From leads to payments: Creating a unified workflow

If you’ve run a business before, you’d realize that having huge traffic is not the only important thing. You need to have a seamless flow from getting leads to closing deals and completing payments. Otherwise, you risk losing your potential leads, giving the wrong information, miscommunication with clients or messing up payments. You see, statistics show that around 80% of sales require five follow-ups. But sadly, close to 48% of sales teams don’t follow up on their leads after the initial interaction. Because of this, businesses end up losing big time. 

Well, let’s look at how you can create a unified workflow in your business in such a way that you streamline all functions, from generating leads to finishing payments.

Capturing and qualifying leads

If you ask many people, they’d argue that lead generation is the most important aspect of a business. And actually, they wouldn’t be that wrong. In fact, a recent study by WebFX shows that around 91% of marketers say that lead generation is their prime goal.

However, lead generation is just half of the equation. Now, what is the essence of generating leads if you can’t convert them into sales? Well, that is the other part that makes the equation complete.

Now, regardless of the way you bring in traffic, whether it is through content marketing, paid ads or good old networking, businesses bring in leads. But again, just having names, contacts and emails is not enough; you need to actually know who is interested and who is not. Actually, statistics show that 80% of leads never turn to sales. And that’s where CRM systems come in. A CRM will help you to keep track of potential leads and know which ones work and which ones are a waste of time.

If you can score your leads properly, now the real job begins.

Streamlining sales communication

Here lies the real work: making your potential leads to commit. First of all, it is important to know that not all leads are ready to buy at the moment. Studies have shown that more than half of them are not ready to buy yet when you first engage them. In fact, 63% of consumers asking for your company info might not purchase anything for at least three months. That’s why you need to keep communication alive, whether through email, phone or even social media interactions.

Now, what does a good CRM do in this case? It helps to:

• Schedule follow-ups
• Set reminders
• Track conversations

After a period of engaging your potential clients and getting them to commit, then you are as good as having a deal closed. The invoicing bit and payment process is not as complicated.

Simplify the invoicing process

Now, we have closed the deal. What remains? Invoicing. You will realize that not many people are in tune with a seamless invoicing system. This causes delays and messy invoices, lowering the customer’s confidence in your business. For everything to work well here, you need to incorporate invoicing software such as QuickBooks.

Now, if your business relies on QuickBooks for accounting, then integrating it with the right CRM can make a whole load of a difference. You see, the best crm integration with quickbooks will ensure that the sales and finance teams are always aligned. You can be sure that your business will reduce errors and make the transition between closing the deal and invoicing very effortless.

Ensure seamless payment processing

We are all done with the hard tasks, and only one thing remains: receiving payments. You see, sometimes, we assume that this is the easiest part of the process, but sometimes it’s not. If your customers do not have a convenient way to make payments, then it might become an issue. And by the way, did you know that having optimized payment processes can boost conversion rates by up to 15%? Well, this is not according to our imagination but from a study by Testlio. In fact, the study shows that 80% of customers value the ease of purchase over other things in e-commerce.

Therefore, it is important that you integrate your payment system with convenient modes of payment like PayPal, credit cards, bank transfers, digital currencies and other reliable means. Also, ensure that security is at the top of your priority list. Your business must comply with PCI DSS (Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard) in order to keep customers’ sensitive information safe.

Benefits of having a unified workflow

Looking at all the integration that your business inputs from the lead generation to the last payment, having a smooth and unified workflow does really have a huge importance. For instance, a seamless process means a better experience for the customers and improved loyalty. In fact, a recent study by PWC showed that 73% of consumers say that experience is a valuable factor when they are making purchasing decisions.

Also, having an organized system syncs up different departments, i.e., sales, marketing and finance teams. With this, the teams are able to see into each other’s performance metrics and ultimately build better campaign strategies.

Wrapping up

Looking at everything mentioned above, you can clearly tell that having a unified workflow system is key in any organization. If you want to have proper success, then it is important that you link your lead generation, follow-up, invoicing and payment systems in a seamless flow. Otherwise, you will be wondering what is actually happening with your business even though it has the highest potential to achieve top success.