7 Steps to Converting Your Leads Effectively
1. Speed Wins
The longer a lead sits, the colder it becomes, which means the speed of your response is key. Automated email responses and voice messages are great tools that allow you to instantly acknowledge an inquiry’s interest and provide them with the information they requested.
What is effective response time to inquiries?
· Phone — calls should be placed within minutes of receiving a lead, and no later than 24 hours
· Email — automatic email responders should be sent within minutes of receiving a lead
Pay attention to your support infrastructure
Equal in importance to the aggressive sales tactics used interpersonally by sales agents, your business must have the proper infrastructure in place to service your generated leads. Preventable mistakes are often made when businesses launch a new product or service without a proper structure and sales process in place to service the leads purchased through their marketing strategy.
2. Know Your Priorities
Taking time to understand and differentiate your leads can often mean the difference between major success and none at all. If your business has limited resources to service your leads, it is essential that you prioritize which leads get first attention. TARGUSinfo (a leading provider of On-Demand Insight for lead conversion) suggests that a successful lead conversion strategy is to prioritize, validate, and score your leads into three tiers:
· Tier 1 — Leads that are ready to buy now and will take very little post-lead follow-up to close These leads will most likely buy with your company regardless of how little or much effort is made on your part.
· Tier 2 —Leads that may plan to buy in the next 30-90 days
With this category of leads, your company must be better than your competitor in the post-lead conversion process in order to close.
· Tier 3 — Leads that might buy within the next 90-180 days
These leads must be evaluated carefully to determine whether they are worth your investment of money and valuable time when it is likely that they will never convert.
Breakdown of expected time and financial investment for each tier:
· Tier 1 — 10%
· Tier 2 — 80%
· Tier 3 — 10%
Data Management
Prioritizing your leads is an ongoing task —data must be looked at continually as you evaluate changes in your customer demographics. Many companies do not possess the expertise or even the mindset needed to properly analyze and utilize critical incoming data. An internal data management team is key to achieving and continuing success.
The data management team serves as co-pilot to the management team and allows your company to organize, analyze, and effectively pull data with quick and effective turnaround —a crucial ability when important decisions must be made on the fly. A major factor that determines an organization’s future success is the ability to make decisions based upon on solid data — rather than a theory or gut feeling — and a data management team can provide that.
3. Create a Sense of Urgency at All Stages of the Sales Cycle
During inquiry stages (and throughout each subsequent stage in the sales cycle) it is imperative to provide prospective customers with a solid reason to act immediately, whether through deadlines or enticement through special offers.
Depending upon on your industry, multiple steps may be necessary to complete a sale. Driven by the sales agent, each step should create a sense of urgency to force the potential buyer off of the fence toward a commitment to buy. Underestimating the important sales role played by agents in the decision making process of a customer, many businesses make the mistake of using customer service/customer order representatives to also field inquiry calls. The buyer’s mindset, short sales cycle, variance in audience, and the aggressiveness of your industry mandate the importance of having a separate online sales team rather than cutting corners and combining sales with customer service.
4. Identify and Qualify the Goal
Depending upon your particular business, your inquiries may not have an immediate understanding of their need for your product or services. Each contact an inquiry has with your business should help them overcome any barriers and clearly demonstrate why your product or service is their solution and is better than what may be offered by a competitor.
It is important to recognize and understand the goal of each sales touch:
· Is it to close the sale immediately?
· Is it to set the next appointment?
· Is it to build the relationship for future contacts?
Sales agents need to know the goal of each call or communication.
It is important that the members of your management team who are directing sales agents possess excellent communication skills to effectively communicate the sales objectives. Converting leads via the telephone is a very dynamic interaction. Multiple, uncontrollable variables can take place at anytime affecting the overall outcome of the call, so it is crucial that agents are well trained, follow well-organized scripts, understand their goal and target objectives, and possess the proper tools to achieve these goals. In addition, measurements have to be in place to evaluate the effectiveness of each agent reaching those goals or target objectives.
