There’s no question that being a small business owner is seriously hard work! Apart from the day-to-day challenge of managing everything, there’s the constant need to drive more customers to your business. But that’s not always easy. As you know, the business world is in a constant state of evolution. With each new technology comes a new fancy method of marketing. As entrepreneurs, most of us are attracted to fresh ways to attract customers and many of us might struggle with ‘shiny new object’ syndrome.
Conventional marketing brought local PR, direct mail, leaflet drops, your website and emails. Now we have unlimited possibilities with marketing funnels, a whole range of social media advertising opportunities, Google Adwords, retargeting campaigns, call-tracking, apps and much more. If you find it pretty exhausting keeping up with it all? You’re not alone. The number of times that I hear a business owner say, “Oh no! not ANOTHER marketing technique to learn” is unprecedented.
Are you leaking prospects?
Picture marketing as being like a big bucket. With any marketing that you do, you’re potentially adding customers into your bucket. Some of those potential customers in your bucket become paying customers. You might be spending £100, £1,000, or £10,000 (or even more!) to grab the attention of new potential customers, and putting them into your bucket. But what happens if your bucket has a great big hole in the bottom?
So much effort (and money) goes into investing in marketing. But if your customers cannot buy from you, what’s the point of all that effort? Did you know that on average, a business will miss a whopping 15% of its incoming telephone calls?
With the best intentions in the world, even the smartest of business owners simply can’t answer the phone when they’re:
- Sleeping
- Eating
- Attending networking meetings
- Doing the work they need to finish for a deadline
- In a client meeting
- On the phone to somebody else
- Have had a huge surge in calls as a result of the latest marketing initiative
- And so on …
And that’s just the day-to-day aspects of running a successful company. There’s also the unexpected:
- Positive mentions in the local or national newspaper
- Some love and attention from one of your customers on Facebook
- Perhaps a mention on Twitter of your business by someone with lots of followers
- Or maybe one or two of your staff have called in sick…
Before spending anything more on marketing, make sure that you’ve plugged your leaking bucket by answering all your inbound calls.
Never lose a potential customer again
Here at Verbatim we’re obviously biased, because call-answering is our business. But this also means that we’re very passionate about helping businesses to grow by providing a top-notch team to ensure they don’t miss a valuable lead (a call that might be worth thousands to them).
As well as telephone answering, we can also offer our clients the option of developing a unique lead-qualification process. We can help you to separate out and target only the really hot prospects who are most likely to be worth your time. The information we capture can also be fed directly into your existing CRM system, making a seamless and fully integrated sales tool.
Get in touch with us today to see how we can help you to capture every lead that comes your way and bring your sales strategy to life.
