Search engine optimization is a challenging industry with an extremely competitive sales environment. There are a lot of service providers competing for the same limited number of clients, and firms looking to boost their sales numbers and grow their businesses can’t afford to let even a single would-be client slip through their fingers.

Customer resource management (CRM) platforms are ideally suited to helping SEO firms maximize the efficiency of their sales process. CRM tools are specifically designed to automate and minimize the busy-work and housekeeping that comes along with sales so that agents can focus more on selling. The following are three simple but highly effective ways a CRM platform can help your team streamline their sales processes and boost conversions.

 

Make the Most of Every Lead

One surefire way to sink your sales conversions is to mismanage your leads. Lead mismanagement is a pervasive problem, and it’s often the result of human error in the sales process. Sometimes the problem is with a wasted effort like when sales teams end up chasing duplicate leads. Even worse is when otherwise promising leads to slip through the cracks, which is a common problem for sales teams with large call sheets.

Eliminating errors and wasted effort in lead management is all about automating as much of the process as possible. If agents are forced to manually track and manage all their leads, it’s inevitable that mistakes will occur. Customer resource management software is a great way to plug those leaks, and if you’re looking to tighten down and push more leads successfully through your sales funnel, you should consider moving to a CRM if your team doesn’t already use one.  

 

Make Your Prospects Feel Valued

The volume of competition in SEO consulting is high enough, but on top of that, because the barriers to entry are relatively low, there are also a lot of shady, fly-by-night operators taking up space and creating a mess. You need to stand out from those companies to make it clear to your prospects that you’re the real deal and that you can actually deliver on the promises you make.

The way to stand out is through customer service. Elevated customer service – especially at the earliest stages of your relationship with a prospect – makes it much easier for you to build the trust that needs to exist between you and your clients. Accomplishing that means making them feel valued and special rather than just another name on your call sheet.

A good customer resource management system enables your team to do that by automatically tracking each and every customer interaction and putting that data at your agents’ fingertips so that they’re always on exactly the same page as your prospects, each step of the way.

 

Pre-Qualify Your Leads Where Possible

One of the best ways your agents can speed up the sales process is to prequalify leads as much as possible. By learning as much as they can about their leads before ever reaching out to make contact, agents can ensure they spend the majority of their time focused on the hottest, most interesting leads rather than chasing after cold prospects with little chance of a conversion.

Pre-qualification can be done in a number of ways depending on how leads are acquired. One great way to do it is by tracking your prospects’ interactions with your promotional materials prior to your sales team initiating a one-on-one relationship. A good customer resource management platform allows you to do this by automatically tracking the interactions and behaviors of your website visitors and mailing list members and then recording that data to automatically generated lead accounts.

That allows your sales agents to comb through a lead’s website usage prior to reaching out, providing them with information like which products or services a lead spent the most time on or which parts of your website were of the most interest to them. That kind of prequalification data is invaluable to getting off on the right foot.

CRMDialer is a full-featured customer resource management platform packed full of all the tools an SEO firm needs to supercharge the sales process and close more deals. CRMDialer’s industry-leading features include advanced lead management, a full communications suite, advanced website tracking, onboard payment handling, and much more.

For more information on CRMDialer’s robust customer and lead management software, or on any of the platform’s built-in sales and productivity features. You can schedule a free demonstration, reach out to our team, or, better yet, start your free trial!