5. Use “Friendly Persistence”
Be persistent. If at first you don’t succeed in reaching a customer, keep trying until you do. After initial contact is made, it can often take an additional 5-7 touches to close the sale. Eighty percent of potential sales are lost due to lack of follow-up. Generating a “hot” inquiry is not enough — your conversion rate will be determined by the effectiveness of your post-lead strategy and follow-up techniques.
The key in lead follow-up is to either push leads into the next stage of the sales cycle or determine as soon as possible that they are not a potential customer. Avoid wasting an agent’s time on dead leads because your post-lead follow-up failed to identify them as such. Many businesses fool themselves into thinking they have a larger pool of interested prospects then they really do. This is because their post-lead fails to push the potential customer forward in the sales process or touch them enough to have the customer eliminate themselves from the sales cycle.
Another facet of “friendly persistence” is to go back occasionally and re-market to your cold leads. Depending on the type of business you are in, the time you should allow to lapse before returning to old inquires will vary. Many effective options exist for re-marketing to cold leads without taking attention and valuable man hours from your “hot” leads. (See point #7 below)
6. Establish Trust and Meet Expectations
Assure your potential customer that you will only help them determine their needs, not pressure them. There is a fine line between quality and quantity —keep questions in your lead form to a minimum. A good rule of thumb for determining how many questions you ask on your lead form is your company’s ability to follow-up. If you have a robust follow-up plan, you may be able to ask fewer questions on the lead form to afford a higher quantity of leads with a bit less quality. However, if your follow-up process is underdeveloped, you might want to incorporate more qualifying questions. While this may limit the quantity of leads, it should hopefully yield a higher lead conversion.
Don’t force your prospective buyer to provide you with great amounts of detailed information or endure a stack of intimidating drop downs on your lead form. Tell them exactly what will happen when they send their information, and how soon they can expect to hear from a sales agent. If possible, provide a choice of how to be contacted (phone, email, live chat) and their preferred time to be contacted.
Always be ready to sell when your inquiries are in the mood to buy. An option should always be made available to the prospective customer to continue in the sales process immediately without waiting to talk to a sales representative. Quite often a small number of leads (Tier 1 leads discussed above in point #2) won’t require a push from you or your agent to complete the sales cycle. Make sure your systems allow for the consumer to be proactive and move through the sales cycle without you — this will increase the customer’s satisfaction, allow your company to be more scalable, and allow your sales agents more time to spend on Tier 2 leads.
Lastly, established trust and set proper expectations of what the customer can expect when they buy your product or service.
7. Use Technology to Follow-up
One of the greatest gifts of all for lead conversion is technology. However, just like oversight with data management, many companies lack the proper expertise to take advantage of technology in the follow-up process. Your email and phone systems can be setup to handle some of the follow-up for you, which can significantly cut your cost for man hours.
Statistically, your business —at best — will only contact 65-75% of your lead file by phone, even following a top call center lead plan. This means that roughly 25-35% of your leads will never even speak with a sales agent. Automated email and unmanned voicemails are excellent tools to help create urgency, drive inbound calls, and provide the consumer with the next steps to complete the sale — even if a sales agent never speaks with them. These techniques are also very effective for regenerating interest from your “cold” re-marketable leads.
Your technology follow-up should be a huge tool to help assist your sales agent in the sales cycle. Remember, you want as many touches as possible from all channels (whether through live agents or automated email) to either move the prospective customer through the sales cycle toward a purchase or off of your potential list.
Keep it simple
Most consumers want simple, step-by-step “next steps.” A little effort, strategic planning, and effective staffing on the front end can go a long way toward the future success of your business.
About the Author:
At Chancellor University I am responsible for the administration and overall operation of the University in meeting aggressive enrollment and retention goals. This includes, reviewing and evaluating the results of program activities, program growth, lead generation, lead scoring, ensuring that continuing contractual obligations are being fulfilled; allocating resources for greater program effectiveness; and efficiency; increasing conversion, developing organizational and program objectives for Board consideration. In addition, I oversee the financial management of the university, including the development and implementation of the annual budget, in order to stay in line with cost per enrollment goals.
I am also an online adjunct professor teaching BUSI330 (Marketing). In addition, I have also been an adjunct for BUSI331 (Marketing Research), BUSI430 (Advertising and Promotion) and BUSI433 (Marketing Management).
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