Right now there are possibly thousands upon thousands of leads sitting in your customer relationship management (CRM) tool and collecting dust.
This is the reality for many business-to-business (B2B) startups as they focus on the next set of shiny leads that come through the pipeline.
Your B2B leads will go to waste unless you begin to create lapsed buckets and develop a strategy to attack them head-on. At my own startup, we leave no stone unturned and make sure that each lead that comes through the pipeline, even if it arrived 300 days prior, is still being contacted.
It’s possible to accomplish this goal, even with limited resources, by having automations and a complete strategy in place.
Start by creating your lead segments
With thousands of leads in a CRM, it can be overwhelming to even know where to start. Say hello to your lead segments. The most common ways to segment leads are by their recency and by how long they’ve been in your CRM. More on that in a moment.
First, here are a few other methods of bucketing to spark your ideation:
Example buckets for lapsed leads. Image Credits: Jonathan Martinez
This illustration shows the use of ICPs and recency to create the bucketed segments. There are three ICPs with four recency buckets representing when the leads came in throughout the period of an entire year.
There isn’t one correct way to bucket leads, but it’s crucial to create these so that it makes reaching out more efficient.
Your B2B leads will go to waste unless you begin to create lapsed buckets and develop a strategy to attack them head-on.
At my own startup, we have a sales admin who works on assigning leads and monitoring the performance of every agent. If a particular agent isn’t hitting their touchpoints for the leads assigned to them, our sales admin is the first to alert them so they can get back on track. Having someone looking over the touchpoints to these leads will help to minimize future gaps.
Typically, when it comes to recency, the latest leads that came in will have the highest propensity to convert. This is why it’s fruitful to segment by the date leads came in so that different messaging, sales individuals and tactics can ultimately be used.
Assign lapsed leads to every sales rep on your team
After building more than 500 sales teams for startups via my own staffing business, I’ve witnessed firsthand nearly every sales structure and system known to man. When you have your buckets, the fun starts in assigning them to individual sales members on your team.
