solution or service they’re looking to find.
    Use HubSpot’s Free Online Form Builder to create targeted forms.
    5. Identify Decision-Makers

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    While more detailed forms can help increase total lead quality, they can’t guarantee that decision-makers are the ones reaching out.
    Instead, companies can boost lead quality by proactively identifying decision-makers and initiating conversations. Start with a look at your current clientele: What role(s) do decision-makers in these companies usually hold? Then, do some research on prospective clients to see who holds similar positions and reach out to them directly. Not only does this increase the overall quality of the lead — provided you create compelling content — but also streamlines the sales process.
    Solutions like people.ai can help you find decision-makers.
    6. Automate Where Possible

     
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    The sheer amount of leads that companies can now generate from both traditional marketing campaigns and PPC efforts means that it’s easy to get overwhelmed and lose the plot on who’s qualified and who’s not
    As a result, it’s worth automating both contact and evaluation processes where possible. For example, email automation tools can help take care of reaching out to potential prospects without having staff compose hundreds and hundreds of messages, while automated evaluation software can pinpoint potential issues with collected data that may indicate a prospect is not ready to buy.
    Check out HubSpot’s Marketing Automation Software to streamline key tasks.
    7. Align Sales and Marketing

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    Sales and marketing are two sides of the same coin, but often end up on opposite sides of the lead qualification process.
    While marketing focuses on bringing in new leads, sales wants to make sure these leads are qualified before putting in the time and effort required for conversion. If sales teams feel like marketing isn’t delivering quality leads, and marketing thinks that sales is being too picky, the result is a disaster waiting to happen.
    Instead, align sales and marketing from the get-go. Sit both teams down in a room and hash out what a great lead looks like, what getting these leads required, the process of handing off leads from marketing to sales.
    Products like Ruler Analytics help with this alignment at scale.
    8. Ask for Referrals

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    Sometimes it’s OK to take the easier route. Instead of building a new lead roster from scratch, it’s worth asking current customers for referrals. You can offer them discounts or other benefits, but if they like what you’re doing it shouldn’t take much convincing to have them pass on the contact data of decision-makers in similar companies, or to reach out on your behalf.
    Consider a solution like Referral Factory to streamline this process.
    9. Track Your Data

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    To ensure your lead quality is stable, track your initial and repeat sales conversions. If you notice that either one of these metrics is falling, it may be worth reexamining lead qualification processes to ensure that the leads you’re generating have the means and motive to make a purchase.
    Act-On can help you track relevant lead data across your organization.
    10. Make Changes as Needed

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    Last but not least? Don’t get stuck in a rut. If current lead generation tactics aren’t delivering the quality you want, make changes. Rethink your keyword strategy, create new content, or broaden your target market. In other words, focus on the outcome, not the operations, to inform your lead generation.
    Take charge of your changes with HubSpot’s Marketing Software.
    Taking the Lead
    Higher quality leads help boost the quantity of sales conversions. But quality leads don’t just fall in your lap — to get the best leads for your business, you need to find the right audience, target your content, track your data, and make changes as needed to keep quality high and sales steady.
    Editor’s note: This post was originally published in July 2010 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

  • 5 Fun Call Center Soft Skills Training Activities

    Are soft skills a weak spot for your call center team? While product knowledge, scripts, and protocols are important parts of training your agents, neglecting call center soft skills can affect your call center’s performance. After all, service roles are all about building relationships and rapport—and that’s much more difficult to achieve over the phone or chat.
    Sure, it’s important to hire people with strong soft skills. But the best agents know how to apply those skills effectively in their role. A new hire who is experienced in face-to-face customer service might not fare as well over the phone at first. It’s up to the employer (that’s you!) to guide them as they discover their strengths and weaknesses in this work environment.
    As Mary Poppins once said, “In every job that must be done, there is an element of fun.” Gamification is one of the best ways to help your agents internalize these important skills and use them effectively in their roles. At your next training session, consider featuring some of these engaging activities to help your team sharpen those soft skills!
    How to Teach Soft Skills Training
    First, Which Soft Skills Should You Focus On?
    It’s important to understand what soft skill application looks like in each type of role so you can guide your agents properly. There are many types of skills that will come in handy in the call center, so we’ve compiled our top picks for improving contact center performance:
    Communication and tone
    When it comes to contact center work, communication is king. But just because someone is well-spoken doesn’t mean they’ll thrive in the contact center. Agent roles can be challenging because they are limited to two types of communication—voice and text – when supporting customers. They don’t have the benefit of relying on body language or facial expressions.
    Tone becomes so important when writing responses or conversing over the phone. Agents should know how to ask effective questions so they can get to the heart of the issue quickly. This will improve KPIs in the long run, including Average Handle Time, Customer Satisfaction (CSat), and First Call Resolution (FCR).
    Working with goals and targets
    Just because an agent is willing to work with set goals does not mean they are prepared to succeed. After all, contact center work isn’t just about working hard to reach a target—it’s also about knowing how to motivate and pace yourself throughout the day.
    Agents who are new to this type of work may get frustrated or even burnt out. And that can contribute to agent attrition and turnover, which can put you in an even bigger bind! Providing best practices for working with targets will help agents better manage challenges they encounter throughout the workday and improve their chances of meeting their performance goals.

