LEAD GENERATION SOFTWARE: WHEN TO USE IT AND WHEN TO AVOID IT

LEAD GENERATION SOFTWARE: 

WHEN TO USE IT AND WHEN TO AVOID IT

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When it comes to dental lab lead generation software and platforms, there are two things to keep in mind:

1. If your dental lab's sales pipeline management process is broken, lead generation software won’t fix it on its own
2. However, if your dental lab's sales pipeline management process is well-defined, lead generation software can help you scale it

In other words, once you have all your sales ducks in a row, you can achieve more while doing the same (or less!) with the right toolkit in place.

We’re passionate about lead generation software because it helps salespeople do what they do best: sell.

It empowers reps to lead productive sales conversations and dig deep into their prospect’s pain points instead of getting lost in admin work.

The wrong sales software will slow your sales team down; the ideal one will cut hours of admin work and make them fly through their day with ease.

In this guide, we’re diving into the ins and outs of using lead generation software to help your sales team hit their quota efficiently and consistently.

Why you should use lead generation software

The answer to this question seems pretty obvious, right? Lead generation software lets you automate the search for new prospects.

That’s true, but there’s so much more a lead generation software can do for you beyond that.

Effortlessly prioritize sales workload

When you manually search for leads and take the time to contact them through cold emails and cold calling, it can take a long time before your efforts land on fertile ground.

In other words, you could spend hours on the phone with the wrong people before your first productive conversation of the day, or even the week!

This happens because a list of cold prospects is just that: a list of unqualified, unscored leads whom you know almost nothing about.

How does lead gen software make this happen? Here are a few examples:

• Leads who download lead magnets and become part of your mailing list could reveal their interests in the links they click through on your newsletters
• A person that visited your website five times in the last week and viewed ten or more pages is probably more interested than someone who visited just once
• A lead that filled out your contact form and wrote a long, detailed message is probably more invested than someone who only wrote a few words

This is the type of information your reps can never gather on their own, without the help of software.

The verdict here is an easy one: lead generation software platforms uncover key information about your incoming leads and helps your team work on hot leads first. It creates urgency and helps you not to waste key opportunities.

Route leads to the right sales rep

A great sales team is made out of people who are driven, assertive and confident while staying empathic, humble and honest.

They also set high standards when it comes to the velocity and size of the deals they close, their sales pipeline health, and their close rate.

The best sales team, however, is the one where everyone knows their undeniable strength and uses it to work through sales conversations and challenges. They use this advantage to complement the rest of their team.

Lead routing can help you make the most out of these strengths. Lead routing is the process of distributing new leads between your sales reps.

When you use a lead generation software, leads that come in have to be assigned to sales reps anyway, so why not use it mindfully, based on what your reps are best at?

Here are some examples:

• Some reps may win more deals over the phone, while others succeed over email or in-person
• If you sell based on geography, your reps will probably know certain areas better than others
• Certain reps may close deals easily with small companies, while others may excel at selling to mid-size and large enterprise

If you aren’t yet routing leads based on specific skills, start with something simple and expand over time.

Streamline lead generation from all channels

Finally, a lead software platform shouldn’t be an isolated tool that pumps prospects into your sales pipeline.

It’s supposed to be a tool that streamlines and combines the work your sales team does along with the marketing team’s efforts.

This is why it’s important to ensure your sales and marketing teams are synced up and on the same page when it comes to leads they’re targeting. All software that either team is using should follow suit.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when synchronizing your sales and marketing teams:

• All channels used to collect leads should be integrated with the same CRM software to send leads to
• Key messages around your company and product should be coherent between your website and other channels
• All lead generation forms should ask for crucial information the sales rep needs

In other words, all the touchpoints your lead goes through should be aligned.

The messaging on Facebook ads should match the tone of voice on your website. The lead forms should make it easy for reps to filter high-priority leads and understand where they came from.

Ultimately, this process should, above all, be simple to go through. It shouldn’t add more complexity to your team’s daily schedules; it should make it more straightforward and productive.

LeadBooster can help you filter leads from your website

DentalLabSupport’s new chatbot LeadBooster is fully customizable tool and can be put on any page of your website to ask visitors qualifying questions and route hot leads to the right salesperson.

