Offer something in exchange for permission to stay in touch with those interested, but not to the point they are ready to purchase. Reports, white papers, assessment tools, and educational email series are some popular choices. The idea is to stay in front of a prospect beyond a single visit to your website with messaging to educate, develop trust and guide them to a focused call to action. If you are having a difficult time coming up with what you can offer, think of the top five or seven questions you get asked about, or things people need to be aware of before purchasing.

Not only should you offer this on your site as an opt-in form, but you can also offer it in posts on social media, or paired with ads… Just be sure to link to a page with an opt-in form.

Offering free consultations can be a great way to get prospective customers or clients to engage but can often result in time wasted speaking with people who are not ready for, able to afford, or willing to pay for your products or services. Protect your time by qualifying the prospect prior to speaking with them.

Require the prospect complete a short questionnaire prior to giving them access to self-schedule an appointment with you. Set criteria to determine if you are willing to meet with them or not. If so, send them to your scheduling link. If not, send them resources to better prepare them or recommend another business which is better suited to serve them.

Networking follow-up doesn’t need to be time consuming or difficult. How many conferences or networking events have you attended but only did minimal follow-up, if at all, after the event? Automation can help you capture new contacts, keep them organized, allow you to add notes, and help you identify those who are good contacts to invest your time in. Instead of just sending a “Nice to meet you” email, offer them a newsletter, report, white paper, assessment tool, or educational email series.

It is great when someone interested in your products or services calls into your business, but it is also easy to “drop the ball” when it comes to getting back to them in a timely manner. It is time to move beyond sticky notes and scrap pieces of paper. Automation can help you capture the person’s information, assign to and create a task for a salesperson, and even send emails with education and next steps to help the lead get prepared to take the next step when the salesperson calls.

Help your sales team be more productive and organized by providing them a sales pipeline. A sales pipeline should contain clearly defined steps of your sales process and automated follow-up. Empower your sales team to focus on moving leads through your sales process without being burdened and slowed down with having to keep track of where the lead is in the process or what needs to be done next. Say good-bye to easy to lose sticky notes and cumbersome spreadsheets.

Not all leads are equal. Some are hot, some cold, and a bunch might be lukewarm. Automation can not only warm leads, but it can also help you identify the hottest leads so your sales team can focus their efforts. Wouldn’t it be great if each lead was ranked based on what links they clicked on in marketing emails and which forms they submitted – Automation can make that happen.

Many leads may not be ready to pull the preverbal trigger the first time they engage with you. This is especially true when it comes to B2B. Having an automated lead nurturing process in place allows you to keep your prospect engaged, further educate, and helps you develop trust – all while preventing them from “falling through the cracks”.

Some ways to provide long-term nurturing to your prospects are to educate them on your products/services, inform them of industry news and events (newsletters), address common questions or issues your customers face, and notify them of upcoming deals or specials. Be sure to provide a button or link to your product or so they can request someone contact them.

Effortlessly help your new customers know they are appreciated with an automated sequence of emails that welcomes, educates on how to get the most out of their purchase, answers FAQ’s, drives utilization and lets them know how to get help if they need it.

While not right in every situation, another powerful strategy is to offer complementary products, services or even an upsell. Just be careful, this can be a two-edged sword.

Asking for customer feedback is something just about every business should do, but most don’t. Periodically giving your customers the ability to let you know what you are doing well, and what you can improve upon is one of the best ways to identify the good and bad in your customers’ experience.

This also gives you an opportunity automatically to send review and referral requests to those who have had a positive experience. For those that haven’t, it gives you an opportunity to make things right or turn a negative into a positive.

It doesn’t take long for most business owners to realize it is easier to sell to an existing customer than it is to find a new one. Leverage automation to help you stay in front of existing customers with other complementary products/services, upcoming sales, events, reminders to order items which need to be replenished.

Provide your customers an easy to find, and use, “support” form so they can ask for help. Provide a link to this form on your support pages and in your customer emails.

For those offering phone and/or email support, identify the top 15 to 20 support issues you face and create automation to send an email within seconds. This will save you or your team time, allow you to help more customers and give your customers a resource to refer to.

Sell tickets or use a form to register people for a free event, send a confirmation, provide additional event information, and send reminders. A lot goes into successful events and automation can reduce the burden of operational details so you can focus on the event itself.

Those who attend your event tend to be more engaged, but don’t forget about those who register and don’t attend. Send each group different follow-up based on if they attended or not. Include event highlights, links to recordings, and a focused call to action for each group. Automation will help you keep track of everyone, so you get the correct message to the correct group.