Are Your Competitors Stealing Your B2B Foodservice Leads?

Ask yourself this question: How long does it take before a sales rep contacts a sales-qualified lead who wants your foodservice product/solution? If the answer is any longer than a few hours, your competitors may be stealing your leads right from under your nose. How can this be?

We've been saying it for seven years now: "the sales playbook has changed". No longer will an ideal customer sit around and wait to be contacted by a sales person. As a matter of fact, studies suggest that an online lead (or an inbound lead) expects to be contacted in a matter of hours, not days, and certainly not weeks.

[For more information about how the Sales & Marketing Playbook has changed, click here]

You'd probably agree that one of the biggest challenges for foodservice equipment manufacturers (and reps) is getting qualified leads into the right sales person's hands QUICKLY. When a buyer submits that 'contact us' form or indicates they 'would like to speak with sales immediately', you best believe they want a call or email within a few hours.

They have a time-to-market issue. They need your product and expertise now. They want to give you money today. If they have to make a second request because you didn't follow up soon enough, they get frustrated, and they will look to the next best option - your competitor.  

Is there a solution?

Damn right. First, start by defining your marketing and your sales lead process. Map out how it works today.  

Perhaps it looks like this:

• Email notification is received by marketing or a sales leader

  • This person must be on top of their email, right?  I mean, surely, no emails get left behind, unread, right?  

• The email is forwarded to the sales manager for that region or vertical industry

• The email is then forwarded to your rep

  • If you use ORGO, it is manually entered into ORGO Leads and assigned to your Rep
  • If you use a spreadsheet, well ... 

• The rep receives the email forward - typically, it's the president ... 

  • Of course their inbox isn't overwhelmed with new emails, right? 

• The president of the rep company has sales support enter it into ORGO 

  • If using ORGO, the manager of ORGO should see the new lead in ORGO LEADS

• The Lead is assigned to the right rep's sales person

• The sales person is then notified, picks up the contact info, and follows up with the lead

In reality, this process should take a few weeks. There is a lot of room for error in this process, and it can certainly be better.

When defining your lead process, think about ways to streamline the notifications. From a factory's perspective, using a marketing automation tool like HubSpot will help capture all the necessary sales qualification intel. But what good is all of this intel if you have to manually enter it into ORGO or send it in a spreadsheet? Or ask reps to report back on leads via a spreadsheet every month? Is that really effective?

What if we told you there was a solution to automate the lead process? Imagine sales qualified leads going directly to the rep the moment they submit their information online, streamlining the process so qualified leads get contacted within hours, not days... and certainly not weeks.  Would you be interested in us showing you how?