DentalLabSupport.com LeadBooster can qualify leads based on the criteria you set, then assign quality leads to the most relevant salesperson based on things like location, availability, experience level or expertise.

Once qualified, you can decide how the information should be stored in LabCell CRM, which will automatically create a new contact as well as the associated deal information. You can set the owner of the lead and control who is allowed to see it.

You can even prompt your prospect to arrange a call, meeting or demo within the chat sequence. Leadbooster integrates seamlessly with DentalLabSupport.com Scheduler, allowing the lead to check the relevant salesperson’s availability and set up a time slot that suits.

When you shouldn’t use lead generation software

With all the benefits of using a lead generation software, are there times when you shouldn’t use it?

It generates more leads, but they’re less qualified

Your team is swimming in more leads than ever before, so things must be going great, right?

Not quite. Let’s say each of your reps was generating 25 leads each week manually. They did so by researching your industry and looked for companies similar to your existing clients. After conducting cold calls and emails, they qualified 15 of them and moved them further down the pipeline and worked from there.

The new lead generation software is bringing 70 new leads per week for each of the reps. That’s almost three times as much, so it implies it’s a good thing. However, as your reps start reaching out to their new leads, they find that they still only manage to qualify about 15 of them, but it takes them three times longer to go through them all.

Their increased efforts result in the same or worse results, making them less productive! Lead generation software should make each rep’s time more valuable instead of adding more menial tasks to their plate.

Your sales pipeline is clogged

This can happen as a result of the above scenario, but it’s possible you’ve just never considered cleaning out a messy pipeline and dropping cold or unqualified leads.

What makes a clogged sales pipeline?

• Leads that have been in it for longer than your typical sales cycle
• Leads that have gone cold and become unresponsive
• Unclear sales funnel stages and an inability to sort leads in your lead gen software and/or CRM based on those stages
• Unclear next steps for leads
• Inability to forecast sales for the upcoming month or quarter

If your CRM resembles any of the above signs, using a lead generation software can only create more mess. If you don’t have a process to sort and act on all the new leads that will come in, a lead generation software will be a waste.

If your pipeline needs to be rebuilt from the ground up, do it before you implement a lead generation software and you’ll do yourself and your team a huge favor for a long time to come.

The one lead generation software you can’t be without

Your company’s website is your internet house. You’re the homeowner. Everything else is rented or borrowed space.

Here’s what we mean by that.

For many businesses, social networks like Facebook and Instagram have been instrumental in their initial success. They easily reached thousands of their followers daily. Their posts easily went viral and grew their audience.

Then, Facebook (and later Instagram) introduced an algorithm that changed the way posts are shown on users’ news feeds. Companies that used to easily reach all 5,000 of their followers suddenly only reached 2% of that total!

In other words: platforms you’re using care about themselves first. In Facebook’s case, many companies started relying on Facebook ads to replace the reach and impact they had organically. As a result, Facebook’s US advertising revenue has tripled since 2014.

With that in mind, even paid advertising (on any platform!) is still not something you own as any updates may mean you have to spend more money to get the same results.

You don’t own any of the platforms where you’re ‘renting’ space along with millions of other users. Your website is the place where you have the ultimate say and can fully control the experience a visitor goes through—and turn them into a lead and a customer down the line.

On top of that, it gives you the benefit of collecting and analyzing your website traffic so you can learn about people and companies interested in your products.

Now you might be thinking: ‘My traffic analysis only gives me numbers and percentages, how does this help me?’

The answer? Alongside Leadfeeder, your Google Analytics data is a sales rep’s dream come true.

Leadfeeder is a sales intelligence tool that monitors your website traffic and turns it into quality leads. It gives you the company information, details about their visit, powerful filtering options, and easy lead routing so you can always know the best-suited reps are working on each opportunity.

This is a goldmine because no matter how good your offers and lead magnets are, only a small percentage of your traffic will convert through your website CTAs. The majority will just vanish.

Here’s what makes Leadfeeder the lead generation software so useful:

• Automatic lead scoring. Your hottest, most interested leads (based on their visit history and other details) are placed at the top of your list. This way, your reps can focus on them straight away and drive a productive sales conversation. Talk about sales prioritization!
• Cross-channel campaign power-up. If your marketing team is running an AdWords campaign, your team can capitalize on it even more by filtering leads from it, along with their visit details. Knowing what message and call-to-action took your prospect to the website in the first place provides extra lead background.
• A shortened path to connection. Leadfeeder will show you if you’re connected on LinkedIn with someone who works at a company it identified on your website. This way, you can forget the awkwardness of a cold call and kick conversations off with ease. Read our cold calling scripts article for more tips on how to leverage common connections.

