Everyone we talk to recently is still lamenting about how bad the economy is and how hard they are struggling to get in new business. We are in the same boat. So, it is important to us to do everything we can to get in new leads and quickly react to them. In addition, we and our clients are looking for ways to drive more people to our website. It would be great to have a way to leverage both needs.
Recently I attended a conference listening to awesome people with amazing ideas. One of the ideas is about automating lead management. By now, you all should have figured out we work with Sage ACT. It is a great tool for managing contacts, including leads. But you need a way to get the leads into the database in the first place.
We also work with Swiftpage, the eMarketing aspect inside of ACT. One of the things included in ACT eMarketing is the ability to build surveys. These surveys can be fill in the blanks to capture data such as name, address, phone number, areas of interest, etc. And….this is the cool thing … they can be placed as a web form on a website.
Let’s take that a bit further. The tool allows data that comes in from a survey to be added to an ACT database as a new contact, in this case, a lead. What a great idea. Build a survey, put it on the web, have it automatically added into ACT and then build a group in ACT that shows all the leads that day.
Once this is built I have a process in place that took a little bit of time to implement, but very little time ongoing. And I can now focus on those leads and turn them into customers.
I’ve been working with this tool forever, but sometimes you don’t see the forest for the trees. It just takes a nudge to have you look at opportunities and be creative with known tools in your sales arsenal. With the new ability to do smart tasks offline, I need to take this to the next level of automation.
I'll do another blog article about how that works out. We're implementing it for several clients so we'll have some great best practices. Glad the trees got out the way for a bit.