    TIP:
    Your veteran agents are your best resource. Ask them how they regulate their work throughout the day and encourage them to share tips and techniques with newer agents.

    Empathy and intuition
    Something people don’t often think about is how much time and effort is spent managing customer emotions. When an agent connects with a caller, they are suddenly thrust into an interaction with someone they’ve never met, who is likely dealing with a frustrating matter. Add hold time to the mix, and your agents may find themselves locked in a conversation with an irate customer.
    While scripts are great for unifying company messages and standardizing the customer experience, reading lines verbatim may come across as cold and robotic. Agents should have enough autonomy and training to adapt the script to the situation while validating the caller’s emotions before resolving the issue. This is key if you want to deliver an exceptional customer experience.
    Active listening
    Isn’t it frustrating when you’re having a conversation, but you don’t feel heard? That’s the dynamic you want to avoid in your contact center—and active listening is the solution.
    In short, active listening means complete attentiveness to what the customer is saying. Agents may repeat parts of phrases or respond in a way that validates them and their situation. This skill involves a combination of empathy and communication, and the ability to ask thoughtful follow-up questions.
    Problem-solving skills
    In the call center, no two interactions are exactly alike. That’s why critical thinking is an essential part of a call center agent’s role. After all, you are there to guide the support process and help solve the customer’s problem.
    Agents should be able to independently tackle problems, spot important details, and find a solution to each problem that comes their way. They should also know when it’s time to escalate to a manager. No matter who picks up the phone, you want to make sure the customer is in capable hands.
    5 Group Training Activities to Develop Call Center Soft Skills
    A PowerPoint presentation can be helpful for listing and explaining the above soft skills. The bigger challenge is encouraging your agents to practice, internalize, and apply these to their daily work.
    So how can you get agents to engage in sharpening their soft skills? The short answer: make it fun! The activities below will help your agents flex these skills and better understand how to apply them to their daily work.
    Voicemail Review
    Play a short voicemail message left by a customer, and have agents practice active listening. They should take note of their tone of voice, as well as any other phrases or details that can help them read into the customer’s situation.
    This exercise is meant to help agents read between the lines of what the customer is saying, as well as understand their tone of voice. Once everyone shares their impressions of the voicemail, have them discuss what steps they would take in the follow-up call.
    At the end, reveal what the real resolution was and how it was handled. Were your agents far off with their assessments?
    Call-Backs vs. Voicemail: Which is Best for the Contact Center?
    The Drawing Game
    Organize your agents into pairs. Agent A will be given a simple drawing, and Agent B will have a paper and pencil. Agent A should describe their picture (without naming the item) to Agent B, who will try to recreate the drawing on a blank sheet of paper. Neither agent should be able to see the other’s sheet of paper.
    For example, Agent A has a picture of an ice cream cone. They may describe it as an “upside down triangle with a big circle on top”. Agent A and B may talk to each other to complete the picture, as long as Agent A doesn’t say that it’s an ice cream cone. When the time is up, the pictures are revealed and compared. This activity encourages communication and problem-solving in agents—and even a little friendly competition!
    Customer Call Roleplay
    Most contact centers use roleplay in their technical training, but did you know this method can be applied to soft skills as well? Pair up your junior agents with more seasoned agents and have them engage in roleplay.
    Have the more experienced agents play different types of customers on the phone. Think of customer personas, such as the ones listed here. How do agents respond to individuals who give short answers without much detail? How should they approach an irate customer who begins the call with a long list of complaints?
    Encourage your veteran agents to draw from their personal experiences and coach your newer agents through these scenarios. This will helps strengthen their problem-solving, as well as active listening and communication skills.
    9 Types of Call Center Customers (and How to Deal With Them)
    20 Questions
    This classic road-trip game encourages your agents to think critically and ask thoughtful questions. Have one agent select a mystery word that falls into the category of “person,” “place,” or “thing.” Then, each agent will ask a question that can be answered with “yes” or “no” to narrow down the word.
    Challenge your team to try and get the mystery word in 20 questions or less. This exercise will help agents ask more insightful questions and understand customer situations a lot faster.
    Who Am I?
    This is another game that is great for encouraging thoughtful questions—with a twist! In this game, an agent is given a mystery word (a noun) that only the other agents can see.
    The other players then take turns making statements to try and describe the mystery word to the agent. The goal is to get the agent to guess their mystery word in as few tries as possible. This game is especially good for improving players’ communication and active listening for the main agent.The post 5 Fun Call Center Soft Skills Training Activities first appeared on Fonolo.