How to roll out new sales software to your team

Whether you’re just implementing a CRM software for the first time or you’re looking to upgrade it with integrations, additional features and power-ups, forming new habits around software can be difficult.

Your team might resist change at first and, even if it removes friction from their daily activities, they may be slow to fully adopt it and use it daily.

Here are our top tips to roll out new software in your sales team.

1. Keep an open line of communication

Your communication with the team might already be open and driven by trust. Whether or not that’s the case, when you come to your team with new software you want them to use, they might not immediately see the purpose of it or your intention behind it.

When it comes to new software for a team of any size, it’s bound to impact everyone’s daily habits and routines.

This means there’s a risk your sales team will think you want to track all of their daily activities and micro-manage them, which can clearly create some friction.

To avoid this kind of jumping to conclusions, announce the new software you want to implement and clearly outline the reasons you believe it will improve the process. For example, you may want to improve the follow-up process of your team, so the new sales software will help with timely reminders and notes.

After you’ve announced this change, make sure each rep can easily ask for clarifications, share their thoughts, and offer suggestions. An open feedback channel is gold.

2. Decide and announce the time and frequency recommended for the new software

Make expectations obvious and reasonable. If you don’t, some of your reps might update it daily, while others may wait for a spare moment every week or two. As a result, you’ll have incorrect data and the software won’t serve its purpose.

These expectations can be as simple as: end of the day, weekly on Friday, or daily before the work-in-progress meeting. The more frequently the tool is used (without creating unnecessary admin work), the more accurate the data in it will be as it reduces the chance for something being forgotten.

3. Establish that using the new sales software isn’t optional

Just like the point above, it’s important to convey to your reps that using the new software isn’t optional or something they can opt out of doing.

Of course, the best way to do this isn’t to be forceful and punish those that aren’t following the usage frequency. Instead, make sure your reps know the advantages they’ll experience from using the software.

For example, if they log their activities such as emails, email lead generation, calls, follow-ups and proposals, they will see how each of those impacted their results at the end of the month—and use it to improve in the following month.

Again, keep an open, ongoing communication loop and identify which parts of their new habits require support or adjustment.

4. Share the information available from the software

After some time using the software has passed, you’ll be able to share new findings and provide deeper insight into your team’s process and results than ever before.

Once you do, make it obvious. Show how the software has increased productivity, reduced the sales cycle, or converted more leads. This will also help you show your sales reps that what they do daily genuinely matters and makes a difference for the entire team, which will lift up your team’s morale, too!

5. Agree on and announce the exact date of new software implementation

As with everything above, be transparent about when the new software will be implemented. If you plan on doing a trial period first, let your team know how long the trial will be.

Announce a clear timeline so that your reps can familiarize themselves with the tool’s features, capabilities and workflows. This will also allow them to seek technical and usability support if they need it—in a timely manner.

Over time, using a sales software should turn into an automated behavior, a habit that doesn’t drain your team’s willpower or energy. It becomes a tool that speeds up and streamlines everything they do on a daily basis.

The time to prioritize your sales opportunities is now

To make lead generation software worth its while, it has to feed into your entire sales process. It won’t make an impact you desire if it’s all you rely on to make your sales team productive and hit targets.

You need a tool that helps your team track leads, manage their pipeline, and take timely action on the hottest leads.

Because if a lead was hot months ago, but you only followed up now, you’re probably late.

A powerful CRM is the ideal way for you and your team to keep track of incoming leads and make meaningful moves to take those leads through each of the pipeline stages.

However, CRMs can make life in a sales team more complicated than it was. They might…

• Add more admin work because they don’t integrate with other key tools you use
• Require a massive time and money investment into training
• Create anxiety because you have to keep inputting tasks and reminders manually (and always worry you’ll forget to do so)

This setup doesn’t help your team. In fact, it probably creates friction and frustration; your team might also resist adopting such software, even if you followed all the steps for rolling it out effectively.

