How to improve lead conversions is a question that most sales and marketing professionals think about often. You are spending money to drive leads and improving your lead conversion rates will build more pipeline and lead to increasing revenue.
First, do you know what your lead conversion rate is? What is the conversion rate by sales rep, by lead source? I bet most reading this cannot answer those questions, this is the first problem. How can you improve anything that you don’t know current performance levels? How would you track improvement? How big is your lead conversion problem?
The old adage “inspect what you expect” is incredibly important in sales.
Many Sales Reps Suck At Lead Follow Up
I dont intend to offend anyone, after all I am in sales too. The proof is in the numbers.
Do sales professionals intentionally ignore leads? Maybe in some cases but I don’t believe that professionals who have a large portion of their income based on performance intentionally ignore lead follow up. So why are the numbers so dismal?
Sales professionals are as busy as everyone else today. When sales reps have 50, 100 or more leads to follow up on and X hours in the day, they tend to focus on leads that are active and engaged.
The problem with this approach is that less than 50% of new leads are ready to buy when they first contact your company. Let’s do the math, out of 100 leads, 50 are ready to buy. 25 will get qualified, now your close rate comes into play. Do you know your close rate on new leads? If not that’s a problem as well. Lets say your close rate is 50% (a good rate of qualified leads to revenue) out of 100 leads you are now down to 12-13 leads.
If you had a solid lead followup and marketing nurture process, the research shows that you have a 70% greater chance at turning those 50 not ready to buy leads into revenue. One of the easiest ways to increase revenue is to simply convert more leads that you already have to revenue.
The Solution
The problems identified above can largely be traced to one cause – not having a sales tool like Power-CRM.
If you were using Power-CRM:
- You would know your sales metrics and KPI’s – Power-CRM automatically tracks over 30 sales performance statistics (lead conversion rates, average response times on new leads, close rates etc)
- Lead conversions would improve – Power-CRM comes with a complete, out-of-box, best-practice lead/prospect management process that will assure every lead is properly followed up by sales
Power-CRM Lead/Prospect Process Demo
Lead Follow Up Infographic
