Local leads almost always come from a communication channel in some way. Either the customer fills out a form with their information, or they initiate contact with you by trying to get a question answered—like, “When are you open,” or “Do you have a specific product in stock?” Either way, prospects expect a quick response to their inquiry.

The big question is—how do you manage all these conversations per day efficiently and quickly to make sure you have the best chance at converting?

This becomes a particular challenge for local businesses with a small marketing team that’s trying to manage the entire process for inbound leads. Especially in today’s multi-channel world, where you’re likely fielding hundreds or thousands of leads a day from myriad channels like your website, Google Business Profile, review sites, social media—and from a variety of communication tools, such as a web form, chat, text, phone call, or email.

Despite all the complexity involved with routing inbound leads, there are ways to better manage the process. In this guide, we’ll show you how your local business can be more efficient at tracking and managing leads, making it easier to respond to each lead quickly (and with less effort)—no matter the channel.

The Biggest Challenge with Lead Management

With so many different lead entry points, your biggest challenge is likely this:

How do you efficiently route leads to the appropriate person at the appropriate time—to your social media manager, the front desk, a customer service representative, or sales?

For most local businesses, getting every lead routed to the right person at the right time and making sure each employee responds within just a few minutes is a tall order. It’s exactly why so many businesses simply don’t achieve the gold standard in lead response times.

But if you don’t respond right away, you’re losing leads to your competitors. After all, half of consumers go with the first business that responds.

Unfortunately, the complexity of managing inbound leads isn’t going to go away—if anything there will only be more channels and ways to communicate with your customers in the future. In the past year alone, consumers have dramatically embraced new digital channels. Not only are they now 3x more likely to use digital channels, a full three-quarters say they’ve used multiple channels to start and complete a transaction.

Plus, slow lead response times can cost you sales:

57% of businesses take a week or more to respond to inbound leads
50% of consumers go with the first business that responds

8 Ways to Manage Incoming Leads More Efficiently

With the strategies shared below, you’ll be able to create scalable and efficient processes that help you quickly route leads to the right person so you can respond faster. By doing this, you’ll increase conversions and sales, and grow your revenue.

1. Know Your Customers’ Communication Preferences

Personalizing the customer experience starts with knowing which channels your customers are on and how they prefer to communicate with you. Yet, research shows there has historically been a disconnect between the communication channels customers prefer and the channels businesses emphasize. A full 40% of businesses say that engaging customers on their preferred channels has been a challenge.

It’s also important to consider which communication methods your customers prefer based on different circumstances, such as their age, reason for calling, or geographical location. For instance, Professional Physical Therapy (PPT) has seen that they need to be flexible across demographics regarding which channels they use. PPT takes the approach of first determining what communication channel would be good for a certain audience and then develops an appropriate message.

“We’re adjusting our strategy all the time to be more engaging and informative, but we look to the channel first to determine what’s most effective, then we roll it backward to develop the message that’s appropriate for that channel.”

– Lauren Donahoo, Marketing Director at Professional Physical Therapy

Make sure your business is offering your customers the communication methods they want to use—whether it’s phone, text, chat, or email. Having a single, consolidated inbox that converts inbound leads into text messages allows your brand to receive and respond to all leads in one place, keep track of leads and conversations easier, and respond quickly to each inquiry. And, because you’re responding on the channel your customers prefer, you’ll also be more likely to start a real conversation and ultimately get more conversions.

The big communication disconnect between customers and local businesses:

89% of customers prefer to communicate with businesses using text
Only 48% of businesses can communicate through text

person looking at SMS and email

2. Make Sure Your Customers Can Easily Find You

Being visible where your customers spend their time online is a critical aspect of generating inbound leads. Here are some important steps you can take to make it easier for prospects to find you:

Establish an online presence: First and foremost, you simply need to have an online presence for your business. The vast majority of consumers (93%) use the internet to find a local business. (Bright Local Survey, 2020)
Invest in SEO: Next, make sure you’re easy to find online by investing in the channels that your customers will most likely use to find you. Typically, this is organic search and paid SEO, but it’s important to know your specific market and customers. For example, Environmental Pest Service (EPS) saw a significant difference in preferred channels between North Carolina and Southwest Florida. In North Carolina, local service ads were closing at over 50%, but local service ads were closing at almost 0% in the Southwest Florida market. Instead, consumers there preferred to connect with EPS through organic SEO or their Google Business Profile page.
Build a solid online reputation: When customers find you, you also want to make sure they’ll find positive reviews about your business. Most consumers (87%) read online reviews for local businesses and less than half would consider using a business with fewer than 4 stars. Google Business Profile (GBP) has become an extremely important method for business discovery in the last couple of years. Here are just a few of the most compelling GBP statistics:

94% of local business calls between Monday and Friday are from GBP.

64% of consumers have used GBP to find contact details for a local business.

The typical business sees 59 actions from their GBP listing every month.

