A sales lead is a prospective consumer of a product or service that is created when an individual or business shows interest and provides his or her contact information.
A sales lead is a very foundation of any business. Whether your business thrive or fail miserably depends on how well you can generate leads and handle them.
Having an Official Website is Not Enough……
Often business owners think that by having a kick-ass marketing team or a meticulously designed website will get them incessant leads to survive in the market. However, as a matter of fact, having an official website is not enough.
And the fact is…..
The average conversion rate is 1% on any website and the top 25% websites have conversion rate of around 5%. To put it on layman terms, you can say on an average out of 100 only 1 visitor on your website can provide you contact details and gives you a countable lead. But, again not all leads are real customers, as defined above leads are just a prospective consumer which may or may not take your service at all.
A general sales cycle goes through the following process:
Visitors -> Leads -> Opportunity -> Conversion
Visitors turn to leads (around 1-5%) and then leads turn to opportunity when you start the process of negotiating deals, offer quotations or start any kind of communication with the leads. Once the deal is closed with the opportunity then only you can say that you have a conversion.
So, one of the hardest part of the whole process is getting leads and this is where marketing department of any organisation has a major role to play.. Generating leads for your business is the most expensive part of any business process and takes two important resources: time and money.
Generate traffic for your website
Traffic on your website is the first and foremost need to generate leads from your website. Google Adwords or other PPC platforms are considered to be great ways to to get hits on your website. Apart from that, you can also try affiliate marketing, offline mediums like newspapers (if your budget allows, as this medium could be very expensive). SEO and content marketing are very effective ways of generating traffic on your website but with them you need patience as they require long-term planning.
Never pay to the sites, which claim to bring traffic to your website. Generally, these sites use automatic bots to show you real traffic.
Another good way to generate traffic for your website and build brand is through social media, which includes but not limited to the Facebook Ads, Twitter Ads and Instagram ads. They are affordable, easy to use and you can start using them instantly if you have a credit card.
Converting traffic to leads
Easier part is done. Now you have to convert this traffic into leads, which you can forward to your sales team. Leads are hard to come by, why? Because not all the traffic you are generating is interested in your product. Some people visit your website just for curiosity and some just misread your ad.
Since the average timespan of a hit on the website is only 30 seconds people tend to leave your website if they do not find the things, which they are looking for in one or two clicks. So there are chances that even if you have the right content for your visitors, they do not get it and leave your website which means you incur a loss if you have paid for the traffic as visitors do not leave their contact details and hence cannot be captured.
A very common practice among the web developers is to build a landing page (Landing page is a special page that is built for your incoming traffic. This page is very specific and generally contains a contact us form and a special deal) for the incoming traffic. This strategy is only good when you know that all your incoming traffic will land only on this page or when you are using PPC campaigns or affiliate marketing but in case of content marketing or SEO, you never know on, which page your visitors will land.
So, for the best results you need to convert all your pages into landing page but this doesn’t make sense if you are offering multiple products and content marketing along with SEO is your action plan.
The Solution
There is no simple solution, which can just copy-paste but there are few tips you can implement to convert more leads on your website.
Tip #1: Make all your pages landing page
Use tools, which can help you capture leads from any page not just from the landing page with a contact form. You should allow your visitors to contact you from any page of your website.
Tip #2: Offer best deals sitewide
You have planned everything. You are running promotions for new customers but are they able to find your promotion from where they landed on your website? If your visitor is not able to find the right deal in a single click then you lose 90% chance of getting them converted.
Tip #3: Less options more conversions
Do not bombard your customer with lot of options. Lesser the questions, better the conversions.
Tip #4: Offer something in return
Offer them some reward to fill your contact from. In one of our websites, we offer 10% discount for sending queries. So, even if they leave our cart mid way, we know where to contact.
Tip #5: Put a wall on your action links
Hyperlinks are used to allow movement from one page to another but it may also mean a lost lead. For example if a customer landed on your homepage and after looking at it he wants to check the pricing then there are chances that after checking the price he may leave your website if he doesn’t find it within his budget. To overcome this issue, you can put a wall around the link so that customer has to fill in his details before moving to pricing page.
For example on our website http://ziffy.in when you click on action button on the home page it will ask your details. Once you fill the details, you will be transferred to the pricing page.
Tip #6: Target leave intent of the customer
You offered everything, which you can offer on your website but still the user didn’t like the product or service or the pricing and decided to leave the site. You should target this particular moment to offer something, which you have never offered to that customer on your website in lieu of their contact details. For a live example you can visit http://ziffy.in and once the page is loaded try to change the website url to something else.
Proper lead distribution
Getting leads is just half the task done. You don’t want to lose your prospects just because you could not reply to the customer on time or you missed the lead because you don’t have enough space on email account. Customers expect an immediate response. They don’t want to wait for hours or days just to get a reply of their query. Therefore it is very important to distribute the leads to proper person and in correct geography if you have offices in multiple locations.
Use CRM
It sounds boring but it isn’t. Get a good CRM and integrate that with your user engagement tools so that every lead captured can be automatically pushed to your CRM.
With the help of a good CRM tool you can manage the complete life cycle of the sales process. Ask your sales & marketing team to properly fill the customer’s details on it, their follow ups etc.
MIS generated through a good CRM can tell you at any point of time how much business you are expecting, your marketing RoI and most importantly how your sales team is performing.
Follow Ups
Taking multiple follow ups is tedious. But, closing deals is not possible without them. Henceforth, automating the process is the right solution. Like in scrap.me you can configure specific time-interval after, which follow ups mails will be sent to the lead.
