Home Business Ideas How to Successfully Convert Leads into Customers.

How to Successfully Convert Leads into Customers.

November 23, 2020

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The ultimate goal of every business owner is to increase sales and grow its business. Every business employs marketers to generate new leads, not only that but to also convert those leads into paying customers. Acquiring interested leads is one thing, and securing their business is another. Most websites have daily increased their website traffic, but, are you making sales from the large numbers of visitors? While getting a visit to your website or a contact from a prospect is great, those visits and contacts don’t mean much if you don’t use lead conversion best practices to turn them into new customers.

To better understand how to convert leads into sales, here are the tips that you can apply to convert your long list of leads.

1. Act Fast

Leads don’t like to be kept waiting. In lead conversion, time is becoming one of the most valuable resources at our disposal. Lead response time is quickly becoming the most powerful determiner of successful contact, conversions, and even bookings and closes for agencies operating in the B2B space. The longer you take to contact a lead after they request information or a demo, the less likely you are to close that deal.

Therefore, a delay in reaching out to the newly generated contacts may lead to them losing interest or turn to a competitor. The level of interest for the prospect drops dramatically after one hour, and with the high costs of paid advertising, and the ever-increasing competition in the digital landscape, you literally can’t afford to waste another moment. Hence, delaying leads is a great way to create a sales disaster in your business.

2. Qualify Your Leads

Qualifying a lead is the process of determining whether a lead meets the requirements to purchase your product or service. Qualifying a lead helps you avoid spending time and money pursuing a lead who isn’t in a position to invest in your product or service. Without proper qualification, you’ll lack the knowledge needed to successfully close the sale.

Analysis proved that 67% of lost sales occur because sales reps do not properly qualify potential customers before taking them through the full sales process. You need to categorize your leads into marketing-qualified leads (MQLs), sales acceptable leads (SAL), and sales-qualified leads (SQLs) which will help you increase your conversion rate. Each of these groups is at a different stage in the sales cycle and therefore needs a different approach from your sales team.

Sales teams must discover how best to get the qualifying information they need, whilst ensuring the potential buyer is well suited to their product, without driving them away. Conduct thorough research on these leads, study their intention and interaction with your platform, check their last sales activities, and then establish contact with them. This is important because if your sales team attends to every lead that your business gets, they will not only end up wasting a lot of time but efforts as well.

3. Regularly Follow-Up with your Leads

Follow-ups are necessary to stay connected with your target audience. This is the process of getting back in touch with a contact or lead after their initial contact. In the lead conversion process, it’s important to leverage both follow-up phone calls and lead nurturing emails. Quickly following up with new contacts and active leads and nurturing long-term leads can help you convert them into customers. This gives them a sense that you care about their needs and are willing to provide them all the necessary services they want.

Don’t stop after sending one or two emails to your target audience or after that one-time demo call. Continuously follow up with them. Make them aware of your business’s offerings and highlight what makes you stand out.

4. Remember Them

Smart entrepreneurs know that it’s necessary to spend time with your customers. This might seem folly, but that’s not really the case. Several studies have shown that leads are more likely to convert into customers when they don’t feel rushed. It’s your task to make every lead feel individually remembered and respected.

5. Structure Your Sales Team for Speed.

It is always good to divide your sales teams into two divisions; one that handles all your existing customers and the other that takes care of all the new leads your business generates.

Also, make use of a good CRM system that helps you to monitor your prospect’s sales stages and other related activities. You can further have dedicated resources who can monitor and assign leads to different sales managers. This will help your sales team handle all your incoming leads and supervise their sales pipeline at every buying stage. You should also aim for continuity, that is, make sure to use the same contact person throughout the entire customer lifecycle. When contact changes from lead to customer, they might find it strange that their contact person in your company isn’t the same, who had the initial contact.

6. Gain Their Trust

People buy the person first, and then the product. Therefore, always be genuine and friendly. Speaking the truth makes it easier to gain people’s trust, so have a real and honest dialog with them. Every meeting should be a conversation, not a sales pitch. Spend at least half of every meeting listening to your customer. Make the conversation about real business issues, so that the customer views you as an expert.

You can also build the trust of your new customers by making them read through the testimonials of your existing happy customers. Add them on pages where visitors are most likely to read them, such as on the home page, pricing page, blog page, and so on.

In conclusion, lead conversion is important for every business, hence, you need to be strategic in other to get more customers from your lead base and see more value from your marketing.