How to properly handle inbound leads (90%+ Booking Rates GUARANTEED)

Leon Matschke: All right, so in this video, I'll show you exactly how to properly handle inbound requests, how to handle inbound leads so that you get the highest booking rate, meaning someone shows interest and you convert them into a book meeting on your sales team's calendar. And if you do this right, you can get 80 % plus booking rates, 95 % show up rates, And I'm going to show you exactly how to do that covering three things. So first of all, we have speed to lead. So how fast you should respond resource allocation. So who in your team handles what, right? We have SDRs, we have appointment setters, closers, account executives, who actually handled what type of requests and how's that routed and the exact nurture sequences that you can just copy and paste. By the way, if you want that as a download, have 23 sequences that you can just See, It shows you exactly on what day you should say what, what email, what call, if you can automate it, if it needs to be tailored. And I prepared it in a document. It has 26 pages. You can download this with the first link in the description, just as a quick side note. So if you want these sequences, then you can do that right now and then continue watching the video. All so we're going to cover these three things. But what we have to realize. In your sales process, have three things, right? You have prospects, which are people who haven't shown interest yet, but they fit your initial like ICP criteria. Then we have leads, which are people who've shown some level of interest. And a lot of people get it wrong when I say some level because it has three level, right? Because your whole sales process is a funnel. That's why it's called sales funnel. And we have upper funnel leads, middle funnel leads and lower funnel. All right. So upper funnel leads are people who downloaded stuff like lead magnets, white papers, case studies. They shown some level of interest and they gave you a little bit of information. So they gave you their name, their email, maybe their phone number, but that's about it. And there's not a lot of buying intent because they just wanted the thing. Maybe it's something useful. Hopefully it is. So they just want a value from that. Now, if your lead magnets are connected to your offer in a good way, meaning they complimented, then they still might be able to buy, which is why you shouldn't ignore them. Then we have middle funnel leads, are, for example, if you're running cold email campaigns, replies to that because they directly indicate some level of interest, right? Or webinar signups because that is just more commitment. So the lower we go, the more commitment and the more buying intent there is. Okay. So for a webinar, you might have to, you know, free up a few hours. And so that definitely shows way more interest in someone just signing up for a newsletter, which would be an upper funnel lead. All right. And if you're cold emails ask like, this is my offer, would this be of interest to you? And they reply, that's not a call yet because that would be lower funnel. I'm to get into that. But they've shown some level of interest that indicates that they are more willing to buy than someone in the upper funnel. And so, and the last one we have is lower funnel leads, which are direct demo requests, direct bookings that haven't been confirmed yet. Price requests, if you have something like that or a contact sales form. Okay. They directly ask to speak to the sales team and someone only does that when they want to buy something. Okay. So these are the three stages, and each of these needs a different handling process, which I'm going to get into in a bit. But it's important to get this right before I tell you, because otherwise it won't make sense. So these are the three stages, and they just show the level of buying intent there is. Now let's cover speed to lead. A lot of people get this completely wrong or they underestimate the effectiveness of this. right. If you get a lead, meaning they're not booked on the calendar yet, but they've shown interest. You should call them within five minutes max every single time. We have a graph here that shows, we call this the money window, within five minutes. All right. Your booking rates are over 80 % and after that they drop very fast. Okay. As you can see, if you wait more than two hours, it's four times lower. Okay. You get a 340 % increase in conversion if you call them within five minutes. So let's say someone, you get a middle funnel lead, right? Someone replies to an email and they say, yeah, this could be interesting. What's the cost? Right. Some level they've said, yes, kind of. If you call them right away within one minute, just imagine it was you. Imagine you reply to an email and someone calls you immediately. It's a human. And they talk to you directly. They're like, I just saw your email reply. Let's talk about that. You're in the moment. You captured their emotional state where they said, yes, this is relevant. And you immediately turn it into a conversation. This is golden. Right? You could get booking rates of 90 plus percent. You book almost everyone. Okay, so you're throwing money away if you're not doing this. Okay, and you could even go as far, and I really recommend this. If you hire someone, let's say you pay them 60K here, right? A normal job. And their