As a general business rule, it’s said you should spend 5% of your turnover on marketing.
Some eclipse this, spending upwards of 20% of annual revenue on marketing to raise awareness and win new customers.
Others spend even more than that.
But many do this without considering one very important thing.
Will they be able to handle the increasing number of leads and inquiries coming through the door, or over the phone?
Related: How to Have Multiple Phone Numbers on One Cell Phone: A Step-By-Step Guide
Creating new leads is great.
But without the resource to deal with them, you’re not only wasting your marketing budget and crucial revenue.
You’re creating a detrimental reputation for yourself as a business with poor customer service.
And considering that 78% of customers have backed out of purchase due to a poor customer experience, this is an important issue to solve.
After all, if you can’t even pick up the phone from a person trying to give you money, how likely are you going to be to pick up any other time?
So, before you run out and start spending your marketing budget, take some time to look and work out how you’ll deal with the increasing number of calls you’ll get.
To get you started, here are a few tips.
Forecast your calls based on previous periods
One thing you can do to get you on the right foot is to try and use your marketing and lead generation information to try and forecast what resources you’ll need for any increase in calls.
These are never going to be 100% accurate – hence they’re forecasts – but they’ll help you identify any potential rises in calls before they happen, and help you attribute resources accordingly.
Add self-service to your website for basic inquiries
Customers today aren’t shy about finding out basic information on their own.
In fact, some prefer to do a lot of their own research before reaching out to sales on their terms.
For example, 91% of customers say they would use an online knowledge base if it were available and tailored to their needs, according to Zendesk.
But if the only way they can research is to call your sales team, then that’s more calls you have to deal with.
Instead, try to divert non-hot leads away from your sales team by creating online resources that leads and prospects can use to educate themselves, before getting in touch.
This could include customer service or lead generation technology like chatbots, which can send people the right information quicker, or act as a lead gen tool to gather information for sales to follow up on.
By diverting these colder leads away from your team, they’ll have more time to focus on hot leads and taking phone inquiries from people interested in buying your services.
Use multiple communication channels
It’s just a fact that not every customer wants to call you, but that might be the only option you’ve given them.
Instead, review your options and create multiple channels of communication between you and your customers.
It could be live chat, it could be an email, it could even be by text.
This, after all, is what your customers want.
Two-thirds of customers have used at least three different communication channels to contact customer service in the past, according to a study by Microsoft.
Obviously, phone calls will continue to play a major role in your sales calls and general inbound communication.
In fact, according to one study by the CMO Council, customers named phone calls and in-person communication as the two communication channels they couldn’t do without.
So this is why this next tip is so important.
Use a telephone answering service or virtual receptionist
One of the easiest ways to increase your capacity to deal with incoming calls is to simply have more people available to answer the phone when it rings.
But this can be expensive when you try and do it in-house.
Receptionists aren’t the investment they used to be.
With more people working remotely is £15,000 to £30,000 a year a good investment for someone to sit behind a desk to answer the phone and greet a reduced number of visitors to your office – assuming you still have a physical office.
A telephone answering service can provide the call answering resource you need to deal with every incoming call without high staff investment.
These virtual receptionists work the same as a traditional receptionists, except they’re remote.
They still operate as a part of your business, but you only pay for the time or number of calls they deal with.
Plus, they can also help with organizing the diaries of your sales team, taking away a lot of unnecessary admin, as well as helping deal with calls.
Offer a callback or appointment service
When a customer calls and you can’t deal with their inquiry immediately, one way to keep them onside is to offer them a call back at a specific time that suits them.
If you’re using a telephone answering service or virtual receptionist, then this service is easy to set up.
You simply ask your team to take the necessary details of the caller and have them schedule an appointment directly into your team’s diaries.
Your customer then knows when to expect the call.
Prepare your call handling to deal with more marketing and sales leads
If you’re going to spend thousands on your company’s marketing, then it makes sense you should also invest in the resources to deal with any uptake in inquiries.
By investing in more output to draw customers to you, without dealing with the resources to handle the calls, you’ll simply see your marketing budget evaporate with no increase in customers to show for it.
And when you’re trying to justify your marketing budget at the next board meeting, that’s a disaster.
