How do you ensure your sales team prioritizes hot leads?

Hot leads are the sales person’s holy grail. Hot leads can be defined as a high-value lead that is a qualified buyer, actively engaged with your company, is highly interested, and is ready to buy.

Hot leads are like striking gold. A deal with a hot lead closes extremely quickly and typically requires little effort on behalf of your sales rep.

As great as a hot lead is, they only hold value if they are properly captured and engaged with. A lead can either come directly to your sales team as a “hot” lead, or their status can build over time.

When a hot lead comes to you directly, they have likely filled a high intent form like a demo or pricing request. Through the form, they have provided all of their information and it is immediately apparent that they are a highly qualified buyer. The lead also will indicate some sort of urgency.

Leads that were previously captured and already exist in your CRM can also become a hot lead. Every sales team should utilize some method of lead scoring. Over time, the lead will return to your site, perform different actions and engage in particular ways that eventually lead to buying indicators. When their score reaches a particular amount, they become a hot lead.

Response time is crucial

In either scenario, hot leads must be prioritized for sales rep outreach and engaged with immediately. Response time is crucial. A Harvard Business Review study found that to properly capitalize on a hot inbound lead, sales teams must respond within five minutes.

Sadly, Drift found that 90% of B2B companies missed that benchmark, and only 42% responded within 5 days. This means that sales teams are missing a massive amount of revenue by not prioritizing the right leads.

Fortunately, there are simple solutions that you can use to ensure your sales reps prioritize hot leads so you can gain more revenue.

Hot lead scoring system

Lead scoring is an important foundational element to any sales team. It helps your sales reps properly sort their leads, decide which ones to actively work, and which ones to walk away from. Lead scoring also helps marketing manage nurture campaigns.

Lead scoring is incredibly useful in prioritizing hot leads. Set up scoring rules on high intent forms, with extra points for key qualifiers like company size or decision time. When a hot lead fills out the form, their score should propel them straight to the top of your sales reps’ list so they can engage immediately.

The same goes for leads that are already in your CRM. Set scores for high intent downloads within a certain time frame. If a lead starts to download content or show other signs of purchase intent, they should be called.

Hot lead visibility

In order for sales reps to properly prioritize anything, it must be visible. If it can’t be readily seen, a lead will disappear into the myriad of other tasks a rep must accomplish.

Create a special list in Salesforce that hot leads (determined by your scoring system) are automatically added to. Reps should actively check this list to ensure they are followed up with as quickly as possible.

If you use a lead routing system, you can set it so all hot leads are sent to a different rep on each day or during a certain time. That way the rep knows a period of time they are “on-duty” and can watch for new additions.

Instant lead alerts and notifications

Again, the more visible a hot lead is, the quicker and more effective your sales reps will take action. Use alerts to notify reps when they have a new hot lead so they can respond ASAP. This makes leads highly visible regardless of where the rep is or what they are doing and prompts more action.

Streamline sales processes and tools

Once you have assured that your reps can recognize a hot lead and act upon it, you can streamline your sales process so they can engage the lead as quickly as possible. Make relevant sales content readily available, have accessible call scripts, email templates, and the means to utilize them highly streamlined and easy to use.

The less time a rep has to spend preparing to contact a hot lead, the quicker they can get to them.

Revenue.io Hot Leads

Revenue.io Hot Leads is a feature that prioritizes your hottest lead sources for your sales reps with complete context. When a lead becomes hot, they automatically appear in the assigned reps IntelligentDialer with complete context into their source, as well as important additional information. All the rep has to do is click to call, and they have the ability to pull up the proper call script right in the dialer. This ensures hot leads are contacted as soon as possible for an impactful conversation.

Furthermore, as a sales manager, you can see analyze data into individual rep response times, conversions, and more to ensure that every rep is capitalizing on their leads.