DentalLabSupport is different. It’s built for minimum input and maximum output so that your sales team can focus on doing what they do best.

This means less time spent on admin and more time for productive sales conversations.

How is this possible? Here’s how.

DentalLabSupport does the heavy lifting for you. Because it syncs with your email inbox and calendar, automates alerts and uses templates, it removes the hours your team spends on admin. This also means your reps will get reminders to follow up with hot leads and never let a great sales opportunity again slip away.

DentalLabSupport keeps you organized and in control. When your dental lab lead generation software sends a new lead to your dashboard, your lead tracking better be in place. Track how your team is doing and provide real-time feedback on important deals. DentalLabSupport dashboards are visual (with simple drag-and-drop function to move deals in your pipeline!), intuitive, and fully customizable.

DentalLabSupport is driven by an activity-based dental lab selling philosophy, using activity prompts, reminders, and a simple interface to focus your team on the actions they control instead of stressing about the outcomes they can’t.

Ready to generate leads for your dental lab that turn into closed deals in a heartbeat? Start your 14-day free trial to find out why thousands of sales teams prioritize their sales opportunities with DentalLabSupport.com.

Call 888-715-9099 to supercharge your dental lab.

How to Run a Successful Lead Generation Campaign

One of the main objectives of running a successful lead generation campaign for your dental lab (and one of the most important) is to do just that, generate leads. The campaign process involves classifying prospective customers and qualifying their probability to buy in advance of making a sales call. The purpose of lead generation can vary from driving sales leads to something like increasing webinar registrations, but in the end they have the same goal and that is to get prospects to raise their hands. Before we go into how to build a successful lead generation campaign, we need to understand a few basic terms.

Basic Terms of a Lead Generation Campaign

• Lead: A prospect that has some level of potential in becoming a client. The individual usually shows interests and provides his/her information to your firm.
• Qualified Lead: A prospect that meets all of your firm’s qualifications and criteria necessary to be considered more likely to become a client.
• Lead Generation: The initiation of consumer interest or inquiry into products or services of a your firm.
• Lead Generation Campaign: The process of capturing and simulating interest in a service or product for the purpose of developing leads. This includes a strategy using a particular media source and an offer to create inbound leads.
• Nurturing: Some leads qualify early on, while others may take more time. Many of your leads will need some nurturing through frequent communication until they are ready to be contacted by someone from your business development team.
• Hard Offer: This is typically an offer for a service or product that usually requires the prospect to act immediately. Often times these offers are limited to a few people or may have an expiration date.
• Soft Offer: This type of offer usually doesn’t require an immediate response. An example of a soft offer is an email newsletter subscription.
• Lead Capture: The use of marketing automation systems, allowing marketers to gather contact information from web forms, landing pages and email campaigns.
• Landing Pages: A page that a visitor can land at or arrive on in response to clicking on a link or offer.

Building Your Lead Generation Campaign

Imagine this scenario for a moment; you are at home when suddenly you receive a phone call from a local moving company. Earlier that day you filled out a form on their website. You input your name, phone number, zip code and services you are interested in. While on the website you also downloaded a guide on how to get ready for your move. In doing so, this local moving company generated a new lead, and that lead is you. With the information captured, they are now able to contact you with further value and information. That is how the lead generation process takes place. 

The process begins with several main components. These components are necessary in order to maximize the number of qualified leads that you receive. Below are a few components to consider:

• A lead generating website: As the name implies, lead generating websites are meant to generate and nurture new business leads. There are variations on the types of leads a website might be looking for. For instance, one site may be focused on recruiting where another may be more interested in generating new business teaming partners.
• A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) System: CRM systems are intended to collect information on prospects. The information you can gather in a CRM on your contacts can include their website, email, phone number, mailing address, content downloads and open opportunities you may have with them. Your firm can customize your CRM based on the information your firm needs to qualify your leads.
• A Content Marketing Strategy: A strategic plan focused on generating and distributing educational content to your target audience on a consistent basis.  An end goal of your strategy could be to drive your audience through the content funnel, gaining their trust, having them view you as the expert, and then contact you when they are ready to buy.
• A Content Calendar: A resource tool that marketing teams can use to plan all content marketing activity for both traditional and online marketing. The benefit of using a content calendar is being able to visualize and strategize how your content is distributed.

