Contractors are always focused on leads. They’re the lifeblood of you business. But if you are overly focused on quantity over quality, you could be making the life of your sales and marketing people tougher than it has to be. Let me explain.

When leads are tough to come by then this does not present the same type of problem, although the conversion will still be low because the quality of the leads may generally be low. The biggest issue on lead productivity is when you have an abundance of leads and you need to sort through them to spend time on the best quality. Here are 4 ways to get better productivity from your leads.

1. Use Qualifying Questions: Shorter forms are great for conversion, but sometimes you can compromise to get at specific information. Adding an extra question or two to a form that helps qualify leads for your sales team. For example, a question around time frame can help a sales rep prioritize follow-up, or decide to punt the lead off to the marketing list for further nurturing.

At Surefire Social we like to ask “the most burning question”. This helps us understand what the biggest pain point is, and the sales rep knows what to email them or talk to them about during a conversation. You can also easily disqualifying the lead, depending on the answer, so no follow-up is required or sending them back for re-marketing.

2. Score Your Leads: Lead scoring is an important way to use the data from your forms to assign points to each lead on some scale like 1 to 10 or 1 to 5. A higher the grade the better the lead.  If you have 5 questions, rate each question from each lead 1 to 10. Add them up and start with the top half. Keep going till the productivity decreases significantly. You can fine-tune this process over time.

3. Split Your Lead Funnel: Most home services contracting companies track their leads in a simple lead funnel. However, with the combination of qualifying questions and some automated workflow rules, you can partition leads into various funnels or “buckets” as seen below. Examples can be PPC, social media, website, email, direct mail, call in. Over time you can learn what lead channels are your most productive and why.

Then, by routing leads with lower close rates to other buckets you ensure sales reps focus on lead buckets that yield the most customers, maximizing productivity. At the same time you can run small experiments to see if we can yield customers from our other buckets.

4. Nurture Your Leads: Lastly, there is no such thing as a bad lead. Sometimes people enter bad information and those leads cannot be used. But organizations should think of leads as sales ready, or not. Marketing teams should identify leads that are not sales ready and hold them back in a separate lead nurturing funnel and continue to educate them and keep them engaged till they are sales ready.

When sales teams get leads that aren’t ready, they should send them to the nurture funnel so marketing can continue to have conversations with them till they are ready to buy.

These steps help maximize yield from your best leads and keeps your sales team highly productive.

What kind of techniques or marketing automation are you using to manage your leads? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Contractor Marketing Lead Generation Video