Inbound Leads Best Practices: What are your 3 tips for following up on inbound leads?

Michael and Michael offer solid advice. I'll assume your website had auto-responders that are setting the proper expectation for follow-up with the prospect, and that the action they've taken is appropriate for a follow-up call - like your "Contact Sales" form for example. Here are three things that have worked well for my lead qualification team:
- At a glance look and see if it's worthwhile. Beyond the Mickey Mouse leads, do they appear to be a target for your company? Place a call if they are a valid inquiry, but don't spend a lot of time if they are not a target, this is a courtesy call, and perhaps you'll be surprised.
- Research the lead if they look "juicy". If you have access to Inside View, Marketing Automation, or another sales intelligence tool, look at their prior history, what web activities they had, search terms they used, etc. Learn what's happening at that company that is timely and strategic. Use their website and Google for recent news and initiatives their executives have cited. Figure out how your solution aligns with that goal. Be prepared.
- Follow-up Fast! I've seen research that shows you are 21x more likely to qualify if you follow-up within 5 minutes and the scale slides downhill fast. Tomorrow is too late.

Since everyone else has done such a great job, and delivered great content, on the "If" you should respond, and the "Ways" to respond I am going to take a moment to discuss the "What to say" once you have them voice to voice with you.

1) I appreciate your interest in _____ and want to thank you for reaching out to us, I am curious though, what was it that caused you to contact us (or "Caused you to respond to our website/material we sent/return my voicemail?")?

One of the first things I teach aspiring sales professionals, and remind seasoned reps is to never assume anything! (Except that this person is going to want to do business with you until proven innocent!). This technique also gets the other person talking, instead of the rep getting on their soapbox. Seek frst to understand! In many cases the prospect will lay out the pains and challenges for you, but in some cases they will just talk about the positive reasons they want to look at your service/product, which leads us to step two...

2) Guide the conversation to "What if you didn't/What if you don't".

It is so easy to take an inbound situation and get a little lazy. Here is a person who is seemingly asking for your product or service, and it is natural to feel that if you just give them the info they want they will buy. The reality is, if you just give them information they will in many cases either procrastinate, or go with your competitor. By taking the time, and potential un-comfortableness, to dig in to the consequences, challenges, and issues that are driving the curiosity you elevate yourself and your organization from just order taking to true selling and get the insight, leverage, and emotional buy in to be able to win the business where appropriate.

3) Quid pro Quo.

In almost every case the person doing the "Inquiry" is asking for something, a quote, a testimonial, a demo or some other item to help them make a decision. Inherently we understand reciprocity. When someone does something for us, there is a part of us that wants to do something in return so we are "Even". Encourage your teams to be agreeable and yet get agreement. For example once you have done step two above the prospect may ask ""Can you send me "X"?" the appropriate answer is not "Yes", it's "Yes with a follow up set". If they want a demo its "Sure, I am more than happy to do the work on my side to set that up, and in order to do that I need you to ______ (get the right people in the room/have this info to me in advance etc.). There are times you want to give generously, there are reasons at times to offer value with no expectations, at this point though it is a time to get something in return.

We actually learned these three things as kids:
- Thank you (with a child’s natural curiosity)
- Natural consequences for actions (touch a hot stove) and non action (forgot to let the dog out!)
- I'll trade you a cookie for your candy bar!

Good luck getting the most out of your inbound leads. -Kevin

I agree with everything Michael says above..
I will add:
-Marketing and Sales should work in conjunction with each other on the process of accepting and scoring the inbound leads. Too often leads slip through the cracks when they are just accepted by marketing, handed to sales an piled and dialed without proper due diligence and deep mined qualification.
-There must be accountability on both teams as to the next steps and result of the lead.
-The qualified leads have a limited shelf life. Thus, activity must be immediate and consistent when executing the outbound strategy to engage the lead POC. Like Mike says utilize the basic mediums to get the conversation going as fast as possible. Use Linked in messages, email, voicemail etc to ultimately get the lead POC on the phone to determine if the lead is a legitimate prospect worth cultivating. Good luck!

Michael LoPreste
wwww.gensourc.com
http://www.gensourc.blogspot.com/

Thanks everyone for your feedback. I look forward to hearing more. The actual blocking and tackling of converting inbound leads is one of the most important conversion points in your lead management process. Organizations are getting more and more sophisticated about generating leads via inbound marketing and content marketing, but the question we are answering here is "what to do when the leads come in". Mike Damphousse, who commented above, makes this point all the time, to paraphase: "you generated a name, so what?".
Here are my tips:

1. Have a dedicated phone resource solely responsible for following up on leads -- .I don't care if you insource or outsource. You need a phone-based team who will just follow-up and convert qualified leads by either introducing them to sales people or setting up appointments or demos. If you want to follow up within 5 minutes like Edwin Thompson just mentioned, then you will need someone ready to call. Follow-up should NOT be put in the hands of quota-carrying sales reps.

2. Use a coordinated multi-channel approach -- The best way to describe this is with an example: Day 1: Phone and Email Follow-up within 30 minutes. Day 3: Phone and Email Follow up Day 5: Phone and Email Follow-up. Emails should be written for the reps and sent in an automated fashion for them via marketing automation (so you can be alerted if they do anything with it). Everything should be standardized and optimized over time: ie when you call, the message you want to deliver, the emails (what they say, when you send it), how long you keep a lead alive, etc.

3. Who you don't call is as important as who you do call -- Time is the enemy in this game and scoring can help. First of all, there is "old-school' scoring. When the lead comes in you throw out obvious garbage and you check the CRM to make sure they haven't come in before, aren't customers, resellers etc. Then comes high-tech scoring where the type of content and activities on the site tell the lead follow-up team who is more likely to convert than others. Both things are important.

I asked for 3 in my question above, but I will add:
Sales 2.0 tools are like adding a "booster" engine to this process -- Mike mentioned Connect and Sell, Edwin mentioned Inside View for research. Great stuff.
Immediate Follow-up when appropriate -- Edwin mentioned so I don't need to do too much with it, but I agree.

I asked our VP of Solution Services, Karla Blalock, to weigh in on this question and she provided the following:

1) Measure the results of each specific activity that generated the inbound leads - webinar, tradeshow, email campaign to develop a per event ROI. We frequently find that inbound leads are higher cost and lower quality than proactive outbound leads.

2) Continue to nurture decision makers within the organizations that responded – not necessarily the responder (who could be an influencer but not a decision-maker)

And, I add:

3) Use what we call the multi, multi, multi approach. Multiple touches, multiple media and multiple cycles to multiply results.