Generating Leads Through a Successful Plan

By understanding the basic terms and having all of the components that make up an online lead generation campaign, you can then start to develop your plan by going through these 5 steps. It’s important to know that your process will vary depending on your objective, target audience and use of media.

1. Set your campaign objective: Your objective can vary based on the outcome that you want to achieve. You may want to start off by defining your goal by either the number of leads expected or revenue per lead. These are just a few examples of what your campaign objective could possibly be. In order to better define your objective you may want to ask yourself the following questions:
   • Who is your target audience?
   • How will you reach them?
   • What do you want them to do?
   • What call to action do you want to offer them?
   • What are you going to offer them?
   • How will you follow-up?
   • When will you will follow-up?
   • Who will follow-up?
   • What will you do or what will you ask when you follow-up?
   • How will you record and report on the results of the lead?
   • Who will you report these results to?
   • When will you evaluate your lead generation efforts?
   • What will you consider a success?
2. Evaluate and select your campaign target: This may come from your current list of contacts that you have or you may want to focus on an entirely new target group for your lead generation campaign. Either way, make sure you have identified who those groups are and what their pain points and issues might be that your firm can answer with content.
3. Determine your media outlet: While there are may different media outlets ranging from email marketing to eBooks and guides, our research has shown that firms generating more than 60% of their leads online are 2x more profitable than their competitors. Therefore, choosing an email campaign or holding a webinar would be an example of a great strategy for generating more online leads.
   
4. Develop an offer: To reiterate, a lead is a prospective client who has peaked interested in your firm’s product or service. In order to identify these prospects in your list of contacts, you may want to send out an offer. This could be a free download to a guide, registration for a free webinar, etc.  When the lead responds to your offer, their information is captured. They are then pulled into your lead generation campaign where you will continue to nurture your leads until they are ready to close a deal.There are several main mechanics to creating an offer. First you must create a landing page where a prospect lands for a distinct purpose. This is usually prompted by an offer and a call-to-action in which the prospect is prompted to fill out a form. Your hard or soft offer respondents become, as what we at DentalLabSupport like to call, a “new hot lead.” There are several different places you can promote these offers such as on a blog, on a webpage, on social media, in an email…these are just to name a few.
5. Create a communications strategy process: This includes what your follow-up process is going to look like. Strategizing how you will respond to your leads, what kinds of material will you share, who will contact them, and finally defining what your proposals will look like as well.

Looking at all the elements of a successful lead generation campaign can make your head spin a bit. So in conclusion, make sure your campaign includes a clear understanding of your target market, multiple media channels to capture and narrow down your leads, compelling offers, and a strong strategy that tracks performance. If you have all of these then you are good to go!  For more information about launching a successful Lead Generation Campaign for your dental lab, visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.

4 Tips to Get Your Dental Lab's Emails Mobile-Ready

By:  David H. Khalili,  Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Email is and continues to be a vital part of dental lab digital marketing success. 

Especially small dental labs on a limited budget can use the concept to effectively communicate with their audience, slowly nudging them to become first-time and repeat customers.

At the same time, email marketing can only be successful if you design effective messages that resonate with your audience of your dental lab. One key consideration to keep in mind is the fact that an increasing percentage of that audience will view your messages on a mobile device; in fact, up to 70% of your audience will read your message on their smartphone or tablet. If you are looking to grow your dental lab with email marketing, keep these 4 best practices for mobile-friendly email creation in mind.

1) Keep them Short

Above all, your audience's attention span on mobile devices is shorter than on a desktop. Because they can see less of your email on their screens, they will be more quickly turned off by long emails that go into detail about a specific concept. 

One study suggests that for optimum results, your emails should be between 50 and 125 words long. For comparison, that's about the length of the introduction to this post. Anything longer, and you risk decreasing response rates as mobile recipients lose interest midway through reading your message.

2) Stay Away from Long Paragraphs

For the same reasons mentioned above, try to stay away from full paragraphs as much as possible. Avoid the dreaded 'wall of text,' which becomes especially noticeable on small screen sizes.

Instead, take advantage of email formatting options. Bullet points, numbered lists, and single-sentence paragraphs can go a long way toward making your email more readable on mobile devices, you may also want to consider using graphics and call to action buttons to break up your text.