only job is to respond to inbound leads within five minutes. That's their entire day. So that might mean that they sit at the desk for four hours. They might go outside and cook and do all sorts of shit. Doesn't matter. But as soon as someone responds, they drop everything. They stop making food. They stop. doing going to the gym, they stop doing whatever they're doing and they call that lead immediately. Even if you only get three calls per day, it will be worth it because you can 4x your business just like this by paying one person 60k a year. Why wouldn't you do this? All right. you can actually do the math. 4x the amount of conversions you're getting right now from inbound leads and then subtract whatever you're going to pay them and it's going to be a massive profit. For such a simple fix, take this seriously. It doesn't matter what type of lead it is, just call them immediately. This should be the number one priority because it's the easiest and fastest fix you can do. And I say this in almost every video, but every company I look into, every company I speak to, they don't do this. So make sure you respond within five minutes because you can get 80 % plus booking rates. And this is a conservative number. You can book almost everyone. So now let's get into who actually handles what. We have upper funnel leads, middle funnel, and lower funnel leads. Here's the thing. For upper funnel, should obviously, like no closer should even be touching that. And again, your response time for each of these, it doesn't matter if they just signed up for something simple. should be under five minutes, okay? So a upper funnel lead should be handled by an STR or appointment setter. They're both basically the same. The same goes for middle funnel leads. So anyone that signs up to webinars, stuff like that, or again, your cold email replies, they should be called by an STR. And these obviously have higher priority than upper funnel leads because they have more buying intent. And then the lower funnel leads. They shouldn't be touched by an SDR at all. Again, a lot of people do this wrong. If you have a lower funnel lead, meaning someone requested a price, requested a demo, there's no reason that an SDR should touch that. Because it's just too expensive. That makes no sense. And people don't like being handed off. So if you have a lower funnel lead, right? Imagine you ask for a demo, like you wanna speak to a closer, you wanna speak to an account executive, salesperson. And then first of all, you you know, you get an STR calls you and they introduce themselves with their name and then they hand you off, they book an appointment with an AE and he now has to introduce himself. And then you finally see that guy and you got passed around twice. for no reason, because you wanted to talk to a closer right away. People don't like being handed off. They want one point of contact and they want that point of contact to stay. All right? You can afford that for upper and middle funnel leads because they didn't book yet. So you can afford to have a step in between because fundamentally you'll have the most upper funnel leads and the least lower funnel. That's at least how it should be. And so you need a dedicated person. to call those middle and upper funnel leads. But for lower, no one should touch this. It should go from the prospect directly to the closer for lower funnel, only for that. It's important. And now, Now, the next thing you should make is some sort of email sequence that someone gets once they sign up for something. right. Again, lot of revenue gets missed out on just because you don't have a simple email sequence. So for upper and middle funnel leads, as soon as someone signs up, as soon as they download something, you should have the first email where you give them the thing that you promised. Okay. And then you should have a fortified email sequence that directs them to the main offer. So they may be booked themselves. because the SDR might not reach them with the phone. So you should have an automated email sequence. And then once that sequence ended, you should have a newsletter where you just nurture them forever until they unsubscribe or book. All right? This should be entirely automated. And so that's what you do to increase the chance that they're going to book after they show the interest. So it's not just calling, it's also emails. And again, I've made this entire document with sequences for catch all. So you can just use this everything if you don't want to choose. If you have an event follow-up, you can use this sequence. If you have a pricing request, you have this sequence with five emails. Email one, call one. It says you exactly what you should include in which. And these get used by firms like HubSpot, SixSense, Google. We've collected that from them. So these are just templates. If you have close loss opportunities that you want to reactivate, demo requests, worm leads, new account representative, new trial users if you do software, contact sales, demo requests, follow ups, right? You have a bunch of templates for a bunch of different things. So you can actually get this document again, first thing in the description, just get it while you're watching because you you can just copy and paste these even if you don't want to listen to the video, that's fine. You can just use these because if you use these, then you can book a bunch of