10 Ways to Improve Your Conversion Rate

By Jay Bower, President of Crossbow Group

Ok, you got your prospect to raise his hand. Now comes the hard part: turning him into a customer. Here are 10 ways to address the challenge in the age of accountability.

1. Acknowledge leads instantaneously and personally. In the age of the nanosecond and Instant Messaging, if you wait even days to follow up a lead, forget about it. Swiftness counts when you’re in a competitive situation. And make sure your “Thanks for your interest” has a real person’s name on it – people buy from other people more readily than they buy from corporations.


2. Let your lead generation programs do more qualifying of prospects. First, the more you target your audience, the more qualified your leads will be, and the higher your conversion rates. The kind of offer you make is a qualifier in itself. If you make it too good, you’ll attract prospects that will never convert. White Papers (and other “editorial” incentives) usually generate the right kind of response. You can ask certain questions of new prospects to qualify them without turning off the lead faucet.


3. Develop segment- and offer-specific landing pages. If you segment your lead generation advertising, carrying that segmentation through to the landing page will improve conversion results dramatically. Using the landing page to remind CFOs of the particular advantage of your service to them, to acknowledge the offer again in specific terms, and to point the way to the most relevant pages on your web site harnesses the personalization power of technology.


4. Deliver more than prospects expect to receive. The way you handle leads – from generating them, through nurturing, to conversion – tells prospects how they can expect to be treated as customers. Go overboard, especially for your best prospects. Courier material instead of putting it into the mail. Add an extra (but relevant) White Paper they didn’t request. Give them a particular insight about their industry or about a competitor.


5. Engage in a lot of testing. Most testing in lead programs involves the first step – getting people to respond. But testing after they respond can have as big an impact on the success of your program. You will want to look at the communication channels – mail, email, and phone – and when to use each. Offers for taking the next step should be evaluated. You can even look at testing how many “next steps” there should be.


6. Increase your product’s or service’s relevance as the conversion process unfolds. Even if you segment your lead generation efforts, at the beginning of the process you often have to treat prospects en masse. It is only when you begin to learn about the prospect’s unique needs that you can begin tailoring lead nurturing and moving toward a one-to-one relationship. As you discover new information about prospects, communicate additional ways your product or service is relevant.


7. Align systems and inform personnel. Make sure your phone reps and sales people know how leads come in, where they’re housed, how they’re scored and how to use CRM and/or SFM systems like Salesforce.com and Siebel. Let your entire organization know your historical conversation rates and current expectations. Get senior sales and marketing management to buy into new target.


8. Develop a lead scoring system and marketing communications streams consistent with opportunity potential and sales coverage. Not all leads are equal in value. If you model or profile how certain prospect segments converted to customers in the past, you can apply this model to current leads. “A” prospects may get six conversion efforts, including two high impact direct mail packages and two phone calls; “C” prospects might get only one or two efforts executed at minimal cost and maybe even through “Autorespond” technology. By focusing on best prospects, conversion rates will rise.


9. Invest as much in conversion creative as you do for lead generation. You’ve spent a lot of money to get the horse to water. Make sure your creative persuades them to drink. Generating leads requires less persuasion than converting them because you can employ powerful offers to get prospects to raise their hands.


10. Provide short questionnaires to determine leads’ BANT (Budget, Authority, Need and Timing) score. As prospects become more trusting and more invested in the sales process, they are more willing to answer questions and provide information. Based on the answers, build follow-on communications consistent with their level of interest.

One last thing to consider: using an outside resource with expertise in your market or with your specific need. Your costs may increase short term, but I’d bet your cost per sale will decrease significantly if you’ve chosen well.

Jay has broad strategic and implementation experience in relationship/continuity marketing and e-commerce. He's led strategic and tactical engagements with over 250 companies ranging from Fortune 500 multinationals to start-ups. He has been quoted in USA Today, Fortune, and BusinessWeek. Jay is a published author, having co-written The Official Guide to One-Write Plus (Amazon sales rank 2,362,943!) He has a B.A. in Philosophy from Colgate University, an M.B.A. from The Stern School of Business, NYU, and completed the e-B2B Program at Harvard Business School. Jay can be contacted at jbower@crossbowgroup.com or 203-222-1645.

