What Can Happen if You're Actually Successful in Internet Marketing...

I was fortunate enough to work for one of the pioneers in Internet Marketing.  This was a very large company who had the idea to elevate their brand, products and services by using internet marketing.  Of course, we had access to the best website designers, an e-commerce engine and sophisticated web tools to support any type of product sale or inquiry.

Our approach was our market research, our messaging and our online sales through the internet.  We looked at the benefits of Internet Marketing such as richer content, easy accessibility and an additional sales channel to interact with prospects and receive better lead sources, better prospects, increased sales.  Also, it provided us real-time results by systematically measuring through web analytics, client reviews, surveys and ratings.

Sounds like a nice problem to have?  Right? What we didn’t realize was the potential for success - how to manage the large volume of prospects who were interested or were considering buying our products and services.  The problem was our response time (follow-up) was slow and many times even non-existent.     

As we all know, like globalization, internet marketing has brought new help and thousands of new efficiencies that have dramatically changed the way we do business.  But at the same time, if poorly planned and staffed, internet marketing can potentially damage a company’s brand reputation, customer satisfaction and most importantly trust.

Bringing more traffic to your website is good, but below are 6 strategies to manage sales ready and not so sales ready leads:

·         Develop good lead criteria.

·         Have good scoring criteria against your established lead criteria.

·         Have a mechanized web-to-lead strategy, automatically assigning sales ready “hot” leads or “warmer” leads to the seller.

·         Include these leads as part of your sales management meetings.  Manage them as you would manage traditional prospects.

·         If you are receiving an abundant of “warmer” or “lesser qualified” leads, assign them as well to your staff or our Appointment Lab to nurture until they become appointment ready for the seller.

·         Get feedback, what attracted the person to the site, what did they like about the content, what experiences didn’t they like….

In the Internet Marketing age, reputation moves at the speed of light. Do something wrong, and you will know about it within minutes, get something right, and your reputation can blossom just as quickly.www.thelearningstrategy.com