people without even calling anyone. Okay. If you just make one call within five minutes, if they don't pick up, you leave everything else to these email sequences, it's going to work. Okay. So this takes 30 seconds. It's a simple form with two fields. So I can send it to your email. So yeah, you can do that. the reason for ⁓ having a nurture sequence like that is to, first of all, make the prospect show up and increase the likelihood they're going to close. That's the point of a nurture sequence. And the nurturing starts not once they booked, but before they booked till they show up. All right? So you have two types of nurture sequences. You have ones for leads that need to be booked. So you want to move them to lower funnel. That's essentially your job. ⁓ for ⁓ funnel leads, right, they download the thing. They get... email one with a lead magnet and then they get three more emails and then they book a meeting or they don't. For middle funnel, right? It's the same thing. They get the thing for emails. And for lower funnel, once you booked a meeting, all right, so upper and middle funnel leads, they can both be turned into this. So once they book, you have a book meeting, you now need to make them show up, pre-handle objections and stuff like that. I'll get into the exact email script in a bit. So You send them an appointment confirmation email, you make a post-booking video that they see once they book, and that will increase the likelihood that they close and make them show up. So that's the nice thing about a sequence. You have these types of leads that just go through this. And once they book, they go through this nurture sequence. And that's the best thing that you can do. All right. The most important email in this whole thing. And this honestly improves like our show up rates from 50 to 95 % just from this email. Okay. And I'm talking about the appointment confirmation email and it needs to do four things. All right. It needs to prepare the lead for the call. They need to show social proof. It needs to confirm that to fit and it needs to make them show up. So those are the four goals we have. Okay. And so we call this the authority email and it has four parts to it. All right. So first of all, you tell them how to accept the calendar invitation because people don't get reminders if they don't accept the calendar invite. So make them accept it. even if you have to show them visually with images, like click yes here, just make them accept it because then they get a reminder which increases the likelihood that they're going to show up. The second thing you do is you link to your social proof page, right? Where you have case studies, stuff like that. You link your website or some offer explainer. If you have a separate site for that or a VSL, so a video sales letter, if you have something like that, that they haven't watched before booking, then obviously you can link that. Basically, whatever best shows them what you do because they need to understand and confirm themselves if it's a fit. And a fourth thing, which is optional, but very helpful is if you have a post-booking video. So you have a video, essentially, if someone books themselves, they get redirected to that page automatically and they see a two minute video where you walk through some stuff. If someone books through an SDR, for example, they obviously won't get redirected because they didn't book themselves. But if you link that video in the email and label it as pre-call checklist, like check this video before our call, then you forced them to watch. And so this is how an email like that could look like. All right. So it's, Leon from Eminence, right? Your company saw you schedule a call with me soon. Make sure to accept the calendar invite. So my assistant won't delete a non accident. This is huge because. What are we trying to do? This is an authority email. If they don't accept the calendar invite, the call is not going to happen. Simple as that. If you have a ton of volume, this actually makes sense to do. And if you can't see it anywhere, search invitation in your inbox or spam folder, the meeting link is in the invite. Okay. These are clear instructions that everyone can understand. Accept the calendar invite. If you don't, it might get deleted. And if you can't find it, just search this. And then you obviously make sure that your event title matches what you write in there. I think that's self-explanatory. In your inbox or spam folder and the meet link. So how to join is in the invite itself. And then you say, check these resources before the call to make sure this is relevant. And then you link the pre-call checklist where you link the, you know, the post-booking video. You link your results page and you can make a third bullet point that isn't in this template where you link your offer and you say this offer overview. ⁓ look at it and so you know this actually makes sense before you join. And then the last thing is you make them confirm again. So this is a double confirmation. You can leave this out if you don't have like too many leads to handle. But if you do, then this is great because you make them go through everything. And then you say, if this sounds like a fit, reply to this email with good to go. If they reply, okay. So if they accept the calendar invite and they reply this, you have a hundred percent show up rate. We've never had it that someone did these