While many CRMs claim to help increase your prospects, few actually explain in detail the ins and outs of how this works. Managing your prospects is no longer optional if you want to succeed online. Here, we’ll offer you some ways to tackle this. We’ll discuss techniques as well as a variety of the benefits of CRM that will make these management tasks much easier.
Automate some of your emails
Email marketing campaigns are a key component of creating and managing prospects. This type of strategy, which is as useful for managing prospects as it is for creating them, is critical for your success.
Just like with marketing in general, sending marketing emails requires first and foremost that you establish an initial point of contact, i.e., send cold emails. Your campaign must always meet general criteria. This is particularly important if you want to avoid having your emails end up in the spam folder of 90% of your prospects. Additionally, you need to include specific information, such as your business’ address, name, and even its registration number. These minor details will keep your emails from being marked as spam.
Next, your emails are intended to address a complex challenge: identifying the value of your product. This is the number one advantage that will generate prospects and transform them into your clients—if they aren’t already.
The bottom line here? You need to focus on your value proposition, your editorial approach. Carry out testing, keep on trying, and, above all, analyze the data you collect. This way you’ll be able to continually modify your email campaign.
In particular, you should consider personalizing your emails with a first name to make your campaign stand out to your prospects. You first need to be satisfied with your campaign before using it to get your prospects’ attention.
Post regularly
You always need to be posting content on a regular basis. This holds true whether it’s for your blog, Twitter, Facebook or YouTube. Developing and maintaining a community requires consistent effort to out-compete your competitors and establish entire groups of people who will over time become followers and, eventually, your clients.
You therefore need to commit to regularly posting articles, tweets, Facebook messages, and even Instagram visuals or YouTube videos. You may also want to use Pinterest, which is the most effective platform in terms of prospects after YouTube. Publish quality content, and do so on a regular basis. Perhaps not daily, depending on the medium, but at least weekly.
This regularity will help you engage followers organically, people within your community who will, over time, become prospects and then clients. Whether it’s on social media or a blog, you should always be starting a conversation with many of your online audience members. By presenting your business as being available, you’ll have an easier time engaging prospects and attracting them organically.
Statistic: a company that blogs bi-weekly engages nearly 8 times more prospects than any other company.
Leverage your professional networks
Many businesses and start-ups have figured this out. Personal or professional networks can be tremendous resources. This sort of professional network or connection will open many doors for you and generate numerous prospects. Why?
Simply because these connections have even greater connections. These sorts of dialogues, based on trust and familiarity, between one or more personal and/or professional connections will draw in many prospects, often in ways you would least expect.
This is how fundraising or crowdfunding campaigns work. Every project leader must first leverage their personal connections to generate leads. The same goes for your business as a whole. By using this sort of network, you’ll generate leads faster, whether directly or indirectly. All in all, it’s a simple way of developing your clientele or finding prospects.
Tip: Don’t hesitate to ask members of your professional network for advice. Not only do professionals feel privileged to give advice to other professionals, but you will also find their tips, opinions and feedback extremely valuable.
Learn from the best
That may surprise you, however. Many businesses draw inspiration from others’ backgrounds, and it’s no wonder: creativity doesn’t pay on the Internet. It never pays. The best email campaigns, blog articles, value propositions and social media posts draw on other posts.
In this case, to generate a significant number of prospects, you need to draw inspiration from how others have successfully attracted prospects. Always trust the methods that have proved effective. Whether it’s catchy messages, posts with video, or a bunch of revealing blogs, keep an eye on your competitors’ activity and modify their strategy to meet your own organization’s needs.
This doesn’t mean copying everything they do from A to Z, but simply keeping the same overall structure. This will usually be foundational for managing your prospects.
For example, in the case of email, figure out what your competitors do—if 100% of them use smiley faces in the email header, how can you make yourself stand out from them? If they use this tactic, that means it works, and you can tailor the strategy to your organization.
If you can, avoid thinking in terms of creativity and originality when it comes to generating and managing prospects. The more you stray into new, less common frameworks, the more sidelined you will become from competitors and from your market.
In other words, focus on what’s being done in your market sector. Keep an eye on your competitors, observe the best ones and tailor their strategy to your own business.
How can a CRM help you manage and generate prospects?
CRM’s capacity for prospect automation and qualification will allow you to fill a void. CRM offers unique features, to say the least, giving you 3-star lead management, as opposed to doing such tasks manually.
CRMs like Dynamics 365 help you manage your prospects first and foremost. Using a variety of tools, such as artificial intelligence, you can identify important data on your prospects. But this is only the beginning, as this is really just a secondary feature.
You can use these software solutions to strengthen your relationship with your prospects and maintain close ties with each of them, as well as to develop detailed plans—all of this practically automatically. You can also fine-tune your sales process by continually improving your techniques using AI or tools for managing prospects.
For instance, you can develop action plans several weeks ahead of time. You’ll go from planning automated calls for every prospect the first week, to sending automated invitations the second week after making the calls, to sending optimized content the third week, following the invitations. These processes are performed systematically based on your prospects. This saves you time and optimizes how you manage your prospects.
Of course, this will all be optimized in real time. With Dynamics 365, for example, you can create marketing dashboards with many statistics and data. This data can be managed by artificial intelligence within the framework of Sales Insights or Customer Service Insights.
You can create, manage and automate all this data using a CRM, optimizing it all to transform every prospect into a client. All in all, from a perspective of business growth, the methods presented above can all be automated and optimized to grow your prospects and manage them more easily on a daily basis. CRMs have proven themselves to be essential assets for managing business leads.
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August 20, 2021 by Frédéric Charest by Frédéric Charest VP of Marketing
Data-driven Growth Marketer with a Passion for SEO - Driving Results through Analytics and Optimization
