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One of the most important (but often neglected) steps in the sales cycle is closing the loop. You’ve attracted the most qualified leads and delivered them to your sales representatives and independent dealers. Now it’s time to sit back and watch the sales roll in, right?

Nope. While successful businesses trust in their sales teams to close the loop on prospective opportunities, things happen. Inboxes overflow, passwords are forgotten, and frankly, sales reps get busy and sometimes lose focus on new leads in the day-to-day shuffle.

That’s why we offer a service to address this problem specifically. We can guarantee that once SmartLead has been running for six months that at least 70 percent of your leads are examined by your sales reps, even when they’re working through independent dealers. We’ll even provide data to show how the reps closed the loop – or what happened to their leads if they didn’t.

How we can claim a 70 percent examination rate

When we say, “70 percent of leads that we deliver to the independent channel will be examined, guaranteed,” some people look at us like we’re nuts. That’s a very high number to quote – the industry average is just 20 percent. And that’s the point. The claim is bold enough that their next question often is, “How will you do that?” which is equivalent to saying, “Tell me more.”

This approach works because our experience shows us  that 70 percent is totally achievable. It’s not good business to throw out a pie-in-the-sky number and struggle to achieve it – while killing your team in the process. We focus on making the claims that set us apart, and those that are both enticing to clients and achievable by our team.

Closing the loop

SmartLead automatically distributes generated leads to the right sales rep through the right channel. Closing the loop is taking it a step further.

Through SmartLead, we can identify whether emails containing lead information have been opened within the timeframe set by the client. If it hasn’t, we’ll send a reminder. Still no action? We’ll send another reminder and copy the sales rep’s manager.

If that doesn’t prompt action, we’ll give the sales rep a call to determine their barriers to examining the lead and offer to look at it with them on the spot. Often, the barrier is something as simple as forgetting their SmartLead password – we can reset it for them on the fly. If all else fails and the sales rep does not examine the lead, we can automatically revoke and reassign the lead to the next most appropriate sales representative.

The final step in closing the loop is assigning a disposition code. This step is valuable to our clients’ marketing teams – and it’s also the step that often doesn’t happen. We’ll generate a disposition code for each lead so the marketers can determine how effectively a specific campaign generated leads, how many were lost to the competition, and how many resulted in sales. Whether the opportunity resulted in a sale or chose not to purchase now, you will be able to use that data for future campaigns.