3) Use Visuals to Enhance, not Distract

Speaking of graphics: including visuals in your email can go a long way toward increasing its effectiveness. Visual content marketing has been proven to be successful, increasing audience goodwill and message recall.

But for mobile devices, you should be careful to use visuals strategically. Much like long paragraphs, large images that prevent smartphone users to see any other part of the content tend to distract the audience, making it less likely that they will take action. Stay away from large banner images, and incorporate smaller, slimmer graphics into your email instead.

4) Test Your Emails

Finally, make sure to not send out any email to your audience without first testing how it looks on mobile devices. Most email clients now offer templates with responsive design, adjusting dynamically based on screen size. But that could mean the content of your email shifts around in ways that you didn't anticipate.

To ensure that your content does not begin to look undesirable, send yourself a test email to view it on your mobile devices. Most Customer Relationship Management software now allows you to do just that. If you are lucky and your CRM enables you to view a visual preview of the email in different email clients and screen sizes without even having to send it, you should absolutely take advantage of that feature.

Keeping Mobile In Mind at all Times

Audiences across industries and demographics are increasingly relying on mobile devices to complete internet-related tasks. Whether your brand markets to other dental labs or just dentist, keeping mobile in mind when communicating with your target audience has become absolutely crucial.  In fact, to effectively grow your dental, that emphasis should come even before you send out your first email marketing messages.  

To learn more about our services, and how it can accommodate your dental lab marketing needs, contact us today 1.888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com.

Why Your Dental Lab Is Chasing Too Many Bad Sales Leads

David H. Khalili,
Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Stop chasing bad sales leads by doing the right work upfront. With better inbound lead qualification processes, your company can turn more of your leads into big sales

Many dental labs don’t do enough upfront work to qualify their new sales leads. They simply pass every single sales lead through to the sales team, even if the prospect is nowhere near ready to buy or is even a good fit for what the company sells.

According to statistics cited by HubSpot, 61 percent of B2B companies send all of their business leads directly to sales, even though only 27 percent of those leads will be qualified to count as “serious buyers.” Having too many unqualified sales leads wastes the time of the sales team and causes the company to miss out on legitimate sales opportunities. When your salespeople are bombarded with low-quality leads that aren’t a good fit for your product or service, they’re going to miss the chance to talk with prospects who are legitimately good sales opportunities.

If your company is chasing bad sales leads, the following strategies will help you better qualify your inbound sales inquiries upfront:

Ask Lead-Qualifying Questions

Not all sales leads are the same, so why would your company want to treat them all the same? After all, every single prospect is unique; they all have different problems and pain points and budgetary concerns, and they all have unique business needs that your solution has to address. But if your company is simply passing every sales lead along to the sales team without even asking any questions, you’re missing a big chance to learn more about the prospect.

Asking questions to qualify the sales leads is a simple step that you can take to start prioritizing and ranking your sales leads. By asking sales-related exploratory questions, you are starting to build trust and build a relationship, and you’re learning more about the larger picture of the customer’s business challenges. Asking questions also helps you do “lead scoring” to rank your sales leads based on how likely they are to buy. This is somewhat of an inexact process, but with time, you’ll get better at deciphering the subtle clues and behaviors of prospects to see which ones are genuinely interested and which ones are just calling around to do research or get price quotes.

Ask Open-Ended Questions

Asking lead-qualifying questions is a subtle process that requires some skill and savvy. For example, you don’t want to be too direct or aggressive by asking questions such as, “Do you have a budget for this purchase?” or “Are you definitely in the market for a new solution?” or “Are you looking to buy sometime soon?” These questions tend to create sales pressure and make the prospect feel defensive.

Instead of putting the customer under pressure, start by asking open-ended questions that get them to talk about their overall business situation. For example, you could ask, “What challenges are you experiencing with your current solution?” This helps get the customer to open up a bit and share their frustrations that are causing them to seek a new vendor. Or you could ask, “How is your current solution impacting your overall business processes?” This is a great question, because it helps you analyze the overall picture at the prospect’s business and evaluate how urgently they might be looking to make a purchase decision.

Every lead-qualifying question is your chance to hear more from the customer. Get them to open up about their business challenges, and then really listen to what they say.