Remember: A credible online reputation includes the quantity of reviews, a star-rating of 4.0 or more, recency of reviews, and quality of reviews. Improve your reputation in each of these areas by implementing an SMS-based Reputation Management platform. By sending out review request links via text message, you’ll quickly see more engagement and results!

Business expert, Jay Baer, provides 10 of the most relevant online review statistics conducted from Podium's customer research to ensure customers choose your business every time.

3. Make it Fast & Easy for Prospects to Contact You.

With a solid reputation in place, you’ll increase your search and web traffic, but the next step is to make it easier for leads to raise their hand and initiate the conversation with your local business. Leveraging the power of the SMS channel to create this convenience, here are a few key areas to focus on:

Your GBP pages: Optimize your GBP pages for new customers by replacing the “Call” button with a “Text Us” option. You can do this by integrating your SMS platform with Google Business Profile. This removes a friction barrier from the process making it easier and less daunting for prospects to reach out. Plus, you’ll catch them while their intent is still hot!
Your website: Optimize your website for lead flow by:

- Using forms to collect SMS opt-ins
- Implementing a text-based web chat. You can use a chat box on your homepage to start, but an even more efficient use is to leverage it on your location pages. The right web chat solution will allow prospects to not only select the location they’d like to contact (if your business has multiple locations), but also convert the chat into a text message conversation that they continue with your brand even after they leave your website.
- Adding a “Text us!” CTA on your main site pages, with a textable number

Your Facebook pages – Integrate your Facebook Messenger with your SMS platform to enable customers to convert messages into a text thread with your business and/or locations.
Your phone systems – Certain SMS platforms enable you to give customers the option to text you instead of waiting on hold or dealing with phone trees. They can also reduce burdensome call volume by notifying you of missed calls and providing the option to text the customer back.

If you want to draw customers to your business more efficiently and cost-effectively—make sure you’re investing in the channels they’re using to contact you as well as optimizing for each of your locations. This will create a more efficient system for you/your locations, and an even better experience for your customers.

4. Implement better response strategies that will save you time and effort

Once you have the basics of generating inbound leads under wraps by ensuring your customers can find you and communicate with you according to their preferences, it’s time to be more strategic in how you use those channels. Here are a couple ways to do this:

Convert popular channels into text conversations: First, determine which communication channels are driving the most leads. Then, figure out how you can improve your response time on those channels. For example, research shows that 80% of callers would prefer to text than leave a voicemail. If you can turn calls into texts, you’ll not only save your front desk and other customer or sales reps time, but you’ll also improve the customer experience. This would also help you avoid playing phone tag—and makes your response times faster.
Template responses to common inquiries: SMS platforms with text templates make it easier for you to quickly answer FAQs like business hours or store location, capture lead information, and convert conversations into appointments and/or sales.

LA Furniture reduces response times to under 1 minute.

At LA Furniture, they saved an enormous amount of time by leveraging SMS as a channel. “You’re not going to get out of a phone call with a customer in under 5, 6 minutes, at best. With Podium, our response time is less than a minute. That’s 5x less, if not more. That’s crazy time savings.”

– Madeline Sweeten, LA Furniture

5. Centralize All Leads into a Single, Consolidated Inbox

Is tracking and routing leads one of your biggest struggles? The right marketing and communication platform can make things much easier for your team and your business by providing a single, customizable inbox for all incoming and outgoing communications across channels—social media, text messages, phone calls, web inquiries, and more.

However, you’ll still need to determine how you want to route your leads. Should they go to a specific person or set of people first? Or should they be routed directly to the front desk?

The benefit of routing leads to a specific person or team is that it may provide more accountability—one person or team is responsible for determining which leads go where. However, it can also cause bottlenecks in the routing process, significantly delaying your ability to respond with help quickly. This is where having the right technology and process in place is key.

Having all your leads—no matter the channel or the communications format—come into a centralized inbox will make it much easier to keep track of and route leads quickly to the right person. And when you decentralize the process by routing those calls directly to specific employees, you can further boost the customer experience and your response speeds.

Mattress Firm increases customer communication efficiency.

Mattress Firm successfully moved communication from customers all over the nation into a single inbox, routing local customers to the right local business (1 of 2,600 locations). With Podium Webchat, a chatbox lives on the location pages of their website, and inbound messages route directly to a district-level inbox where there’s always a minimum of 10 team members ready to respond and engage with customers.

“Webchat has really created an efficiency that we needed. It’s helped ensure our customers will get a more timely response,” noted Steve Barnes, Senior Manager of Omnichannel Integration at Mattress Firm.

“Podium puts the power back into the stores. Instead of relying on a small corporate team, we now have 6,500 people ready to respond to customers. And it’s a better decision from a staffing standpoint and a customer experience standpoint. Our customers can literally chat with someone and then an hour later…see them in person. It’s fantastic.”

