Most businesses that publish online quote request forms do so with little or no strategy.

These forms are typically published on their website as a wish, and often generate an email to some hapless employee who has to stop whatever they're doing each time to process them. Needless to say, if these quote requests come in with enough regularity, it's easy to see some, if not many of them slipping through the cracks, and leads getting squandered.

Process failure, not a human one
This breakdown is not the fault of the hapless employee, so much as the weak lead workflow. These people should never have been inserted into this process in the first place. People get busy, and things get forgotten. If a business is going to invest in lead generation, the fruits of such efforts should not land in someone's inbox. 

If you're not convinced, consider the following:

• most people in charge of entering leads have no vested interest in the outcome, and this manual data entry tends to delay the tasks they are responsible for completing
• when the salespeople do eventually get these leads from admin staff, they're often forced to go back and forth with them to confirm all the lead details, which wastes both people's time, and delays the follow-up
• when the lead goes directly to the salesperson's inbox, it still has to be manually entered into the CRM for follow-up. This may reduce the number of hands a lead passes through, but it doesn't make it any more efficient. And a CRM that requires users to jump through hoops to process a lead will eventually be forsaken for Outlook - and salespeople looove Outlook!  When salespeople revert to using Outlook instead of the company CRM, the business loses visibility on its pipeline and conversion rates.
• And while salespeople are great at managing pipelines, they tend to be terrible at creating them.

Learn to look past the inbox
What these realities teach us is a successful lead generation strategy must look past the inbox, and respect everyone's time and efforts. To be successful, new leads must instantly manifest as new or updated contacts in their CRM, complete with all the follow-up details needed for a sale. Efficient lead processing should empower your sales team to do more sales, not more typing. 

Now if this sounds wishful, consider what would happen if that same company were to replace the current quote request form on its website with one from Link2forms Team Edition. This new form would look the same, if not better, but the lead generation workflow would change to the following:

• new prospects would be added to Act! CRM automatically and instantly with each submission, and the salesperson alerted by email
• the details of the quote request will be written to the new contact's history
• a new follow-up would be scheduled for the sales rep that also includes those quote request details
• one or more follow-up emails could be automatically sent to the new prospect telling them when to expect a reply, and providing them with some helpful products or service links to review in the interim.
• reports would be available for management to review all the leads the form generates
• and finally, a new Opportunity would be created for this new sales lead.

All this would happen without any human intervention or delay. 

Small changes can produce big results
Now imagine what this small change could do for that business. Salespeople would open their CRM each day to find new leads, activities, and opportunities to pursue. Follow-ups would remain visible in their task list until completed, and Opportunities present in their pipeline until closed. The chances of leads getting lost in the inbox, or neglected due to conflicting priorities would be all but eliminated. Business owners could also invest more confidently in marketing knowing now that new leads would reliably fill the top of the sales funnel, and follow-up workflow would be more streamlined and reliable.

In short, everyone would be happy and making more money.

And if this outcome wasn't compelling enough, Act! users get this automated lead-generation technology for only $20 per month. With all these perks at such a puny price, the only question left to ask is ... are you lucky enough to use Act!?