Converting Leads into Customers: 3 Practical Tips

Every business needs to sell. Regardless of its size, the sales team keeps the gears turning. But closing deals is not a matter of luck. It is about perfecting your sales process. To increase your chances of winning these valuable contracts, one of the main strategies is to make your team focus heavily on converting leads into customers.

For those who are not aware, leads are potential buyers. In other words, it is a person who has indicated an interest in your product or service in some way. Your company needs to be in constant contact with warm leads to show value and persuade them to buy your solution. This relationship can be established passively through digital media (such as your website, blog, and social networks posts), and/or actively (through cold calling, cold mailing, marketing ads, and active prospecting on LinkedIn).

Keeping track of the conversion rates on each of the pipeline stages will bring visibility to which of these efforts needs attention to engage the leads and make your pipeline convert like crazy.

To help you in this journey, here are 3 great tips to effectively prepare your salespeople to guide your lead into a customer.

1. Define your ICP — Ideal Customer Profile

Do you know what an Ideal Customer Profile is? With a self-explanatory name, it is all the requirements a qualified lead should have to be determined as an ideal prospect to your business. These potential customers usually:

● Make purchases with a higher average ticket
● Stay with your company longer
● Take better advantage of your solution
● Bring the best ROI to your business

To find out who your company’s ideal customers are, define your buyer persona or simply look at your sales database and analyze the best deals made so far. Take note of the following items: market maturity, geography, company size, industry, and budget. You can also collect these answers through a quick interview with these companies.

You can look at other aspects of these good-fit potential buyers, such as “who makes the purchasing decision,” “what their major pain points are,” and “why they continue to use your solution.”

Once you discover the type of company that is high-performing, just go for it. If you try to sell to everyone, you will spend time and money with leads that probably will not give you any return. Use data validation to make sure you’re focusing on your ICP. This is especially important when considering that for every $92 spent acquiring new customers, only $1 is spent converting them.

With an accurate ICP, it is much easier to direct sales efforts and consequently increase the conversion rates of leads into customers.

2. Align Sales and Marketing teams

Among various tasks, your marketing and sales teams have the same goal of driving revenue, so it is crucial to keep them in sync. However, it is not common for organizations to place both areas under the same management.

The result is there are many conflicts. 25% of businesses describe their sales and marketing as either “misaligned” or “rarely aligned.” Marketing usually complains that sales fail to convert the leads generated and sales defend themselves by saying that potential customers either don’t arrive or are not, in fact, good opportunities. This scenario is unfavorable for the entire company.

If this is your case, there are ways to unite both processes to reach leads that can be more likely to close a deal. These 3 following different points have the goal to improve the communication between the teams:

● Clearly define the KPIs
● Hold regular meetings together
● Provide the same tools

First of all, if they don’t have a clear and equal definition of what each of their KPIs represents — such as marketing qualified leads (MQL) and sales qualified leads (SQL), it is not possible to combine forces and maximize success.

Also, it doesn’t make sense to have a marketing team that generates leads without sales’ feedback about what is a good prospect (as we mentioned in the first topic).

Secondly, both teams need to talk, at least weekly, to align the results of the efforts applied and what they need to improve. We recommend at least two weekly meetings. One at the beginning of the week — where the managers present their goals and actions for the next few days. And one at the end of the week — where a review should be made and the results of these efforts are presented to discuss points of improvement.

Finally, using the same tool helps to establish a global knowledge of the activities that are made in the two areas. There is a variety of software available to help businesses stay organized and efficient with following up on customers and prospects. Companies often use a customer relationship management system or CRM that makes it possible for those involved to keep all the data updated. The characteristics of potential customers will be stored on the platform, allowing access in a practical and fast way. As relevant data are registered, a CRM gives more power and unity in the decision-making process.

Following this routine makes it more likely that in a short time both areas will be well-aligned, and consequently, the conversion of leads into customers will increase.

3. Boost your follow-up strategy

A follow-up sales strategy is crucial for any negotiation. After all, it is in the follow-up process where the lead will establish a relationship with your company.

And because it is such an important part of your sales process, you need to pay special attention to this activity. However, 90% of sales reps give up on the third attempt of contact.

Research has shown that only 2% of leads close after the first contact. In fact, 80% of sales take about 5 contacts to happen, but only 10% of salespeople perform the entire process of following up.

It means that, by giving up on the first few unanswered attempts, your company may be missing out on closing a lot of good deals.

Therefore, a well-structured sales cadence can turn your pipeline into a lead qualification machine and helps you reach more opportunities.

​​The Wrap

Measuring conversion rates is critical to knowing the right time to approach your contacts and turn them into hot leads. In your pipeline, you’ll discover where your leads are stagnant and when is the best time to conduct this contact to the final stage. This process relies on the attention and commitment of the teams involved, with the help of the best resources available.

And remember: there’s no point investing in lead capture if your subsequent strategies don’t encourage conversion into sales.

Pay attention to the steps mentioned in this article and achieve an exponential deal conversion rate.

Author Bio: Brenda Linhares is the CMO at Insight Sales — a user-friendly software that enables companies of all sizes to track Key Performance Indicators, Metrics, and Business Data.