6. Don’t Forget About Customer Experience

Grabbing your customers’ attention online—whether through organic search, great reviews, or GBP—is only the first step in closing the deal. You also have to make sure you show customers that you understand what they need and that doing business with you will be easy. If you can deliver on those two customer experience promises—you’ll be ahead of 90% of businesses and more likely to earn new customers’ business.

90% of customers believe most brands fail to meet their customer experience expectations.

90% of customers say they want a convenient experience.

80% of customers say they would be more loyal to a business that showed they really understood them and what they were looking for.

Chatbots and automated phone trees can speed a response to a customer, but they are only helpful if the customer experience also remains intact. A well-built phone tree, for instance, can answer a variety of potential customer questions or concerns, which means customers do get an immediate response. However, most customers deeply dislike the automated and impersonal approach of phone trees. In fact, 62% of customers would prefer to “hand out parking tickets” than wait in an automated phone tree for service.

Chatbots can often offer more personalization than a phone tree. In fact, consumers say chatbots answer their questions faster, transfer them to a human agent, and even help outside of service hours.

But consumers also acknowledge that chatbots still have limitations. At least 60% of consumers would prefer to wait in a queue if it meant they could immediately speak with a human agent.

The lesson here: Most leads are happy to surf your website to learn more about your company, read online reviews, conduct other research as part of their decision-making process, and even use self-service tools like phone trees or chatbots to get simple questions answered. But, when they’re ready to make a purchase, especially with higher-ticket purchases, they want help from a real person—quickly.

“People can do research and figure out some things on their own, but ultimately, we want to direct them into our stores because we know the experience is better. Using Podium Webchat to facilitate this, our ticket averages are higher, our NPS scores are better, and ultimately, we make happier customers from it.”

– Steve Barnes, Mattress Firm

Using a centralized inbox and a decentralized lead routing strategy can help you scale your ability to respond to leads with a human approach. In Mattress Firm’s case, directing customers to their stores and local employees for a response helped them to achieve a 23% conversion rate and millions in revenue from Webchat leads.

7. Provide More Customer Context to Employees

Make it easier for your team members fielding leads to see the contextual history of that lead’s website actions, previous interactions, and purchases. This will eliminate customer frustration of often having to repeat themselves and distinguish your business as providing a higher level of customer service and personalization. Almost all customers (89%) say they’ve encountered the highly frustrating experience of having to repeat themselves to multiple customer service reps.

America Car-Mart increased sales with better customer context.

At America Car-Mart, providing more context to its employees about leads was a critical component of driving more sales. Because most of their customers have experienced some kind of financial distress, customers felt uncomfortable having to convey this type of information in person.

By centralizing inbound leads at the corporate office, they were able to take a lot off the dealership’s plate while also giving customers a better and more consistent experience where they no longer had to explain their situation in person at the dealership. Now, once a lead is ready, the customer experience team simply assigns them to the right associate at the right dealership—all within the Podium platform. “This has allowed us to bridge a gap that existed before where we were losing people because they were not comfortable coming in to [the dealership] to share their story,” said TJ Pike at America Car-Mart.

Having a single inbox with all the interaction history for a lead has also helped bridge a gap within their own company. Marketing, sales, IT, collections, and customer experience can now work together to attract new customers and put them in the right cars.

8. Keep Tabs on Employee Response Times

Research shows that conversion rates increase by more than 8x when you attempt to respond within the first 5 minutes instead of waiting between 5 minutes and 24 hours. Yet only 0.1% of inbound leads are engaged in under 5 minutes.

Given these stats, it’s critically important that your employees respond promptly to all leads routed to them. The best way to ensure this happens is to make sure they have the proper training and processes in place so they:

Know when it’s their responsibility to respond to leads
Know that a fast response time is critical
Know what tools to use to see incoming leads and respond to those leads

In addition, it’s also important to reward employees who are consistently responding to leads and converting those leads to sales. Simple verbal recognition, such as a call out in a company newsletter or a manager praising them for their efforts can go a long way. But you can also create other rewards, such as awarding prizes for responding to a certain number of calls or messages in under 5 minutes or setting up friendly competitions among employees to see who can respond to the most leads in the shortest amount of time.

Put Your Lead Management into High Gear with Podium

Centralizing your lead management and response efforts is the best way to ensure you never miss responding to another lead again—no matter how many channels or types of communication tools your leads might be coming from when they search for a local business online.

Save Time with Podium

Manage, route, and respond to leads faster with Podium, the marketing and communication platform made for local businesses.

Save more time. Manage all communication channels and separate systems through a single, secure platform that converts phone calls and chat messages to text conversations.
Convert more leads. Attract the right customers with higher local search rankings and relevant reviews, collected in the channel customers use the most—texting.
Delight more customers. Create a multi-channel, frictionless customer journey from first impression to post-purchase with visibility into each lead’s interaction history.

Try Podium for free. Click here for a free trial.

8 Lead Management Tips to Close More Sales