If you ask any business owner what their number one goal is, it’s a no-brainer. Increased revenue, decreased spend. If you asked everyone on earth the question “Do you want to make more money and spend less doing it?” You’d get a pretty unanimous answer. “Yes!”
So then how do you do it?
You might decide that you need to start with some form of advertising to generate leads. Now your company has ads on the internet, TV, billboards, moving vehicles, you name it… your brand and message are now all over your city–and the marketing companies love you for it!
That’s all well and good, but remember at the beginning, when we said we wanted to make MORE money and spend LESS? You might be spending a bunch of money on traditional media, but where are those leads going? Your efforts are probably funneling potential leads to visit your website, or to give you a call for more information.
Here’s where the challenge comes in.
Do you trust that a potential lead will adequately fill out the form on your website, or just add their name and email? Does a name and email say enough about your potential customer to start a conversation? What happens when that person calls your company after hours? If they call during regular business hours, are your employees trained to ask them the right questions? Should you try to field these calls on your own, or hire a professional answering service?
Recent trends are showing that using a professional answering service for lead capture may be the answer to every business owner’s prayers. According to MarketingProfs, telemarketing services are among the top 5 most effective lead generation tactics. Using that logic, hiring a professional answering service to help capture some of those incoming leads would create lead capture success for a business of any size.
B2B Technology Marketing Community reports that 61% of businesses named “generating high quality leads” as their number one challenge in 2016 and that the greatest barriers in preventing them from doing so are the lack of resources in staffing, budgeting, or time. What’s more, a recent study done by a global marketing company surveyed 219 small to mid-sized US businesses and showed that 65% of marketing departments had staffs of 5 or fewer professionals. What this means, is that there aren’t enough marketing professionals in many business environments, which is why capturing leads fall through the cracks.
Research shows that a phone answering service can save a company money and solve a lot of these pains. An answering service is trained to correctly capture leads and information from prospects that can and will benefit the company’s lead generation efforts.
Using a phone answering service is the smartest way to capture information about your prospects. Information is power, so quality lead capture from the right answering service can take so much of the guesswork out of your future marketing efforts too.
