Whether you have a small or large segment of cold contacts, you can be sure that you’re leaving a lot of potential revenue on the table. Once you’ve tried-and-tested marketing strategies to gain new contacts, you also need to take action in order to convert these contacts into qualified leads.
From the point of your business bottom line, new contacts are only valuable if you can convert them into paying customers, so it’s crucial that you get this part of your marketing and sales process right.
Here are some tips that will help you convert your contacts into qualified leads.
Act now
Your contacts don’t like it if you keep them waiting. When you delay reaching out to your contacts, they will quickly lose interest, and worse, they might even jump aboard your competitor’s ship instead.
Having a good CRM can help you in keeping track of your contacts so that their interest won’t end up forgotten and abandoned. If you’d rather stick using the simple email system to manage new subscribers collected through your website, you can try directing messages from these contacts into a priority inbox instead of the general primary inbox so that they can be attended to ASAP.
Structuring your sales team
There are two crucial tasks your sales team has to do:
- Relationship management with existing customers
- Covering new contacts
These aren’t easy feats to do, so to make it easier for your sales team to balance these two tasks, you may find it helpful to create two sub-teams. One focuses on acquiring new customers while the other one handles existing customer relationships.
Another way that you can handle this is by dividing your team according to the different industries in order that each sales rep gets to handle specifics, which in turn makes it much easier to handle.
Following up
It isn’t uncommon for contacts not to respond right away after you reach out to them. This doesn’t mean that you simply wait for them to get back to you. Take the initiative and try calling them another time or send another email. The possibility of them just being busy is a valid option. You should also try to increase your connections with leads as much as possible. For instance, during a sales call, you can simply ask them if you could add them to your mailing list as a means of keeping in touch with them.
Data to understand conversion process
Data can give you a great understanding of how well your process for converting online leads are performing. Use analytics software to create dashboards that show how many leads are entering your CRM system at each stage of the sales funnel and how many of them are eventually going to convert into sales qualified leads.
When your data is clearly presented on your dashboard, you’ll easily see which parts of your sales funnel are leading leads. This will allow you to focus your attention on reaching out to leads who are more likely to convert.
It’s important to remember that your data is an integral part of your regular sales meetings to give every member of the team an overview of what the current situation is and allowing them to suggest ideas to convert leads from a particular part of your sales funnel.
Conclusion
By efficiently structuring your sales team and carefully using data, you can improve your conversion rate for online leads. The only word of caution I’ll leave you with is to always remember to turn your focus around and away from the product or service approach and direct it to a problem-solving approach instead.
Finally, keep in mind that your responses should both be rapid and appropriate for your lead’s position in the sales funnel in order to be successful.
