I recently partnered with a new guy to schedule my leads for me. He has done such a great job that I have had to adjust my organizational system to track, schedule, and reference my lead information. Leads are tricky to organize for several reasons.
Let me explain how I do it.
1. Receiving an appointment. I recommend that everyone use an Excel spreadsheet (preferably in google docs) to track your leads. I recommend that each time you get a new lead, whether it is from yourself or your appointment scheduler, it is both entered into this spreadsheet and emailed to your primary Gmail inbox. The spreadsheet is primarily to track which ones you sold and which ones you didn’t sell. The day to day organization can all happen in your Gmail inbox.
2. Label the lead by city or area. I have a new label system I have been using in gmail. Think of a label like a folder with the exception that an email can have multiple labels. I have split my service area up into approximately ten minute by ten minute areas and created a “label” for each area. For instance, “Duncansville, PA,” is the city where I live and is very small; I can drive from one end to the other in less than ten minutes. I have a label for “Duncansville Leads.” Anytime I am in Duncansville, I can click on this label from my phone’s gmail client to see all the leads that are labeled, “Duncansville Leads.” There is a larger city called “Altoona” nearby which takes about twenty minutes to drive from one end to the other. In this case, as in most larger cities, there are multiple zip codes. In this situation, I have a label for each zip code. When a lead comes in, I immediately label it according to area so I can reference a list of all the active leads I have in any one city or area.
3. Schedule leads by AM/PM. Have your appointment scheduler set up appointments for AM or PM. In other words, the owner is either in during the morning hours or the afternoon hours. If you have set up your gmail account like I have, you have a label for each day. Click on “Labels” => “Manage Labels” and add a label called “AM” and “PM” which is nested under each of these daily labels. So your label list would look something like: Monday -AM -PM Tuesday -AM -PM Use these “AM” and “PM” labels for leads only. All other tasks for that day go into the main label for that day. So, if I have a note to “get my wife flowers,” that would be labeled “Thursday.” But if I have a lead for a business owner who is available on Thursday morning, that would be labeled “Thursday AM.”
4. Label each email correctly. As leads come in, you should have moved them from the inbox into a sub-folder called “AM” or “PM” for the day when you are planning to run that lead. (If the owner doesn’t care which day, you put it into the next time when you are planning to be in that area.) You have also labeled each lead with an additional label for the area it is in. Here is how you do this in practice:
A. You open the email with the lead information in your Inbox.
B. At the top of the email click “Labels” and check the label for the city first.
C. Then click “Move To” and select the day / AM or PM label when you want to visit that lead. This will move it from the inbox to that label, but it will keep the area or city label attached to the email as well. Here is how I use the system each day:
The Low-Tech Paper version: You can even do all this with a simple three ring binder. Have a section for each area where you write down each lead. And have a daily schedule at the front where you simply write the business name and city / area next to it in the schedule. Store all the notes and detailed info on a page for that lead in the city / area section which you can reference each time the business name comes up in your schedule at the front of the notebook. Hope this is a help!
Email me with questions: james@ccsalespro.com
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