Leads are great, but if you don't have a systematic approach to respond in a timely and personalized manner where you can automate your followup and track your progress--you won't be able to learn what's working and what's not.
Spending 30-45 mins now to setup your automation sequences will save your team up to 15-20 minutes PER LEAD on manual outreach, follow-up and tracking and will reduce your time to follow-up which will dramatically improve your conversion rates which is why its so critical to set this up before getting started with leads on Hotel Tech Report.
Once your Zap is turned on, the beautiful thing is that everything is in full autopilot and you can just set it and forget it when it comes to HTR leads. The only thing you'll do is set your lead targeting criteria via the Instant Connect settings in the vendor dashboard and all of the manual admin, lead routing, CRM data entry and manual followup will be fully automated 🙌 which (a) will save you ~15-20 mins/lead and (b) increase your success rates by lowering response times!
Why its Critical to Automate Your Lead Follow-up
⏰ Save time: Setting up automation takes 30-45 minutes upfront but then you save hours of your team's time on followup going forward
🧪 Optimize Your Follow-up: If you're changing who responds, how quickly, when they respond and what they say--its impossible to learn what's working and what's not. Automation allows you to standardize your funnels and learn which types of leads work best, which outreach messaging works best and more.
📬 Improve response rates: There is a direct correlation between time-to-followup and success rates, automating your followup eliminates potential delays and helps you win more deals.
📈 Track performance: Without automation you can't successfully identify what's working and what's not to improve response rates and conversion over time. By setting up automated followup sequences by lead type you can gain visibility into not just which leads were HTR leads, but which types of leads from HTR were the most successful, which outreach messaging was the most successful and more.
What You'll Be Using Zapier to Automate
In Zapier there are two critical concepts to understand, 'trigger' and 'actions':
TRIGGER
This is the event that will happen that will 'trigger' an automation sequence to begin
When you accept a lead on HTR
ACTION
These are the automated 'actions' that will happen after the 'trigger' event occurs
Lead details get sent to Zapier which then:
Creates the lead in your CRM
Drops them into a personalized nurture sequence
Here are the steps in the sequence so you know what we will be setting up:
💸 Lead is Captured:
Hotel Tech Report gets your company a lead and your team is sent a notification email
🖥 Review + Accept the Lead
You login to your vendor dashboard to review the lead details and accept the lead
🤖 Automation Sequence is Triggered
Once you decide you want a lead and press accept, the automation sequence will be triggered
📬 Zapier Inbox Receives the Lead Notification Email
The lead is automatically sent to your Zapier email parser inbox (this is called, the 'trigger') with all of the details of the lead
⚡️ Actions Triggered
Once the trigger event occurs, you will be able to trigger automated 'actions' (eg. add contact to your CRM, create followup to do item for your sales team, add the contact to a list to send on an automated followup sequence, etc)
Step-by-Step Guide to Automating Your Lead Followup
Follow the steps below to automate your lead followup and implement best practices to reduce your time to followup and increase your competitiveness and likelihood to win the deal on each lead you accept.
Step 1: Create a Free Zapier Account
Step 2: Create a Zapier Parsing Email to Receive Lead Details (Watch tutorial)
Step 3: Send a Test Email to Zapier & Map the Fields (Watch Tutorial)
Step 4: Setup Your Zap and Simple Actions (Watch Tutorial)
Step 5: Setup Your Zap to Create a New Lead in Your CRM (Watch Tutorial)
Step 6: Setup Zapier Paths to Drop Leads into Nurture Sequences to Followup Automatically (eg. price quote, demo request and matched leads)
We recommend setting up 2 key flows based on inquiry type:
Path #1 (Direct Leads - Price quote or Demo): Filter in Zapier for leads with the 'inquiry type' field= 'Request quote' or 'Request Demo'
Path #2 (Matched leads): Filter in Zapier for leads with the 'inquiry type' = 'Matched lead'
4. Nurture Sequence Templates & Inspiration
The video tutorial below walks you through an example of our recommended nurture sequence setup for direct and matched leads to have their own dedicated flow.
TIP: Download the copy/paste templates from the tutorial to use as a base to (a) save time setting up your own nurture sequences and (b) to make sure you're following best practices.
Still need some help?
Reach out via the live chat on Hotel Tech Report to setup a free coaching session.
This article is part of a 3-part series