The Ultimate Cheat Sheet on Lead Conversion

Leads are the life-lines of any business. The challenging process of converting your leads to a loyal customer decides if your business is here to stay and thrive. Oh well, it does depend on how you manage to press the emotional hot-buttons of the lead. However, lead conversion can be endlessly customized.

But, First things first, do we understand enough of what a lead means?

In an early stage of the sales process, 'lead' refers to an individual who has expressed an interest in what your business has to offer, but requires a little more nudging to convert into a contact.

Here is an ultimate cheat sheet for managing your leads, focusing on the right leads, tracking what works and what doesn’t in a structured way.

Define your 'Perfect Lead'. Familiarize your sales and marketing team with this persona

Dig and know the problems and interests of whom you think is a potential lead, what type of content attracts them, how much of their time is spent online or offline, social channels they prefer for communication,  their role in the buying process and what behavioral traits indicate their readiness to be passed on to the sales team.

Define your conversion criteria

Many organizations use BANT -Budget, Authority, Need, and Timeline for their conversion criteria, but for your business, you might have to apply something else. It depends on 'what exactly constitutes an opportunity for your company?' Once you've defined the entry point for an opportunity, you can work back from there and create criteria your prospect must meet before that opportunity becomes active.

Lure them with amazing content - Publish Blogs

To push leads to the point where they are interested enough to buy your product or service, you need to build trust.

Blogging is a great way to build that trust.

Companies that blog generate 67% more leads than companies that don’t.

They must see you as an authority in your niche and feel that you can support them to ensure their success by them using your product or service.

“The fact is that today you cannot become an authority simply by declaring yourself as one! Today's customer is more suspicious and would want to see you prove it. By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure that you can become that authority.”

-Forbes.

Great content speaks for itself, and people do share it. But for that to happen, you need to spread on social media and extend the reach to drive more new leads. Ensure you include an offer with the content you share to acquire the contact information of those who are genuinely interested in your product or service so that it will be easier to qualify and convert them into customers.

Get them to click through to your website or blog.

If you have got them to do this, then new engagements have begun!

Make your landing pages look creative

You must think of a way to capture more of the lead's information to increase their engagement with you. Create a  simple yet luring landing page with the objective - to encourage the lead to take the desired action. It could be downloading content or registering for a webinar, a demo, etc.

The format you prefer, the content, images, CTAs that you choose to have on your landing page make a huge difference.

Here are examples of killer landing pages

When a new lead comes in…

First, make an impactful impression by highlighting your value proposition in an automated email. This is the best practice - sending an email confirmation along with the receipt to your lead.

Use your phone!

Yes, don’t walk, run. Call your prospect right away. Practice the call, send a follow-up email. It should usually be from an account representative. Email templates are the best for representatives to customize the email to the lead.

If you didn’t talk to the lead, the email should :

• Introduce your offering and a note as to why you are reaching out.
• Include key selling prepositions, differentiators, promotions, awards and link to your website.
• Have a reason for them to call you back.
• Mention a specific time to call you back.

If you did talk to the lead, the email should:

• Thank the contact for their time.
• Include key selling prepositions, differentiators, promotions, awards and link to your website.
• Have a link to a specifically associated page on your website.
• Have Follow-ups and next steps

Place a second call and email. If there isn’t any answer, leave a voicemail. Every email and voicemail must be unique and must communicate a consistent theme, say, best prices.

How does your phone number show up on the caller ID? Try calling from a different ID to see if this results in more pickups. Test calling at different times to know the optimal time of the day.

Contacting a lead in 5 minutes versus 10 minutes increases rates by 900% – 5 minutes can make all the difference in your success – and that’s not all. Not only does timing matter, but the effort you put forth can be a significant factor; while 68% of leads are contacted only once, you can get a 90% conversion rate after making 6 calls. Better yet – be the first one to call and get 325% more leads!

-www.business.com

Email Nurture Campaign:

Carefully plan your content strategy and timing of offers. Turn it into your perfect opportunity to build credibility, establish thought leadership, to keep your brand front and center. Try including company’s blog posts, white papers, links to ebooks, press releases, offers, promotions, award announcements, industry news and highlights, and case studies.

Encourage the leader to share it on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn. Reiterate your value prepositions at every touch point.

Nurtured Leads have a 23% shorter sales cycle and 56% greater lead gen ROI.

Align your company’s quarterback and receiver

We mean your marketing and sales team. Allow both teams access to a centralized database of customer contacts and marketing and sales activities. Let them know the moves to play and the cards to use before the game begins. Discuss and get to a mutually agreed marketing-sales lead response time to work leads efficiently. Demand and extract visibility and insight about your customer from each teammate to better your chances of nurturing and responding to your prospect's interest and closing of sales.

When you deliver targeted content with clear CTAs, blogs can turn out to be channels where you can learn more about your customers’ needs. Portray your company’s leadership and expertise via blogs to influence the buyers' decision.

Be consistent with your communication

Sometimes, leads will flush straight through into an opportunity, but many times, they won't. They'll linger in the lead stage until they meet the criteria you've defined.  Use analytics to measure the performance of your messaging and adjust accordingly to make sure you're achieving your industry average open and click-through rates. Attempt more than nine communications before a lead responds. Being consistent pays off. Also, educate your leads using relevant videos.

Conclusion:

A lot of businesses run into sticky spots trying to map out how and when to convert leads. Just remember to focus on the bigger picture while working on lead generation because in the end, you are trying to get more sales for the company.