6 Steps for lead conversion

Sales leads are the crucial success point to any business-to-business (B2B) industry.

 

If you know when someone is looking to buy a product or service that you offer, you can contact them directly, pitch your service, and spell out their return on investment to secure the sale.

However, too much focus is placed on these quick win sales. What about the potential customer who doesn’t know how you can help them yet? What about the potential customer who wants a bit more information on prices? Surely they are just as valuable in the long term.

Only 27% of business to business (B2B) leads are sales-ready when first generated. This makes lead conversion essential for capitalizing on the other 73%, but up to 65% of B2B marketers have not established lead nurturing campaigns.

This begs the question: Can I make my lead generation campaign nurture opportunities for the future? The answer is yes, and here is how…

Understand the Online Marketing Funnel

The traditional marketing funnel encompasses all marketing activity from PR to print advertising. However, from an online perspective, you can monitor and analyze anyone who is looking at your online activities and tailor your approach to reach them.

Essentially the four main elements of the online marketing funnel are:

Audit

Take a look at your current online traffic levels and conversion ratios. Do they match up? Some webmasters get obsessed with visitor levels, but having a lot of visitors without conversions to me only equals one thing: A leaky marketing funnel. Although people are interested in your product or service, you are losing them at the final hurdle.

This is where lead nurturing comes into play. By gaining information such as an email address, name, or phone number, you can continue to monitor and connect with them, ensuring they don’t fall off your radar and buy from a competitor.

Make sure you are monitoring online leads and conversions, but are finalizing sales by phone. The easiest way to do this is use a visitor level call tracking system. In the majority of B2B industries, a phone call is definitely a prerequisite before a sale is made.

Target, Target, Target!

After you have narrowed down what should be included in your online leads funnel, you need to put a plan in place to make sure you’re reaching the right people. Deciding how you judge which point of the sales process different customers are at is essentially deciding what it means to be sales ready. The more you can find out about a website visitor, the closer you can match their requirements with what you can offer them.

A study suggests that our brains help us to focus on one thing by allowing us to ignore everything else. This really puts emphasis on creating something that visitors really want to see; otherwise you simply become part of the white noise. Target quality leads over quantity, and use your strategy to nurture relationships with people who want to be targeted.

Leverage Existing Databases

Existing databases are an invaluable resource, especially for your lead nurturing efforts. When marketing budgets are tight, spending them on sourcing new leads will eat into your profits. Why go to that trouble when you have an entire list of past customers who may be looking to buy again?

One of the most important messages to take away from this is the more effort you put into creating a database and keeping it up to date, the more leverage you have to align them to you brand again.

Content Marketing on Steroids

Having a great product will be little use if no one knows about it, and social media is often the first stage of the online discovery process. To have a good social media campaign, you must first have some great content to share. To make the content work for you, you have to have a great website that offers a unique service. Content is what holds social media and product together.

Create some exciting content that will educate your potential buyers on exactly what you can do for them, testimonials on what you have done for others and establishing yourself as a thought leading brand in your industry is what you should be aiming for. This takes strategy and time to build up, but linking social to content is an absolute power house for lead attraction and conversion. High quality content that is contextually relevant sent to potential clients leads to a 208% higher conversion rate than batch and blast.

Hard selling is not needed and is often inappropriate in the first establishing steps to generating and nurturing a lead, but if you’re able to show how you can help a potential customer, using statistics and offering something of value to the reader or establishing your business as a thought leader, you’ll be able to get people thinking: “if they know this about my sector, and are giving it away for free… what else do they know and how can they help me?”

Decision Maker’s Needs

Although you are looking at your online marketing strategies, working closely with an offline sales team is essential. By understanding the buyer, you can understand their needs and wants and evaluate how best to nurture this lead. Targeting people around the decision maker in a business is likely to be useful and if you can schedule in-person meetings to get in front of the people they answer to, you’ll have a better chance at getting ball rolling and making the lead into a sale.

