The way I see it, for an online marketing campaign to be successful, there are two main components you need to master: making your business more visible in order to get more traffic, then converting that traffic into leads with the right landing page or offer.
But web leads don’t translate to instant revenue; instead, most businesses collect web leads and then pass them off to a sales staff, whose job is to evaluate those leads and “close” them, ultimately resulting in a sale.
In this way, closing is the “missing piece” of the puzzle—it’s often a separate, off-line component from the online marketing strategy. So what can you do if your marketing strategy is sending plenty of leads to your sales team, but you aren’t seeing a good enough close ratio to justify your efforts?
Step 1: Fix the funnel
The first step is to fix the “funnel” you use to get leads, because it might be out of sync with the rest of your strategy. I assume you have a specific target audience you’re trying to convert: a specific target demographic and a certain condition (e.g., you might target middle-aged homeowners who are looking for a new furnace). If you don’t already have a target audience in mind, this is the time to do your market research and identify one.
Your sales funnel should involve several steps, each of which narrows down your potential audience a little further. For example, you might post content specific to homeowners on social media, attracting homeowners to your brand. Once they get to your website or follow you on social media, you might have a landing page that attracts people looking for more information about furnaces.
Your first action in improving your close ratios should be “fixing” this funnel, which could include adding more steps (so your audience becomes more specific), or readjusting your funnel so you start targeting the “right” audience. The better your leads are, the better your chances at closing them will be.
Step 2: Get more information
You can also improve the quality of your leads by getting more information from them. The more information you have, the better you can target leads in your conversations (and the more persuasive your salespeople can be).
Requesting additional information may cost you some conversions, but if your conversion rate is high enough so that your main problem is closing leads, you can probably afford the loss. Make sure you get the following:
- Contact info. Get multiple categories of contact information. If your leads have come from the web, chances are good they prefer digital communication, but don’t automatically assume that. Try to contact your leads in multiple ways, to ensure successful contact at some point.
- Type of interest. Why are they contacting you? Drop-down menus are common here, but no matter what, you should get some gauge of why someone is interested in your brand.
- Place of business. If you’re running a B2B operation, see if you can get the name of the lead’s company. This will allow your sales staff to do some quick background research before engaging.
- Extra details. Leave an extra (optional) field for your leads to fill in more information about what they’re looking for. The more they give you, the better.
Step 3: Optimize your initial response times
Once you have started collecting the information you need, work on optimizing your response times. When completing a form, your leads should see a message that lets them know what to expect; for example, you can tell them they can expect a response within an hour. However, you should seek to exceed that goal. According to at least one study, you’ll get 10 times as many successful closes if you respond within the first five minutes of a form submission, compared to within an hour or later.
Step 4: Be persistent
Next, make sure your sales staff is persistent. You don’t want to be annoying, but one moment of contact isn’t usually enough to engage someone in a conversation and work them closer to a close. Shoot to make five or six touches before giving up. I like to use Boomerang for Gmail to remind me to follow up with leads if they haven’t responded after a certain amount of time.
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Step 5: Consider your offer
If you’re having trouble closing across the board, consider the strength of your offer: if your prices are too high or if your service packages are unappealing, it won’t matter how good your leads are. For this step, you’ll need to work across multiple departments and do a comparative audit of your offers; make sure to look at your closest competition.
Step 6: Fix the script
Even skilled salespeople need to have some go-to scripts to handle objections or move the conversation closer to an actual close. If you’re having lots of trouble getting those closes, you’ll need to optimize those scripts further with experimentation and ongoing testing.
You can also use a tool like Intercom to automatically send a series of emails to new leads to onboard them or help steer them toward a conversion. What I love about Intercom is its ability to A/B test each email in the series, so you can continually optimize your funnel.
Step 7: Get feedback
Finally, if you’ve implemented all these steps and you’re still not able to get the close ratio you want, try getting feedback from some of the people you weren’t able to reach. Were you too pushy over the phone? Were your prices too high? Were they ever interested in the first place? Anything you learn can help you improve your efforts. You also can use MailChimp or Typeform to conduct automatic surveys on leads to find out valuable information.
Fortunately, the closing process can be optimized like any other link in your sales and marketing chain. Take a close look at your current process, step-by-step, and make sure everything’s in its right place and optimized for both your specific industry and your specific demographics.
If you’re still having trouble getting a decent close ratio after applying all these steps, you may need to consider targeting a different audience, or making some changes to your sales process overall. Don’t stop experimenting until you find a solution that works.
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