The first most important thing about handling potential customers who contact your company is to have a clear idea of the type of company you are, and the type of customer you best serve.
This might sound strange, especially for compliance firms which can be frequently mentioned as commoditised, but at the end of the day you are going to save a whole lot of heart ache by making sure you have the basics down at start, before you start chatting to prospects.
So, best to start looking at what type of firm you are, what type of staff you hire, turnover of staff, what your office image is – both physical and online, and what your annual compliance workload looks like.
The clever marketing gurus often mention you should have an idea of your customer persona, that is the likely customer profile of people you best serve.
So once you’ve got all that down pat, the best way to sift through your best prospects is to match the best customer profile, with the people who start applying.
At the very start of the process, it’s important to not only have a good data capture process, but also a good evaluation process.
So looking at your “contact us” page, make sure you include critical information, but also offer the ability to provide additional information.
And here’s our 5 tips on how to analyse those tyre kickers:
- Only provides first name in the name field, and not their surname
- Provides their personal email address, which is usually a generic email and doesn’t allow identification of the company
- Doesn’t provide the company name they represent
- Doesn’t provide a landline in the phone (along with the other points above, which make it difficult to work out who you are talking to), but only provides a mobile phone
- Leaves the “message” field blank, or just wants a competitive price without talking to anyone.
If you do happen to progress a phone call, then keep an eye out for worrying signs. Whether they are “just wanting some pricing for the boss”, or “need to check with their partners”, or “just want some information before a call”. These are all signs that the decision maker isn’t present, and more than likely an administration person is going through the motion of getting information for the sake thereof.
So keep an eye on your prospects, make sure they meeting your customer persona matching with your culture, and if you need help with your outsourcing then drop us a line here at Odyssey.
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