Good news! Your practice’s leads are up, meaning you have more prospects on your radar than ever.
Bad news! You have no idea how to connect with them. You could hardly be farther from a solid introduction — to say nothing of them making an appointment and signing them to business. For the connection you have with these people, you may as well be looking at a hundred-year-old yearbook.
Closing this gap is the difference between business growth vs. stagnation. How can you close the gap and connect with the leads you already have?
Identify Qualified Leads
One way to connect with your leads is to identify which are worth pursuing in the first place. A qualified lead is, by virtue of being qualified, already further down your pipeline than the others, and therefore more amenable to signing on with you.
Streamline the information you receive from form fills and ask specific questions which identify a lead as qualified. What’s their primary income stream? What’s their risk tolerance? What does their ideal retirement look like? Knowing the answers to these questions gets you from pursuing a lead to serving a new client much quicker than an arbitrary guess.
Further still, identifying qualified leads at your events is an easier task than you may think. Host a referral event for your current clients and invite them to bring a friend or two who could use your services. Odds are, the friend is in a similar spot to your client — which means you already know how to close them.
Develop Communication Funnels
To reach your leads, you need to have efficient and consistent lines of communication. Building solid email lists is a thorough, robust strategy to keep clients funneling into your orbit. This way, you’re maintaining contact with your leads and staying at the top of their minds, building the relationship that one day will mature into them being a client.
Building an email list, however, is not the same as maintaining an email list. Review your email communication methods on a consistent (but not overly frequent) basis to make sure the processes you have in place are actually working. This way, you can make necessary adjustments along the way and keep those communication funnels running.
Don’t be afraid to build leads through the mail, either! Even if you think it’s old-fashioned, it’s still a rich source for connection.
Monitor Performance
Whatever processes you happen to adopt, much like your email communication funnels, you should monitor their performance. Stay abreast of how your marketing efforts are performing and keep an eye on those scorecards. Once something stops working, stop using it; once a particular process begins peaking, be sure to follow through.
If funds are tight and you’re finding that it takes longer to close, make some decisions as to which processes to keep and which to drop. It’s important to spend where the stats and leads are best for you. Regardless of whether you’re aiming for efficiency or optimization, actions that trail in total returns won’t contribute to lead turnover.
With all these methods, keep in mind that the key is to keep going. A lead remains a lead as long as you don’t give up on the prospect. Soon enough, and with the right tools and connections, even the most remote lead can become your next favorite client.
