How to Engage with Leads Consistently (Without Feeling Salesy or Overwhelmed)
There are two stats that, to the average person, make absolutely no sense to put together, but we’ve recently made a few simple changes to our process of engaging with leads based on them:
Stat #1: “On average, it takes 6 to 8 touchpoints to turn a lead into a customer” (source: abstraktmg)
Stat #2: Most people can’t remember more than 7 things at once (paraphrased: abcnews)
We live in a world where we’re both intentionally & subconsciously processing more information than at any point in history. It’s no surprise that people frequently forget things they said they’d do only moments before.
If we as business owners want to be front of mind when a potential customer is ready to a) invest in our services or b) choose a service provider, this generally means we’re interacting with them in some format consistently.
For most people, this is simply building a process to engage with leads consistently. But most people run into a couple of problems with building a process:
- It feels scammy
- It’s too complex
- It’s super time-consuming
Below, we’ll break down how we’ve found ways to stay front of mind without being annoying. But first, let’s define a few things so that we’re all on the same page.
What are the different types of leads?
There are lots of ways to categorize leads for your business … when we asked ChatGPT, it gave options based on Qualification, Source, Fit, and the one we use: Intent. If you’ve never thought about categorizing your leads, intent-based lead categorization is basically based on where they are in your sales funnel:
- Cold Leads: People who fit your ICA (Ideal Client Avatar) and probably already know who you are, but haven’t shown any interest in your offer (eg: they could follow you on Instagram or may be attending the same conference you are).
- Warm Leads: People that have indirectly indicated interest or engaged with your content (eg: email list signups, comments on testimonial/portfolio/education posts, buying your low-ticket offers, etc).
- Hot Leads: People actively considering investing in your services (eg: DM’d questions about offers, submitted inquiries on your website, or they’re people you’ve sent a proposal to who haven’t signed, etc).
For most engagement activities where the goal is simply to stay front of mind, the type of lead doesn't make a big difference. However, the warmer a lead is, the more you should know about them and be able to personalize your interactions.
How do I build a process for engaging with my leads?
You may be thinking: I’m already active on social media, why do I need an engagement process?
Social media is becoming less social every day, and algorithms are trying their best to distract you to spend more time on the platform (to show you more ads…). Creating a specific list of who to interact with and completely side-stepping the algorithm will 1) save you more time than you think, and 2) help you genuinely interact with more humans who genuinely care about you & your offers.
For anything process-related, we stand by the motto: “Perfect is the enemy of done.”
At its core, there are only 3 parts to building your engagement process
- Who - do you have a list of who you’re engaging with?
- When - do you have a habit, routine, or calendar block?
- How - what does “engaging” actually mean for your business & customers?
You can make this as simple or as complicated as you’d like. Most big companies have whole sales teams with big, built-out databases of leads managed by sophisticated software companies. But unless you have a VERY good reason to pay expensive fees and be complex, keep it as simple as possible.
Let’s go one at a time.
Who - Building your engagement list
If you’re starting from scratch, we’d recommend starting with a simple Google Sheet and making a table with the bare minimum information you need:
- Name - first is usually enough to personally address them
- Social media link - have a link so you can save a lot of time by directly going to their profile
- Lead source - did they inquire (hot lead), or are they a prospect you think would be a great fit (cold lead)
- Notes - for anything you want to remember about them
- Last engage date - that you’ll update every time you engage
Depending on your business, you might want to swap out “social media link” for a phone number, email, or address, depending on how you’ll be engaging with your leads.
The goal here is to keep it as simple as possible. This won’t replace your CRM. It doesn’t have to have every possible piece of information on each lead (that would be a painfully slow process when adding new people to the list, so you just wouldn't add them). This is all about speed and efficiency.
This is what ours currently looks like (the source is a multi-select from a drop-down to see when people interact with multiple of our “hand-raiser” pieces of content):
Who do you add to your engage list?
If you go back to the idea of Cold Leads, Warm Leads, & Hot Leads, you want to add from hottest to coldest until you get to as many as you can consistently follow up with every 1-2 weeks. That could mean 10 or 100, but try to think about making your list about 5-20x the number of inquiries you want each month.
The warmer the “average temperature” of your leads in the engage list, the fewer you’ll need to reach your inquiry goals since they’re starting at a much higher likelihood of working with you. Aka: if they’re all hot leads that have asked about working with you in the past, it may be closer to 5x your lead goal. If they’re all cold leads that you’ve never interacted with and you don’t know if they’re even looking for your services, you should aim for closer to 20x+ your inquiry goal for the month.
Ex: Goal 5 leads a month, with all hot leads in the engage list, 5 x 5 = ~25 people to engage with weekly.
When to actually engage with the people on the list:
The easiest way to see progress is to form a habit. If you work 5 days per week, aim to engage with 1/5th or 20% of the engage list per day, Monday to Friday, in a pre-determined time block each day. There are also tons of other ways to fit it into your schedule; the biggest thing is to plan for it, not just expect it to fill the gaps in your schedule.
In reality, you won’t engage with everyone on the list every week because you won’t have opportunities for some of them - they may not have posted anything recently due to vacation, or they posted something that doesn’t offer a genuine opportunity for engagement.
How to genuinely engage once you have a list:
We’ve all gotten “this is super cool” in minor variations from the same person over and over to the point that it starts to get annoying. They’re not adding anything to the conversation of the captions on your posts, or they’re making their story replies all about how great they are (yup, even we’ve been guilty of this in the past).
Our approach to engagement has the goal of:
- Learn something - eg: ask a question (and care about the answer)
- Add value - eg: if someone asks a question that you’re equipped to answer, or you can give recommendations to resources (not just your own)
- Start a conversation - eg: replying to someone’s story because it’s something you’re interested in or passionate about
Basically, to sum it up, we care more about building a relationship & trust with people on our engage list, and most people have gotten wise to copy/paste or AI-written engagement because it all feels inauthentic at this point. The goal, for us at least, is to be human and form genuine relationships with others.
In summary, will this blow up my inbox overnight?
Honestly, no.
Genuinely engaging with leads comes with no guarantee that they will pay you thousands of dollars within 30 days.
This is by definition a mid-to-long-term growth strategy. Genuine connections and loyalty are becoming less and less common, and therefore more valuable. If you can build trust over time with the right people, they will become repeat customers who will spend much more money with you, and/or refer you to their friends and peers.
But, this also means that you have to be willing to “prune” or remove people from your engagement list as soon as you realize they’d be a bad fit, because the sooner you replace them, the sooner you’ll be building a relationship with a great fit future customer.
At the end of the day, a good engagement process comes down to having a list of people that you’d actually enjoy working with and consistently engaging with in an authentic way to stay front of mind.
If you want help building out your sales & marketing process, this is one of the most common conversations we have with our coaching clients. You can book a free discovery call here, where we can chat about how we can customize a coaching package to your specific needs.