When most people think about the benefits of a virtual receptionist for their business, it’s usually in the context of call answering.
A Virtual Receptionist service adds a professional front to your company.
Answering calls from clients and prospects, directing calls to the right members of your team, taking messages when you can’t be reached.
They can even help with important administration work like diary management and booking meetings.
But a virtual receptionist can do so much more for your company.
Including improving your sales and marketing function.
But how can a virtual call answering service improve your sales?
Here’s how.
The inefficiencies with lead qualification
Qualifying leads is an important task in your sales and marketing function.
By understanding the quality of leads coming in, you can spend less time on low quality enquiries and spend more of your time on high quality leads that have a better chance of becoming customers.
Qualifying leads can take a long time, and can tie your sales team up for hours a day on calls that are never going to turn into paying customers.
Part of the Lead Qualification process is inbound marketing and attracting better leads through the content on your website.
A live chat can be good here as it adds a virtual receptionist function to your website.
But what about those leads who call your business?
Especially the ones who call you cold, and who you have no information on?
They might be an ideal lead.
Or they could be someone who will never be able to work with your business.
How can you find out before passing them to your sales team and potentially wasting their time?
Use your virtual receptionist.
Lead qualification with a virtual receptionist
While lead qualification is different for every business, the way you qualify leads is likely to be pretty standard across your business.
It could be based on any number of criteria, like:
- Company size
- Turnover
- Number of clients/ customers
- Budget
While you’ll likely do most of your lead qualification through forms on your website, when a prospect calls you directly, you’ll need to have a few simple questions ready to gauge how hot of a lead they are.
And this is where a virtual receptionist is the ideal screen to keep low quality leads away from your sales team, while ensuring leads more ready to buy, always get through to the right person.
Because your virtual receptionist is the first line between your sales team and leads, you can give them your lead qualification questions to ask anyone who calls your business interested in buying your product or service.
Depending how much you trust your virtual receptionist, there are two things you can do once they’ve asked your qualifying questions.
- They can pass the responses over to your sales team to let them decide how good the lead is for themselves.
- You can provide a virtual receptionist a lead scoring template and depending on the answers they get to their qualifying questions, they can automatically book a meeting between high priority leads and your sales team.
Once the meeting is booked, your sales team will get access to all the information taken on the call so they can work to turn the lead into a sale.
What would this lead qualification process look like?
You’ll provide your virtual receptionist with a list of lead qualification questions and the responses that indicate a good lead.
When someone calls requesting information about your product or service, your virtual receptionist can take them through the lead qualification questions to determine how good of a lead they are.
The lead’s information can be passed over to your sales team to make the final decision.
OR.
Your virtual receptionist can use your lead scoring to determine the quality of the lead based on your criteria, and automatically book a call with your sales team if they meet the minimum requirements of a good lead.
Either way, by the time the lead gets to your sales team they’ll have a good idea whether it’s likely to result in a sale.
Plus, lower quality leads will be easier to identify, or can be screened out entirely before they even get to your sales team.
The benefits of using a virtual receptionist for lead qualification
There are a number of benefits to using your virtual receptionist in this way, including:
- Freeing up your sales team to prioritise better leads
- Pre-qualifying leads before they ever get to your sales team
- Reducing the time spent on admin
- Improving the chances of your business making money
- Reducing the number of low quality leads and spam calls getting through to your sales team and taking up their time
Of course lead qualification is just one thing you can use a virtual receptionist for. Read our complete guide to hiring a virtual receptionists for all the benefits and some tips for choosing the right virtual receptionist services.
Start using a virtual receptionist with Face For Business
If you want to get the benefits of a virtual receptionist to answer your business calls and deal with clients and new business, then get in touch with us today.
Whether you want a simple call answering service, or want to start using a virtual receptionist service as a lead qualification resource, we’ve got a team of fully qualified remote receptionists ready to get to work on your business.
Contact us today and speak to one of our team about what you need.
The post How to use a virtual receptionist for lead qualification appeared first on FFB.