two things and didn't show up. And they basically confirmed themselves that it's a fit. So you already pre-handled objections. You pre-handled the thrust objections because you showed them exactly what results you got. You pre-handled the implementation stuff because in your offer explainer, you explained exactly how your offer works. So you shorten your sales calls too, which is great. You can double your efficiency with this. And then the pre-call checklist. You can also mention some things. And I'm going to cover now what you can exactly say in that post-booking video. And I like to cover five things. And this is a one-time video that you can record. It's two, three minutes long. And then you can use it forever. So you basically say, we do our best to confirm all the appointments as quickly as possible. As soon as we do that, you're going to get a confirmation email from the person that's going to do the meeting with you. Once you get that invitation, make sure the time we have booked is correct and works, which is basically them confirming the appointment. A lot of time we cancel appointments that aren't confirmed. Again, you say the same thing that you said in the email, just because the days are booked full. Okay. This is also huge for pre-handling objections, especially if this is transactional sales. Make sure all decision makers are on the call. You can add them as guests in the invite. If you want to step it up a bit, you can even show how to do that in the video itself with an example so they have a visual. The last thing we want is for future questions going unanswered or someone missing important information. This is just framing it differently because you're not like, OK, bring everyone here so you can buy the thing. right away. ⁓ You actually want future questions from everyone answered in the same call because that's the most efficient way for everyone. Then you also, if you frame your whole call as an application, make sure to say this. If we say no, it doesn't mean anything bad. Even if you don't say no to everyone, if you say this, then you give the impression that you don't just accept everyone, which you shouldn't by the way. Okay. I'm not telling you to lie. Don't do that. but you shouldn't just accept everyone. You should accept the people who you think are a great fit. so saying this also tells other people that you do this and you actively disqualify. Okay. So you tell them, if we say no, it doesn't mean anything bad about you or your company, right? We're just at capacity or you're just not a fit for our skillset, which is no problem because we want to make sure we only take on people where we're confident that we can help. Okay. And the last thing. It's a great predictor for our future working relationship. How someone acts during the deal process, the easiest people to work with are just the ones that respond fast. They're proactive. They take initiative. If you do this, you're just going to get more easy going clients. The people who see this are just going to treat you way nicer on the call. And the whole thing just flows more smoothly. So you can also leave this out. This is just the framework we use, and it works great. All right, now here are some examples. Again, you have this first link in description with way more. I want to cover two of them in a bit more detail. If you have an event, so be that an in-person event or a webinar or something like that, first of all, the SCR should, because this is middle funnel, they should introduce themselves. So, hi, John, I'm the point of contact for your team over at your company name. Thanks for attending the recent workshop or event name. Curious, was there anything specific that stood out from the event we could explain or help with in further detail? Notice how this doesn't ask for a sale at all. It just introduces who you are and then tells them, thank you for attending. Is there anything I can help with that we didn't cover in the event? Because if they do respond with some questions, you have a lead that you can now call again and book them in. Then you have a follow-up with just the first name. It's pretty simple. And again, the third email in the sequence just You say the exact same thing, and this is more tailored. You say, hi, John, thanks for attending the recent workshop event name on date, because this is now in the past. So you remind them when it was. Most of our customers find that, and then you link some helpful document. Helpful when they're solving for automated workflows, like this is an example that we used. This, you just input your solution right here. But essentially, you just give them some sort of free thing, free value, because that always works. All right, and you say most of our customers find this helpful, which also implies that you have a lot of customers who are very happy. And then you can ask a very specific question for the problem you're solving. So in this case, we ask, are there any specific workflow issues you were looking to solve by attending the workshop? Just make this adjusted to your offer. And then for pricing requests, we have three emails, too. This should be sent immediately. can automate this. Thanks for requesting additional information about the product name. Would you be available tomorrow at 2 or 4 PM quickly to discuss your use case ⁓ so we can give you an accurate quote? Let me know what works best. You can