You’ve invested many resources into your inbound marketing campaign. In fact, your campaign has been very successful at generating leads. However, you’re not done just yet. Your leads are worthless if you don’t follow up on them. The goal here should be to turn those leads into customers, thereby providing you with a regular stream of revenue. Unfortunately, you may find that all of those IT sales leads you’re generating are not being successfully converted. The following are a few tips to help ensure that you don’t waste your leads:

Respond as quickly as possible

Don’t wait to follow up with your sales leads. The longer you wait, the less qualified of a lead they become. This is because your company is still fresh in their mind, and your competition hasn’t had a chance to steal them away from you yet. You may think that calling within 24 hours should be quick enough when it comes to following up on your IT sales leads - but it’s not. Consider the following:

• Calling a prospect within a minute of lead generation improved the conversion rate by an average of 391 percent compared to making the first follow up at a later date. That number plummets to an average of 7 percent when the call is made after 24 hours.
   
• Calling a prospect within the first five minutes of lead generation will be 21 times as effective than calling that prospect after 30 minutes of having generated the lead.
   
• Calling the prospect within five hours is still 40 percent more effective than calling after 24 hours.

Why does a quick follow up increase the chance of conversion? There are several reasons:

• The lead is more likely to be near their phone or computer when they submitted their information, which means they should be easier to reach.
   
• Their interest in your business is currently at its peak. The longer you wait, the more of a risk there is that they lose interest.
   
• A quick response builds confidence in your business - your prospects will assume you know what you’re doing and that you’re on top of things.
   
• A lead is more likely to work with the first person they speak with. This is true in pretty much every business. Take for example the response time stats of the property management business - around 64 percent of buyers and 66 percent of sellers end up working with the real estate agent that they speak to first.

When it comes down to it, the early bird gets the worm.

Make multiple attempts

You may not be able to reach your lead on the first try. This doesn’t mean that you no longer have any hope of converting them. However, out of all the leads that businesses follow up on, almost half are never contacted a second time. General rule of thumb - which is backed by extensive sales data - is that your salespersons should make an attempt to reach the sales lead at least six times before giving up on the prospect.

Follow up by emailing and calling

Calling your sales lead isn’t the only way that you should follow up on them. If you didn’t reach them the first time you called, then an email can improve your chances of reaching them. In fact, according to data collected by Leads360, sending emails to your sales leads between phone calls can help to improve your chances of contacting them by as much as 16 percent. Emailing your sales lead within 20 minutes of lead generation can boost your conversion rate by 49 percent. You should make no more than five attempts to reach the prospect via email within a month-long period - and these attempts should be spaced out.

Track your data

You’ll need to track your data in order to judge your follow up strategy and to adjust it accordingly. Keep track of how many IT sales leads you receive every week, how long it takes you on average to follow up on these leads, what percentage of your sales leads are actually converted into prospects that are qualified and what percentage of these prospects are converted into customers. Set goals for these measurements so that you have something to judge them by.

Your IT sales leads are incredibly valuable to your business, so don’t let them slip out of your hands. You need to follow up on your sales leads as soon as possible and make multiple attempts to contact them via both phone and email if you are unable to reach them on your first attempt. For more information and advice on how you can take control of your sales process by contacting one of our Rizen inbound specialists for a free Hubspot CRM demo.