Tag: what is CRM

Does your organization have a solid process in place to get your leads qualified so that your sales teams find time to focus on the most sales-ready prospects in their CRM software?

Do you have any idea about how your sales reps are qualifying and thereafter converting those leads into customers?

Lead conversion skills are the heart of revenue growth and expansion in any organization.
Therefore, here are a few best practices that can help you increase your lead conversion ratio and grow your business to new heights in 2019.

Are you a business leader poised to take your company to the next level, and looking for a software platform that can help you do that?

If so, ConvergeHub is for you!

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1. Publish awesome and informative blogs

We all acknowledge that the stage for converting leads comes at the very end of the sales cycle. However, to persuade the leads to get to that point, whereby they become interested enough to procure your offerings- you primarily need to build up trust.
Leads and prospective customers cherish to see you as a subject matter expert and an authority in your arena and feel that you can be trusted to support them and ensure their growth and satisfaction using your offering(s).

According to Forbes, blogging is a great way to building that trust:

The fact is that in the world of today you cannot become an authority simply by declaring yourself as one. Customers are more suspicious, and they want to see you prove it. By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure that you can become that authority.

Prospects and leads are more likely to engage with brands and organizations once you can establish yourself as an indisputable authority in their minds, leading to more lead conversion rates.

2. Integrate your CRM with a marketing automation platform

A majority of sales reps today use easy to use CRM software solutions to move leads and prospective opportunities through the sales pipeline and close deals.
If you know what is CRM software, you must be aware that CRM is a robust application that stores a plethora of information about all your leads, and customers in the CRM database, which includes details like demographic and behavioral data.

Therefore, when you use marketing automation, which is also known as sales force automation in tandem with your easy to use CRM , you can without any hassles leverage that contact details to customize and target the messages that you need to send to your prospects.

Using Salesforce Alternative CRM software like ConvergeHub and others, you can personalize your lead nurturing process and send messages based on your prospects’ past buying behaviors, interests, and more.

Since, doing this allows you to send more personalized outreach. Which in turn helps in better engaging prospects that enhances the likelihood of conversion.

3. Set up lead scoring to qualify leads

Lead scoring techniques help your marketing teams to identify the most sales-ready leads in your CRM database.

While scoring leads, you can use a point system that indicates the value a lead represents, by awarding points to leads for actions they take, like clicking or opening emails, visiting your website, downloading eBooks, participating in post-sales surveys, etc.
You can also award points to your leads for demographic data such as the place they reside, their job titles, the industry they work, etc.

As these scores accumulate over time, you set a score threshold, at which a lead may be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead), which once they cross can be passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Remember, while you are setting up your lead scoring system, always include your sales teams in the process, since they can better decide along with your marketing teams, which action warrants which score, and at which a new lead can be considered as an MQL.

Moreover, it is also highly advisable that you must check your lead scoring practice at least once every quarter, for finding whether the leads are being qualified too soon or too late in the process. Since, if your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to your sales teams, but very few of them are getting converted, odds are that your marketing executives are qualifying the leads too soon, and hence you must increase your MQL threshold to fine tune your lead scoring process.

Simply put lead scoring improves the quality of your leads in your easy to use CRM, which helps in achieving a better conversion rate for your organization.

4. Run lead nurturing and lead generation campaigns

It is a common fact, that to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. There are several ways you can generate new leads, from email drip campaigning to social media programs.

Now, once you have generated new leads, you need to nurture them through the sales pipeline that must consist of a series of ‘touch points’ to move them towards a sale.

Lead nurturing aids in identifying sale ready leads using lead scoring, since each action your leads take can be scored to move the leads closer to conversion.

As an add-on, here is a link to the CONVERGEHUB LEAD GENERATOR, which is a free tool that lets you visit anyone’s social media page (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp etc.) and capture all information instantly without any manual typing.

Using this free tool you can save qualified leads from social media, other sites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse. It even lets you create notes and follow up tasks to get a head start with that lead.

You can save the captured leads in the Lead Generator itself or save them in the ConvergeHub CRM for even more sales power.

5. Set up killer landing pages with optimized CTA buttons

As the leads move through your sales pipeline, you need ways to capture more of their information by increasing their engagement with your brand.

One of the most effective ways to do this is to create simple, yet attractive landing pages that will encourage your leads to take a desired action, like request a demo, register for a webinar, etc.

Make it painfully clear to your leads, and visitors viewing your landing page, which action you want them to take, how they can take it, and most importantly what will they receive in exchange.

If you are not sure how to create awesome landing pages, it is best to check out some examples from your competitor’s websites.

6. Share on social media and use social monitoring to find brand advocates

It is easy to engage your known leads with multichannel campaigns and email marketing.
However, what can you do about those leads whose contact data you do not have in your CRM database?

Therefore, when you create blogs and other types of contents around your brand, share them on social media, so that people may share it, which in turn will extend the reach of your brand and drive in more new leads to click through to your blog or website.

Since, once people do that, you will understand that the engagement has begun, as these will be leads that are genuinely interested in your offerings, and are so easier to qualify and convert into customers.

Remember to always include some type of offer in association with your contents that you are sharing to capture the contacts of these new leads.

While sharing your contents in social media platforms, if you find people speaking positively about your brand, reach out, start a dialogue, and show your appreciation. You may even ask them if they want to feature in an interview or a case study of your brand.

In other words, treat these people with care and respect in any possible ways, because they are potential brand advocates for your business, who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and also help to increase conversion rates.

Here are two statistics that illustrates the role that brand advocate can play for the growing your business.

• 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)
• Only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)

7. Enable sales to quickly follow up on qualified leads

According to a survey done by InsideSales, it states that:

Your odds of reaching a new sales lead drop over 10 times if you wait longer than the first hour of shown interest, and the odds of [sales] qualifying that lead decrease six times after the first 60 minutes.

Therefore, you need to enable your sales teams for immediate follow up, once a lead is qualified, since the longer you wait to reach out to a qualified lead, the lesser the chances of conversion will be along with the passage of time.

Using a Best small business CRM software like ConvergeHub, which is capable of creating reminders and automating tasks it is easy to send alerts to sales reps the moment a new lead becomes qualified, to ensure that your sales teams do not let MQLs fall through the crack.

Key Takeaway

Lead conversion is the bread and butter of your business since it is a process that allows your business to grow, by bringing dollars into the coffers in your organization.

Nevertheless, as you can see, lead conversion does not happen on its own, as it requires serious planning and execution of various tactics to increase the lead conversion rate.

Therefore, always measure your lead conversion ratio, by keeping a scorecard that can help you track this metric so that you can easily identify what is working and what is not, and let you fix the nonperforming issues and focus more energy on conversion tactics that are producing results.

The math is simple. When you increase engagement levels, you boost conversion rates, and revenue climbs.

Do you have any tips for increasing your lead conversion rate? Let us know in the comments section below!