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Did you know that 80% of leads are never worked on by sales teams?
This is what is known as lead leakage.
One of the top priorities of every business is to establish a working sales pipeline. This should have a sufficient number of prospects for its sales team to work on with no sales funnel leakage.
Another priority is to reduce customer acquisition costs (CAC) by utilizing several lead sources and preventing lead leakage. Developing a steady sales pipeline and finding potential customers is accomplished through multiple marketing channels.
However, several factors to consider here include a budget, years in the industry, type of business, and the industry itself. Spending a lot of money on generating leads, only to experience lead leakage later, is the most frustrating part for a business owner.
In this article, we will take a closer look at lead leakage, why it happens and 4 ways you can prevent it.
Marketers lose the majority of leads because they focus on gaining new leads instead of nurturing and managing existing leads. In this regard, lead leakage refers to the loss of leads as they progress through the funnel.
To create sales, you must guide the customer down each step of the sales funnel. In this process, there is always a chance for lead leakage if you don’t nurture them or close the deal.
There are two types of leads that leak:
1) Cold leads (inquiries or suspects): These are passed to sales and never worked upon because sales assume they are uninterested.
2) Warm Leads: These are leads that have been worked by sales but have not progressed down the pipeline for some reason.
Lead leakage can occur for various different reasons. The following are the most common causes of lead leakage:
In marketing and sales, dealing with unqualified leads is one of the biggest causes of lead leakage. These prospects are still at the very top of the sales process, and they haven’t yet decided whether or not to purchase.
You can use lead scoring, which ranks leads based on their level of interest, actions, and readiness for purchase. In this way, you can prevent lead leakage by ensuring that your leads are ready for sales before they are sent to them.
For building relationships with leads and customers, lead nurturing is a critical component that you should not neglect. It’s a way to keep in touch with prospects even if they’re not quite ready to buy. It can also help prevent lead leakage.
While nurturing your leads is critical, you must also be able to tell the difference between engaging with them and keeping a safe distance. Too much persistence from the sales team can result in lead leakage. Make sure you know where your lead is in the sales process and only give them what they need.
Lead leakage is one of the most expensive marketing and sales issues, and it affects the company’s bottom line and slows its growth. To avoid lead leakage, you must plug any gaps in your sales funnel. A business must control lead leakage to boost sales and revenue.
Lead leakage can have quite a negative impact on your business ad revenue. Here are some helpful ways you can keep lead leakage under control:
Before you do anything else, you need to figure out where lead leakage is happening in the sales process. Is your website getting a lot of traffic but only a few conversions? Are you getting a lot of trialists, but they are not converting into customers? Are you having a hard time convincing potential customers at the proposal stage?
The first step in sales funnel leakage is figuring out where the problem is.
Investing in technology is crucial for enhancing sales performance and preventing lead leakage. Some tools that you must adopt are:
Some companies continue to use MS Excel to keep track of their customers. But lead storage, lead distribution, and lead information cannot be managed efficiently using excel alone. There are CRMs, like NeoDove, for every size and type of business these days, and the investment will be worthwhile in the long run.
In this way, you can maintain tabs on a potential customer’s purchase progress. You will know when to follow up and thus prevent lead leakage.
To help inbound marketing activities, marketing automation tools are an excellent resource for gathering contact information from potential customers. These tools involve variables such as industry, company size, and other critical factors like lead industry segmentation and CRM integration. Thus, they excel in all aspects of managing leads, from the initial capture to the end of the lead’s lifecycle, preventing lead leakage.
It’s easy to remarket the content to leads who are a good fit for your products but are still a few months away from making a purchase using these tools.
These platforms assist in refining the organization’s sales follow-up process to prevent lead leakage. To prevent sales leakage, they include a series of touchpoints such as phone, email, and social media.
Marketing must take the responsibility of nurturing and promoting sales-ready leads to the sales team. Marketing can develop, identify, and hand off sales-ready leads for lead nurturing to prevent lead leakage. This includes sending relevant content to prospects based on who they are and their interests.
To prevent sales funnel leakage, it is also important to note how far along they are in the buying process. You can track this based on their digital activity on your website.
Marketing should also be in charge of re-nurturing leads that have been handed over to sales. This is important to convert them into sales opportunities and prevent sales leakage.
Another way to help reduce lead leakage is through cooperation between your sales and marketing teams. It is important to have scalable processes, and both the sales and marketing teams understand and share responsibilities. Both teams need to:
1) Agree on a predictable lead scoring method for sales-qualified leads to prevent lead leakage.
2) Keep a fortnightly or monthly lead dashboard and analyze both Sales & Marketing follow up on leads.
3) Have a standardized approach to lead nurturing and remarketing to prevent lead leakage.
4) Ensure that the right content for the right lead is created and pushed at the right buying stage. For this, regular customer feedback from sales to marketing is required.
Lead leakage is one of the most challenging areas for sales & marketing teams. Ensuring proper lead management is critical for organizations to avoid lead leakage.
To reduce lead leakage, it’s important to identify points in the funnel where users frequently stop or resign. What do they require there? What about additional motivation? What about direct contact with salespeople? Dispelling their skepticism?
Remember to personalize your messages and content according to the stage of the funnel to prevent sales funnel leakage. And, your business will be thriving in no time!
Sales pipeline leakage can also be referred to as sales funnel leakage or lead leakage. Lead leakage refers to the progressive loss of leads as they progress through the funnel.
To create sales, you must guide the customer down each step of the sales funnel. In this process, there is always a chance for lead leakage if you don’t nurture them or close the deal.
A sales lead is a person or business who may eventually become a client. Any potential buyer of products and services of a business is a lead in the sales pipeline of that company.
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