Voila! Opportunity Management Changes Everything

If your inbound marketing is working, then you should be getting a good amount of inbound sales leads. This could mean inbound calls, emails, opt-ins to your email list, social media followers, and more.

But what do you do with those inbound leads once you have them?

This process is called opportunity management — judging opportunities to determine the most qualified sales leads, where each prospect is at in their buying process, and which leads simply aren't worth your time to attempt to convert into sales.

Let's go over the process from inbound marketing to opportunity management.

1. Inbound Marketing

If your email prospects respond and buy your low-ticket item, move them
up the totem pole and start sending them big-ticket item emails. 

Your inbound marketing efforts are your number one priority in this funnel. This is how you get potential sales leads, qualified or not.

Use inbound marketing techniques, both organic and paid, to generate new sales leads and new emails to add to your opt-in list.

Focus on multiple inbound marketing methods: call ads, email opt-ins, social media ads, etc. The more sales leads you get, the more opportunities you have to make sales.

2. Email Marketing

Once you've gotten new email opt-ins, you're going to send them that initial email. They've gotten their freebie — now it's time to send out a low-ticket item, just to see if they bite.

If they don't, then put them on the backburner list, reminding them to buy. If, after a few reminder emails, they still haven't responded, they're probably not a good lead. Continue to send them your email newsletter to stay top of mind, but you shouldn't expect sales from them.

However, if they do buy your low-ticket item, move them up the totem pole on your email list and start sending them information about your big-ticket items and core products/services.

3. Opportunity Management

There are many ways to do this, but the best way is to use an opportunity management CRM to analyze your contacts, identify what products/services you think each one will buy, and determine your revenue opportunity from each lead.

Opportunity management CRMs also allow you to see which buying stage your lead is in and track all activities — emails opened, links clicked, etc. — as they happen.

At this point, you've already weeded out the leads that probably aren't going to buy anything. Now it's time to determine just what sales opportunities you have from these qualified leads.

You will have to set up your sales process in your CRM (whether that's an email sequence, or an email, then a call, or whatever process that has shown the highest success rate in your business) and go through that process with each qualified lead.

Opportunity management helps you to stop beating dead horses
and instead focus on the leads that will actually buy from you. 

Utilizing opportunity management allows you to dedicate more time to the best quality leads. Instead of beating a dead horse and continuing to reach out to a lead that simply isn't going to buy from you, you're making more money by analyzing and understanding your best sales leads and pursuing them.

If you need help getting started with this process, get a FREE inbound marketing assessment today. It might reveal things about the opportunities your business has to become much more successful.