My client, A food truck manufacturer, was getting tons of website traffic and quote requests but their close rate had some room for improvement. The biggest issue we faced was not a matter of lead volume or lead quality, it was inefficiencies in the sales process.

The business was getting more Sales Qualified Leads than it could handle and the sales pipeline was becoming unmanageable. Bad leads were bogging down the sales team and good leads were slipping through the cracks. We needed to build a system that was more efficient and had less room for error.

My Approach

The client was already using HubSpot to manage all their marketing and sales efforts, so we took advantage of the platform’s Workflows feature to automate parts of the sales process. Our goal was to build out some deal-based automations that would improve follow up rates and filter out the bad leads as quickly as possible.

The Challenge

At first glance, this seemed like an easy problem to fix, but I quickly discovered this was a case of several problems rolled into one:

1. Lead quality
2. Inefficient sales process
3. Miscategorization of inactive leads

My Solution

To accommodate the added complexity, I organized my approach into three phases:

Phase 1: Weed Out The Bad Fits

The first step was to create an automated email sequence that would trigger anytime a new quote request was received. I wanted to emphasize the high price point as early as possible to prevent bad fits from moving further down the sales funnel. 

I also emphasized build quality, creative designs, customization options, and additional value adds to pique interest in prospects that truly wanted the best of the best.

Phase 2: Create Follow Up Reminders

The volume of quote requests was simply too much for a small team to handle. To help move these deals along, I built some additional steps into our automations that would send out follow up reminders to the internal sales team.

Phase 3: Recategorize Unresponsive Leads

Of course, not all good leads become customers right away. Issues such as budget, timing, or seasonality can make a deal turn cold. We didn’t want to label these leads as “closed lost” since there was still potential, but we didn’t want to let them clog up the pipeline either. So we created a new deal stage called “future follow ups” and enrolled them in a six-month nurture sequence.

The Results

Within 30 days of launching the workflows, My client’s inactive lead count had dropped from over 900 down to about 30 and were able to more accurately forecast revenue.

For more details about the strategy and tactics I used to help my client, you can reference this blog post.