Follow Up By Phone

Other companies make the mistake of relying too much on automated systems. For example, when you get new inbound sales inquiries via your website or online advertising, you might have an automated email reply or online intake form that asks the prospect some questions about what they’re looking to buy. These automated tools can be helpful, but you can’t rely on a fully automated lead qualification process.

Instead, call people back. Get on the phone and have a detailed conversation that allows for the “human element” of relationship building and establishing trust. Even with the great technology we have today, you still need to get on the phone and talk with your customers.

Why? For one thing, the buyers who are most urgently looking to make a decision want to hear back from your company immediately, and from a real person. Motivated buyers are probably contacting several of your competitors, and according to HubSpot’s cited statistics, 35-50 percent of sales go to the vendor who responds first.

Some prospects are never going to be the right fit for what you sell, and not everyone is a “good” customer. But with better inbound lead qualification processes – one that includes asking good questions, sorting and ranking the sales leads and following up quickly – your company can turn more of your sales leads into big sales.

About DentalLabSupport.com

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David H. Khalili is the founder and CEO of DentalLabSupport.com, an industry-founding lead generation firm based in Los Angeles. His company helps Dental Lab companies to generate sales leads and improve their sales processes. For more information please contact us at info@dentallabsupport.com or 1.888.715.9099.

Starting Early: How Message Consistency Can Help You Close More Doctors

By David H. Khalili,  Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Every dental lab wants to maximize its sales process. But in reality, that's often easier said than done. By the time your sales department picks up the phone and calls a lead, their decision on whether or not to become a customer has probably already been made..

You can still convince members of your dental audience who are on the fence to go one way or the other, but if you truly want to improve your sales rates, you have to start earlier. From the moment your target audience is first exposed to your brand, they will begin to form an opinion about your brand that ultimately impacts their likelihood of becoming a customer. So if you are looking for effective ways to close more sales, you have to start early: with message consistency.

Messaging and Branding

The ultimate marketing goal of every business should be to create a consistent brand. Global powerhouses like Nike and Apple succeed because everyone knows their brand and has a general ideal of what it stands for. How did they get to that point? 

Below is a list of 7 key characteristics that successful dental laboratories share. They include:

1.  Audience Knowledge
2. Uniqueness
3. Passion
4. Consistency
5. Competitiveness
6. Exposure
7. Leadership.

Achieving any of these characteristics for your brand as a dental lab requires a thoughtful, strategic approach. But for the purposes of this post, we will focus on what we would argue is the single most important aspect of branding: consistency.

Think about it from a Dentist's point of view. If you hear about a dental lab a few times, and the message or visual identity is different every single time, it will be impossible form a coherent image of that brand in your mind. If, however, the same brand establishes a clear visual and textual identity, focusing on the same core benefit again and again, it will be much easier for you to form a reliable opinion about that brand. Consistency, in other words, is absolute key.

The Consequences of Cognitive Dissonance

At this point, you may be wondering how branding and message consistency plays into your ability to close more dentist. To answer that question, we have to explain a key psychological concept that applies to all of us: cognitive dissonance.

In social psychology, dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner motivation to keep our attitudes, beliefs, and knowledge in harmony, and avoid disharmony at all costs. If, however, messages conflict with each other or don't line up in our minds as desired, we tend to discount all variations as untrue to maintain harmony.

If you're not careful, cognitive dissonance can affect your sales efforts in the dental lab, in a very tangible way. If your messaging throughout the marketing campaign, leading up to the final sales call, has not been consistent to create a firm brand image in your leads' mind, they will dismiss your company as not credible and the final sales call will do little to persuade them otherwise. And even if the marketing has been consistent in itself, a sales call that's inconsistent with previous promotional messages can lead potential customers on the fence to say no to your company.

How a CRM Improves Message Consistency

Consistency, in other words, is crucial for your business to close more sales. Fortunately, Customer Relationship Management software can help you increase and maintain that consistency, in two ways:

• Consistent email marketing. If your email marketing relies on sending impromptu messages to potential customers, you run the risk of sending conflicting messages without even noticing it. A single change in phrase can suggest something entirely different to your audience. A CRM allows you to set up and automate your promotional messages, increasing the consistency as a result.
• Consistent Marketing-Sales Hand Off. Especially if your marketing and sales efforts are maintained by different departments, integrating both to maintain message consistency can be difficult. Because CRM software stows all of your contact information, your sales department can make more informed sales calls based on information your marketing department has gathered in previous efforts.

