YOU DID IT! It’s been five years, and you have not only defied the statistics that said your business would fail, but your business is booming… well, it was booming a few months ago. You were so busy taking care of the regular day-to-day business activities that you overlooked that leads and sales slowed down. Now you are caught up with your workload, and things are painfully slow. So now, efforts have shifted to troubleshoot a drop in leads and sales.
What happened?
You used to get 20-30 new leads a month, but last month there was a grand total of six! Facing layoffs and losing some of your best people, you become ultra-determined to figure out what happened and desperately turn it around before things get much worse.
You start troubleshooting, going through leads and sales, advertising and promotions, service requests and human resources. There aren’t any red flags, but you know something has changed! Your Facebook ads are running as usual, and people are landing on your website, but that seems to be where things stop.
You call your web developer and ask if something has changed on the website. Looking through their records, the developer mentions that the last change was three months ago. Per your request, they replaced a photo and created a new email address.
“Email address… email address…” you mutter to yourself, “That’s it!” you exclaim.
Three months ago, you called the web company to request an email address to be created for the new salesperson. Unfortunately, your former sales guy moved away, took another job and no longer needed his email address. You immediately remember you forgot to get the web designer to update the contact forms on your website. Instead, the forms were forwarded to his [now deleted] email address!
NOOO!! Three months’ worth of leads, down the drain! Tens of thousands in lost revenue!
Fortunately, your web designer looks into the form submissions and can extract all the leads from the last three months. The problem is that you have sales leads that are now mostly dead. You spend the next two days contacting each lead without seeming desperate, while you can’t stop thinking about the mortgage payment due in three days. Such a simple mistake that brought such a drastic change.
Thankfully, after countless phone calls and lost sleep, you managed to close 30% of the leads and increase sales again. Complete catastrophe partly avoided. Congrats!
Check Your Lead Source
Being web developers and marketers, we get to hear the success stories and the horror stories. Although this story has different variations, it has been inspired by actual events [more than once].
All that to say, regularly check your contact form on your website. You should receive a response within a few minutes when you send a test. If you don’t, check your spam folder. Finally, contact your web developer to troubleshoot if the email doesn’t come through.
If you have never received many contacts through your website from potential customers, you may consider improving things like SEO and calls-to-action to generate leads. Let us know if there’s anything we can do to help.
