When Professionals Run Into Problems With Lead Conversion, This Is What They Do

Conversions: The cash crop of Marketing

You might run the best lead gen campaign but if the leads don’t convert into business, the campaign that you made has to go out of the window.

Let's be honest..

Conversions are difficult.

43% professionals say converting leads into customers is their biggest challenge. But, professionals think about chalking out the right strategy:

To avoid getting trapped in a cycle generating demand that isn’t really a demand.
To avoid money sinking into campaigns that don’t pay off.

What can you do about it?

Nurture Leads

Take all the leads you have captured via web forms, blog subscriptions, downloads, persuade them gradually and gently through the buying stages. This singles out the ones that are likely to convert.

Keep untested leads. Do not send it to sales. Instead, target content to further qualify them.

Result: You'll earn people’s trust before you ask them to buy something.

Have email personalization programs in place. According to Forbes, it has shown to boost open rates by 14% and conversions by 10%.

Reiterate the standards you have set for lead quality

According to BrightTALK, Increasing lead quality is the priority for 68% of B2B marketers.

To achieve this, align sales and marketing over a set of shared definitions for lead qualification, come up with a clear framework for your buyer’s journey, and clearly demark between MQLs, SQLs, and SALs (marketing qualified, sales qualified, and sales accepted lead)?

Answer the questions with your team:

How do you define a “sales-ready” lead?

What actions and criteria indicate interest and intent?

Merge your CRM and marketing automation platform

If you’re trying to run lead gen campaigns without this key systems integration, you’re making a big mistake. A two-way integration between your CRM database and marketing automation platform (MAP) gives sales and marketing teams the ability to work from a unified pipeline and share lead intelligence.

Sales representatives can see where leads originated, how they were qualified, and how long they’ve been active. These insights (and others) help your reps start rewarding conversations with people they already “know,” in a sense.

Marketers, on the other hand, can use the CRM/MAP integration to track close rates and other conversion metrics.

Concentrate on the “right lead information”

This can be quite tricky! Depending on your various lead entry points - web forms, landing pages, gated downloads. Ask yourself if you’re getting the right information about each lead from the outset.

If you don’t get the right pieces of information, it’ll be hard to allocate that prospect. At the same time, remember you don’t want to make many demands and risk losing the prospect over privacy concerns.

Discuss with your team if:

You want to run a drip campaign?

Follow up immediately?

Are they interested in your products/your content/ both?

Restrict webforms to 3-5 fields (Email and name are usually non-negotiable.) Choose your questions wisely. Consider a custom question, depending on the circumstances.

Fish the big fish!

Have a simple net in a lake teeming with fish, to increase your chances of catching them. Because successful businesses fish where the big fish are. To mimic them, talk to customers who are familiar with your products or services, use them, and have high probability of using them.

It is important to not that you don’t waste your time trying to convince people who don’t need your products or services when there are customers out there who already know they need what you’re selling.

Better your telephone skills & presentation skills

Great speakers:

Connect through storytelling
Use their voices well
Have inner fire with authority
Prevent fear from overpowering them
Are aware that 'how you say it has five times more impact'

Research : People retain 20% of what they see, 20% of what they hear, and 50% of what they see and hear.

Most businesses don’t use the telephone sales-effectively. Customer enquiries, orders, or complaints have telephone as primary method of dealing with your business. Mismanaging telephone efforts can throw a fortune down the drain. Enhance the telephone skills of your team. Turn the telephone into one of the most powerful business tools available by creating a great impression.

Key Takeaways

Use visual aids to have a massive impact for more information to get through in a shorter period of time. And don’t waste time in generating more leads if your existing conversion process has loopholes. Many businesses are able to generate leads and prospects, but are losing their sales opportunities because of this approach. If this is the case with you too, you don't need additional leads. Instead, you need much better strategy for converting a larger portion of your prospects into customers.