Set your follow-up schedules based on lead strength

Setting up an effective follow-up schedule for your leads is crucial in turning prospects into loyal customers. However, not all leads are created equal, and treating them as such can result in missed opportunities and wasted resources. To maximize your sales potential, it's essential to tailor your follow-up approach based on the warmth of each lead.

Here's how to set up the best follow-up schedule for leads of varying degrees of warmth.

🔥 Hot Leads:

These are leads that have shown a high level of interest and engagement with your business. They might have requested a demo, downloaded a whitepaper, or attended a webinar.

For hot leads, a prompt follow-up is imperative. Aim to reach out within 24 hours of their interaction with your brand. Strike while the iron is hot to capitalize on their enthusiasm and keep the momentum going.

🌡️ Warm Leads:

Warm leads have demonstrated some interest in your products or services but may not be as actively engaged as hot leads. They might have signed up for a newsletter, visited your website multiple times, or engaged with your social media content.

For warm leads, a follow-up within 48 to 72 hours allows you to stay on their radar without coming across as too aggressive.

🛀 Lukewarm Leads:

These leads have shown mild interest or engagement but haven't taken significant actions yet. They might have subscribed to your blog or followed you on social media.

Follow up with lukewarm leads within a week of their initial interaction. This timing keeps your brand fresh in their minds without overwhelming them with too many communications.

🥶 Cold Leads:

Cold leads are those who have shown minimal to no interest in your offerings. They might have visited your website once or signed up for a webinar but haven't engaged further.

While it's tempting to dismiss cold leads, they still represent potential opportunities. Implement a long-term nurturing strategy for cold leads, such as a monthly newsletter or targeted content campaigns. Follow up with cold leads every few weeks or months to keep your brand on their radar and capitalize on any shifts in their needs or interests.

Remember, the key to effective follow-up is consistency and personalization. Use a mix of email, phone calls, and social media outreach to connect with leads at various touchpoints.

Now that you have your leads organized by strength, and have a good idea on how you might schedule your follow ups with them, here are some ways you can use LACRM to manage these schedules:

CRM tip: Create a custom pipeline field for "Lead Strength".

Using a pipeline to manage your leads is the best way to track their status in the CRM. Creating a color-coded "Lead strength" dropdown field on your pipeline gives you a simple way to organize your leads in your pipeline without having to create new groups, and lets you visually identify who in your pipeline report needs the most urgent attention. Here's a tutorial on how to create new custom pipeline fields.

CRM tip: Use sub-calendars to organize your follow-up tasks.

When you're managing multiple types of follow-up schedules, it's especially important to keep those schedules organized. The best way to do this is to create a separate sub-calendar for each type of follow up -- this lets you keep your tasks segmented on your Workspace and also color-code them on your calendar! Here's how to create sub-calendars on your account.

Advanced CRM tip: Use Zapier to automatically move leads marked as "Cold" (either via a group or pipeline) into an email campaign

Zapier is a third-party tool that lets you automate actions between LACRM and 5000+ other apps. A great way to use this integration is to connect LACRM to your email marketing tool so that you can automatically add cold leads to your lead nurturing campaign simply by tagging them as a Cold lead (in a group) or by using a custom pipeline field entry. Setting up this integration requires using Zapier's "Filters" tool, which is only available on their paid tiers.