The average number of people involved in a decision is 6.8 — and that number goes as high as 21 individuals on buying committees at larger companies. Your nurturing content will need to speak to each of them individually and address their unique needs.

Lead nurturing is more than simply pressurizing people who are not ready to buy into purchasing. If done right, it can create a loyal customer base that trusts what you offer and believes in what you do. Taking a visitor from the initial website visit through to sale is a skill which will become increasingly valuable as the internet markets become increasingly wide and competitive. Get a head start today and begin formulating a lead nurturing plan for your business.

For more details contact me at contacttim82@gmail.com

 

8 Strategies For B2B Marketing Success

Now is a great time to get your team thinking about both short-term goals and long-term activity. Here are eight concepts to focus them on.

 

 

1. Play The Volume Game: Do your team members know exactly what they need to do to hit your marketing team goals? High-performing marketing teams understand the volume of marketing activity and precise actions they require to hit their targets. In fact, the best marketing cultures rally around these numbers, which are closely tracked and understood throughout the marketing department.

2. Assess The Quality Situation: Imagine the net impact on marketing programs of a database that is only 75 percent marketable. A short-term fix is to assign someone on your team stewardship of the data. Having that person get a handle on the current state of the database and understand how to fix it quickly will prevent negative impacts of incorrect data on your campaigns. Be forewarned, however, that databases grow and change quickly, so your data quality efforts cannot be a point-in-time fix. High-performing marketing departments have assigned owners of the data, often part of the marketing operations function, and an ongoing plan for assessing and repairing data quality. Make this part of your long-term core strategy, and you’ll see positive results over time.

3. Take An Extra Step In Qualifying Your Leads: Are all of your marketing leads going directly to sales? Fully qualifying your marketing leads into sales-ready opportunities with the help of teleprospecting could dramatically improve the quality and conversion of leads that end up in your sales pipeline. Studies show that marketing leads sent directly to sales may not receive follow-up  because sales folks responsible for closing business may not have the cycles to fully qualify and convert marketing leads. Employing a teleprospecting effort, with a dedicated calling team, ensures no marketing lead is left behind. This approach requires agreement with sales leadership on the specific definition of a fully qualified sales-ready lead and can be a great boost to help everyone meet their goals.

4. Get Feedback: In addition to reviewing metrics from the sales automation tool, make sure your team members are constantly engaging with sales to discuss their perception on leads passed and opportunities created.

5. Assess The Targeting Situation: Ensure that you have crossed the “T” in targeting. With a large volume of marketing activity, both inbound and outbound, happening in your department, it can be easy to lose resolution on the target. To ensure you have all of the right target buyers in your database, encourage your team to analyze historical purchase data.

6. Personal Research: The emerging trend of B2B buyers decreasing their engagement with salespeople until they’ve narrowed their options to just a few solutions is not going away.

Now more than ever before, your company’s success requires content that is grounded in deep insight about buyers’ decision to choose you over a competitor, or to do nothing at all. Marketers on your team need to become experts in their target buyers, how they buy, and what is important to them in order to be successful.

7. Messaging Alignment: Marketing creates a lot of stuff. And it is easy to get in the habit of creating unnecessary new stuff to support new demand gen activity. One way to combat that is through planning. Once your team is aligned around the target buyer, conduct an inventory of the content you currently have. Have team members review all content, checking to ensure it maps to the messaging themes of the persona and establishing how the buyer expects to use that content in his buying process. The results can be captured in a simple matrix that will easily the identify gaps that exists and allow you to plan for content creation.

8. Measure, Analyze, And Hold Accountable: With the tools available today, there is no excuse for not being nimble and adapting in real time, yet busy marketers can easily lose sight of tracking the effectiveness of campaigns in real-time and miss the opportunity to adjust to hit goals.

For more details and consultation contact me on contacttim82@gmail.com