 In short, optimizing your sales efforts starts with message consistency. To learn more about how a CRM can help you achieve just that and maximize your ROI, contact us at 888.715.9099 or visit DentalLabSupport.com

4 Steps to Lead Nurturing: Walking the buying path with your customers

Lead generation can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that more is not better if you don’t know how to nurture. The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

That said, I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not putting enough toward progression. Get out your walking shoes, and take a journey with your customers.

I define lead nurturing as consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution), regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” True nurturing involves a sometimes long and circuitous path, but along the way, you’ll be building long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships with the right people.

Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support. If you’re wondering what kinds of content helps progress leads further faster, ask your sales team. Start by asking your sales team questions like, “What’s the content you share with leads that helps them convert?” or “What’s the content you use to help take people to the next level?”

The first step on that path to success is to start thinking like a customer.

Step #1: Walk in your potential customers’ shoes to build a customer journey map

Be the customer, and get as you close as you can to their experience by really observing the behaviors of your customer. After you’ve gaining a solid understanding, build your customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map? It tells the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.

The journey map is about helping you understanding the key interactions that your future customer will have with the organization. What are their motivations? What are their questions with each marketing touch point? Try to understand what they want and the concerns they’ll have along with peers they’re interacting with. The goal of customer journey mapping is to gain customer wisdom.

As you do that, consider the questions that customers have in mind before they make a buying decision:

• How will this product or service help my company?
• We’re doing OK, so why do we need this?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?

Help prospects find the answers to these questions, and you’ll remind them of the benefits of working with you. You’re creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite-sized chunks.

Step #2: Plan your path to create content geared toward progression

Invest as much in forming creative and content for lead progression as you do for lead capture. I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not enough toward progression.

The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

Read “Content Marketing Tips for Lead Nurturing” for ideas on content to use. Through the combination of all these, you’re providing relevant, educational and thought-leading content. For more ideas, read “Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content.”

It’s worth noting:

• The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect.
• You need to create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria, such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.

Step #3: Walk the path with your customer

In a complex sale, the journey can be long and challenging to help people move from initial interest to purchase intent.

Your only job is to make certain you nourish your customer along the way and guide them with a meaningful compass toward the right and best decision for their needs.

Think of your marketing team as trail guides who will need to point out all the sights along the way that are useful in the decision-making process.

Slow down, and walk at the customer’s pace, even if that means taking the long route with them when it comes to buying your service or product. If you hurry them along, you might end up with an exhausted customer who doesn’t feel good about the journey and won’t turn to you to continue the path to purchase.

“How you sell me is how you will serve me”

Most economic buyers subscribe to the notion that how you sell me indicates how you will serve me. Here’s where that little statistic I mentioned earlier comes in. A study of business-to-business buyers shows that salespeople who become trusted advisors and understood the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to come away with a sale.

The complex sale requires that your prospect:

• Must be familiar with you and your company and with what you and your company do.
• Must perceive you and your company to be expert in your field.
• Must believe that you and your company understand his or her specific issues and can solve them.­
• Likes you and your company enough to want to work with you.

Remember you can’t automate trust. Trust-building should be the theme of your nurturing efforts.

Building trust

By providing valuable education and information to prospects up front, you become a trusted advisor. You are then perceived to be an expert. You don’t sell; you don’t make pitches. Instead, you provide insights and solutions all within the realm of your expertise and, as a result, become the first company they turn to when there’s a need.

Make your marketing program’s single point of focus be to develop trust, and your business will become more profitable and less reliant on competing on price. Selling, per se, is reduced in the interest of more open and honest conversations with prospects. You win more business on a sole-source basis, and more new business referrals come your way.

Step #4: Keep marching

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from 20 years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 40 to 70% of potential sales. Research compiled by the MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report showed, “marketing departments with a lead nurturing campaign reported a 45% higher ROI than marketing departments that did not utilize a lead nurturing track.”

If inquiries are simply passed on to salespeople, reps, partners or distributors for follow up, beware.  You may be leaving as many as eight out of 10 sales prospects on the sales path for your competitors.

Now, get your compasses out and begin the long-yet-fruitful journey toward an effective lead nurturing program. You’ll be surprised how many potential customers will want to join you along the way.