Effective enquiry management enhances your ability to turn great fit prospects, into great fit customers.
Of course no single aspect of the sales process can be siloed. You need to be consistently vigilant across every stage in order to understand your overall direction and performance. However, the devil is so often in the detail.
Enquiry management may only constitute a small part of the whole sales and customer journey but it is essential it works properly.
After all, you’ve invested significant time, resource and money into marketing campaigns, sales lead generation and building a brand. The last thing you want to happen is for an interested party to slip through your fingers at the critical moment.
Unsurprisingly, a report from Leadsquared discovered that…
“74% of companies say converting leads into customers is their top priority.”
Leadsquared
Every lead is valuable. Don’t let a poor, inconsistent experience trip you up at the first hurdle.
What Is Effective Enquiry Management?
Enquiry management is the process or responding to, handling and distributing each enquiry your business receives.
At it’s most rudimentary level, this is something any aspirational business simply has to do well.
The value comes when switching from a basic, to an elite enquiry management process. In short, an effective practice ensures rapid response, expert insight and that no enquiry is left unanswered.
Having the right process in place allows you to improve the capacity of your staff to effectively manage all incoming customer enquiries.
Even better, they can do so without feel time poor. This in turns enables them to treat each enquiry with the attention they individually require.
For many businesses, the enquiry process is handled manually. Perhaps it is reliant on reviewing the incoming inbox a couple of times a day.
Such an approach is not conducive to excellent customer experience nor operational effectiveness.
Distractions pop up, staff are in meetings or the task simply slips their mind. For any of these outcomes, the direct impact is to leave red hot prospects to cool off and quickly lose interest.
But there is a better way… let’s dive into five ways an effective enquiry management process can increase your sales.
1 – Action Every Lead
Every lead requires an action. Looking introspectively, how well are your enquiries currently being actioned?
Are they left to sit, potentially being ignored until days or weeks down the line? Or are your sales team automatically notified the instant a prospect reaches out?
“49 percent of surveyed sales reps ignored more than half of all marketing-provided leads.”
CEB
Unless the team is notified, enquiries can go unnoticed. In revenue terms that’s the equivalent of someone waiting at the checkout, card in hand, and being ignored by the cashier.
Even if the opportunity ultimately ends up not converting, you can explore why that is, safe in the knowledge that the enquiry was actioned appropriately.
• 15 Essential Customer Service Metrics To Monitor
• How A Faster Enquiry Response Time Generates Double The Conversions
• 5 Ways To Streamline Your Operational Processes
2 – Assign Enquiries To Experts
Does your team have access to the the information they need respond effectively? Is it committed to memory or at least quickly available to hand?
Stripping that right back, do you have the appropriate team responding to each enquiry type?
Assigning each enquiry to the relevant expert will dramatically increase the chances of a positive outcome. Sometimes it pays to have a dedicated team for this that are trained and measured accordingly.
Not only does this encourage accountability for actioning each enquiry, it ensures the person responding is the most knowledgeable.
For example, your best seller probably isn’t the right person to handle a support ticket. But they are likely to be best placed to speak to a target account.
Customers want to speak to the experts. Effective management ensures that happens on the first engagement.
3 – Increased Efficiency
Speaking of first contact resolutions, a survey by Forrester concluded that…
“73% of customers find “first contact resolution” to be an important factor for customer satisfaction.“
Forrester
Time is critical. Not only for enhancing your own chances of converting leads into revenue, but for ensuring customers actually want to part with their money.
Hubspot discovered that…
“90% of customers rate an “immediate” response as “important” or “very important”.
Hubspot
Being notified as soon as an enquiry comes in, combined with assigning the lead to an expert, will improve the experience for every party.
4 – Enhanced Customer Experience
Ultimately this is what it all comes down to.
Having an effective enquiry management process allows you to explore precisely how your customers like to engage with you.
As well as understanding crucial information such as your average response time, you can understand how prospect’s want to contact you and invest accordingly in those channels.
There’s no point gearing yourself around an enquiry hotline if your customers contact you exclusively via email.
Likewise, if you know a particular enquiry type is more valuable to your organisation, effective management allows alerts to be set up to ensure it is actioned right away.
Customer experience is a key competitive differentiator. If your prospects are enquiring with more than one supplier, how often do you think they’ll go with the company that responds insightfully and immediately?
“50% of buyers choose the vendor that responds first.”
SPOTIO
The above statistic says it all…
5 – Improved Projection
Can you currently, accurately measure the source of your enquiries? Do you know which channel or campaign has the greatest impression on your audience?
By knowing precisely where each enquiry originates, you will instantly see what is working and what isn’t.
“37% of marketers waste marketing spend as a result of poor data quality.”
Forrester
That’s a lot of money that could be better spent with improved targeting. A refined focus leads to better projection.
Likewise, once you know your conversion rates for each enquiry type and channel, projected revenue figures for your ultimate goals become much easier to calculate and attain.
Predictable revenue is the key to success.
By knowing which channels you need to invest in it becomes easier to turn those enquiries projected to have a higher closing rate into happy customers.
Intrigued to learn more? Check out our Insights Hub to keep your business at the cutting edge.
Related Articles
- May 27th, 2021