The 6 Fundamentals of Turning Leads into Customers
The 6 Fundamentals of Turning Leads into Customers
Turning leads into customers is one of the most important parts of your entire growth marketing strategy. If not the most important. Whether you are just beginning to refine your sales strategy, or whether you are examining your process now, these are the 6 absolutely essential fundamentals that we have found, time and time again, to improve your conversion rate with very little effort.
1. Effectively use a customer relationship system (CRM)
CRM systems, at the very, very core – enable you to capture, manage and measure the conversations you are having with your leads. The physical act of codifying conversations and lead numbers not only supports you to never forget opportunities amongst the chaos of day-to-day business, but it allows others to jump in and help and creates tracking that you can use to measure your ROI. If introducing a CRM software system feels like a big jump, use a spreadsheet for not. Anything is better than emails and phone calls alone.
2. Add value for free
A simple, powerful tool to converting leads to customers is to offer some kind of non-monetary value along their journey to buying a product. This could be something as simple as a link to an interesting article, a meal, a PDF etc. Something that will add value to their life right now will engage their need to reciprocate and put you in a great position when you do ask for that sale.
3. Don’t be a hero
Every single conversation you have along the journey from leads to customers needs to be about the problems and the desires of the lead in question. They are the hero – you are their biggest fan – and your only purpose is to help them solve their problems and achieve success. If you have to talk about yourself, talk in the context of how your experience helps them.
4. Follow up all leads.
This one is a really simple one but you’d be surprised how quickly you will disappear in the minds of your potential customers if you never follow up. Create and test a cadence for follow up to establish some consistent rules for your business, and never forget to do it. Combining point 4 (adding value for free) with this point can often make it a lot easier to get in touch with leads.
5. Set and communicate clear goals
Whether you are a business owner doing all the sales work yourself, or you have a team of people converting leads to customers, setting and communicating clear goals for the month (the week or the quarter) is important to understanding how you are performing and where you can work on the process. Although you will always be dealing with external factors, there are many different techniques that can be employed within your sales process that could potentially make an incredible difference to your results.
6. Create consistency
Consistency will also support your business to scale up, down, across countries or even through franchises without any loss of performance.
Once you have achieved these 6 fundamentals it is likely your sales process would have improved significantly. Beyond this, you can start exploring ways of improving it using modern psychological principles or technology. Making these changes permanent takes time and effort but never forget the risk of doing nothing at all.
Amy Miocevich, author of The Very Good Marketing Guide (Wiley $29.95), is a sought-after marketing expert and founder of Lumos Marketing. Amy has over a decade of experience working with hundreds of Australian small-and medium-sized enterprises and helped them generate hundreds of thousands of dollars of additional revenue. Find out how to do the same at https://verygoodmarketing.com.au/
Tags: selling acquisition small business entrepreneurs coaching