also include a booking link in your signature or something like that. Just make sure you don't land in spam. Then again, one follow up on your pricing request. Is there any time that works? We want to support you as soon as possible. I've gone ahead and outlined your account managers availability, right? You give them three options with two different times per option. That always works great. The more options you give them, the better. Also, people don't like booking links usually. So if you just give them times to choose from and you mix them up, right? So you do ⁓ Monday on 11 or 4 PM and then Tuesday on 1 PM or 3 PM or Friday on 9 AM or 11 AM, right? So you mix up everything. which gives you the highest chance that they're actually going to be available. It's way easier to just respond to an email instead of booking a call yourself because Don't overestimate your prospects. Usually they don't think as much. So they don't want to book themselves. That's just how it is. Okay. But it still doesn't hurt to just link it in there. And then you have the third follow-up. Hi John, why don't you make sure I did my due diligence on your recent pricing inquiry. I'd love to get you in before our schedule fully books up. Add a bit of urgency, right? Let me know what time works best for you. And I'd be happy to coordinate on mine. Again, if you want all of these, I have 26 pages. with all of them. So you can just get that if you haven't already. So if you have a nurture system, if you set this up right, then from all your inbound leads, you can book 95 % of people in and 95 % of people are going to show up, which means you get a 10 % leakage from the initial leads to showed calls, which is insane. If you don't do this, it looks something like this. Of the leads you get, you book only half at max. And then of the ones you book, only 50 % show up at the max. So you're losing out on so much more than if you just did these one time fixes and it could look something like this. right. This has also your sales process has almost nothing to do with the closer skill. If you just have a good nurture sequence, people are going to close themselves. The marketing already did 90 % of the closing process for you. You just need to show up and take the payment almost. All right. It's just gonna make everyone's life easier. And the good thing, this doesn't require much active effort. If you set up a good sequence once, that's it. You have the sequence, it's set. All right? And the small tailored things, AI can help out with that too. So just set this up. It's so worth it. Trust me. So again, if you have proper inbound handling, you get 80 % booking rates, 95 % show up rates, 50 plus percent close rates. And also if you want more exact, like I've made an exact system on how to get a show up rates in a separate video. So I'm gonna link that in the corner. You can go watch that after this where I break down exactly like the whole nurture sequence from book to showed in way more detail. But honestly, if you just do this, what I told you, you don't even need that. That's just for the... the extra, right? So you have the same volume that goes in, but you get way, way more deals out. Okay? Way more. Like this is at least a 4X. So I think this is worth it. And so again, I'm just going to mention it shortly. If you want this inbound nurture guide, get it first link in description. If you need more sales calls book for your sales team in general, that's what we do at our company. So we run the outbound for you. You only pay us per showed call. So it's zero risk on your end. Manage book meetings with companies like Airbus, Deloitte, McKinsey, Salesforce, BMW, many, many more hard to reach prospects that we actually booked. over 200 demos per year per client. if that's something interesting to you, you can click the second link in the description. Just watch the video. It's very short to see if it actually makes sense. And if it does, then we can talk. And if you like this sort of stuff, then you can subscribe, like, so I know that I should make more videos like this. And I have one more bonus for you since you watch till the end. If you want to get 5,000 decision maker contacts, for your exact ICP, right? So you tell us exactly who you want to reach, what you sell. If you want that for completely free, okay, then you can click the third link in the description. It's going to be labeled so you don't mix up which one is which. We have premium data sources, so this is actually expensive, right? It's worth 50K plus. You get emails and phone numbers. We give you a complimentary AI email copywriter. You get the whole thing within 24 hours. And we actually do this manually. So we customize it to your exact offer and ICP and you get 5,000 of these people that you can reach out to right away for completely free. Please be patient. It takes us some time. Again, we do this manually. So this is not just some one size fits all thing. We customize this, but we also don't do it for everyone. So you can fill out this two step form. It takes less than 30 seconds. Just the more specific you are, the better the result is going to be. And if you qualify, then we're going to send it over. If not, then we'll send you something else. So no one goes empty handed. So you can do that with the third link. So just look in the description and see what makes sense for you. And I'll see you in the next video.