  • Extensions and souvenirs

    When a brand is successful, there’s often a desire to extend it.

    Disneyland was an extension of Disney movies. It reflected some of the magic of the movies, but created something new and valuable as well. Disneyland had some of the Disney essence and then built something additive and new.

    Apple did the same thing with the iPhone in extending the brand of the Mac.

    On the other hand, the new Leica watch is simply a souvenir. It’s not a better watch. It’s not more of a Leica than any of a dozen other overpriced watches could be seen to be. It’s simply there to remind you that you liked the original. It’s a souvenir of a feeling, not the creator.

    Nothing wrong with a souvenir. I’m sure Leica will make a profit from their watch with little damage to the promise that the brand itself makes. But make too many souvenirs and you become a hollow shell, wasting the chance to make the change you seek.

    The crappy t-shirt you bought at your favorite musician’s concert is a souvenir, but they shouldn’t count on that as their legacy or the engine of their growth.

    All day, individual creators have to make choices about what they’re going to do next. Sometimes we can create an extension. And sometimes, we decide to make a souvenir instead.

  • Stop Sending Emails to Unengaged Subscribers

    An active email list is an essential pillar of email marketing. As a business owner that sends out emails regularly, you want an email list with contacts that engage with your content and purchase your offers for email marketing success, great ROI, and increased business revenue. An average worker battles with up to 121 emails…
    The post Stop Sending Emails to Unengaged Subscribers appeared first on Benchmark Email.

  • CX Ops Roundtable (free events)

    Hi #cx community- we’re hosting our next monthly round table tomorrow (Thursday) at 12PM EST. You can sign-up here for more information and invites: www.cxops.org/community submitted by /u/jncreative [link] [comments]

  • GiveSites Pro Sell More Businesses With What They Have Got…

    Perhaps a lot of people have been talking about GoteSites.pro lately. ​ It refers to the most recent, most inventive, and most results-focused gift site creation tool to have been released to date. ​ This ground-breaking platform enables you to build gift websites that are updated automatically and provides unlimited gifts to business owners under your own brand. ​ You simply need to have a fundamental understanding of how the Internet works, and GoteSites will take care of the rest for you. ​ You no longer need to wait a few days or a few weeks for your gift site to go up. You can quickly and easily create an unlimited number of gift sites with GoteSites and start promoting them right away. ​ https://www.skilatchi.com/2022/09/givesites-pro-sell-more-businesses-with.html submitted by /u/cycysimba [link] [comments]

  • Side Hussle

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  • We ignored SEO => 700 visits/ month vs. We focused on SEO => 500,000 visits/ month Here’s an SEO course I made to help you learn SEO the way even a 5-year old can learn. FREE!

    SEO contributes >50% to our $3 million startup | Here’s an SEO course I made to help you learn SEO the way even a 5-year old can learn. What to Expect: SEO strategies for scaling e-commerce brands without ad spend and why solely relying on paid advertising strategies, like Facebook Ads, will keep you from reaching your earnings potential How to skyrocket your profit margins and put more money in your pockets for each sale generated How to increase conversion rates by bringing users to your website who are actively looking to purchase your product How to generate consistent traffic that you can rely on to generate sales on autopilot for years on end, without massive fluctuations or constant maintenance. Behind the scenes look at how our strategies have 10x organic revenue for e-commerce brands that implement them And much, much more… Link: https://amanbhatia97.gumroad.com/l/seo submitted by /u/amanbhatia97 [link] [comments]

  • Different Ways to Grow Your Business With Little or No Budget

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  • Mindbox: Redesigning an automated marketing platform

    Mindbox is a cloud-based marketing automation platform for client companies. It helps them control email campaigns, set up personalization, and manage loyalty. Mindbox also removes the load from internal IT systems and allows you to transfer the collection, storage, and management of client data to a cloud-based CRM system with convenient management. Evrone provided three React specialists to help with the website redesign for Mindbox, and for the duration of the project, they became full-fledged members of the team with equal access to repositories and regular one-on-one meetings. Read the full case study here. submitted by /u/elizaveta123321 [link] [comments]