Tap Into Inbound Inquiries To Insure Relevance Of Outbound Campaigns

We all know that things have changed -- buyers, not companies, are in charge and marketers are on the hook to play to customers' terms. And the terms that customers dictate require marketers to be prepared for being helpful with inbound inquiries to satisfy and persuade their prospects. That requires not only things like online search engine marketing to be found when customers are looking. It also requires multichannel customer analytics and intelligent systems to present the next best (i.e. relevant) offers on the spot while customers are inquiring by phone or still browsing the web site.

For example, within two weeks of moving to California, my family and I made a plethora of purchases to make ourselves at home. Yet, in our case, the telemarketers that were haunting our new phone number as soon as it got connected missed out on the opportunity of selling to us. From the moment when our Internet connection became live, we went researching online to make our buying decisions. At that point, the dialog was in our hands and any ads that we saw were relevant to our search and we were likely to click on them. As long as we believed that it was our own idea to do so, we were highly motivated, for example, to examine car financing options.

Although buyers are not listening when you talk, they have become more information hungry than ever in their research for buying decisions. This constitutes a great opportunity for those marketers who know how to be at the ready with the right information at the right time.

Another interesting shift is that while markets are increasingly concerned with their multi-channel strategies (as they should be), they also need to be aware that buyers do not think in terms of channel, rather the convenient way of accomplishing our goal. After all the product research my family did online during our shopping spree, we left most websites without completing a purchase.

For example, after narrowing down our choice of car make and model, the exact car and financing option that we picked was still sold to us the old-fashioned way—namely offline, and by a friendly sales person at the dealership. Of course, the opposite happened too. When we found products of interest in stores, we used comparison-shopping engines to find better prices online.

Marketers should take advantage of all inbound interactions to deliver the best offer, rather than just outbound messaging. If an offer doesn't work, they should have that next best (i.e. relevant) offer ready to present, regardless of which channel the interaction came through. And, most of all, because the buyer is in charge, marketers not only should, but need to focus on being helpful, not just on selling.


Akin Arikan is director of internet marketing at Unica Corp. and author of the recently published book, "Multichannel Marketing: Metrics and Methods for On and Offline Success."

M2O: Matching Market & Media To The Right Offer Accelerates The Pipeline

By Dan McDade, President, PointClear

Ah, Saturday. An early game of tennis, some family time, maybe a power nap with the fragrant promise of the choice T-bone you’ve been waiting to grill tempting you onward through the day. Sun starts to sink, you saunter out to pre-heat the gas grill to searing readiness. Turning the knob, you get…nothing. The bolt especially designed to secure the fuel line has vanished.

You vaguely recall tossing the extra one provided by the manufacturer into an overflowing box of miscellaneous fasteners you keep in the basement. Unearthing it, you are faced with at least 158 shiny, seemingly identical bolts – but only one will work. It’s getting dark, you’re getting hungry, and the longed-for explosion of chargrilled beef taste is slipping further away, buried in 157 indistinguishable bits of metal that aren’t quite right.

Now you know how your sales team feels.

The very best of them are unwaveringly focused on the end result. They visualize that steak, they hunger to sink their teeth into as big a bite as they possibly can, they know just how high the heat should be, just when to grab the meat off the grate and slap it down on the plate, sizzling and perfect. If you give them one bolt, or even three or four, they’ll test them and turn them, find the one that works, hook up that gas and turn up the flames.

If you give them 158, they’ll throw out the box and start looking around for another way to cook.

This is exactly what happens with typical lead generation. Even in an eroded U.S. economy that makes finding juicy deals harder and harder, about 94 percent of generated leads are not pursued by internal sales organizations. Pared-down sales organizations, reduced to their best performers and eager to close, are frustrated by the very thing that marketers are rewarded for: a mountain of leads. Rather than sort through a motley group of prospects – some not qualified, others not sales ready – they abandon all but the most obvious and substitute their own, usually less successful, prospecting.

Lead Generation Becomes Lead Honing
With most companies being forced to do more with fewer resources, figuring out which leads will cut to the chase fastest becomes someone else’s problem. Marketing has done its job in initiating interest, sales converts the most interested to revenue, but who takes the existing market curiosity, sharpens it by exposing underlying pressure points, whets interest over repeated contact and files away the unqualified prospects to point sales to the most potent opportunities? A trusted prospecting partner who understands the market, the way to approach it and the messages that resonate most with prospective customers across the spectrum of purchase-readiness.

We use a discipline called M2O – Market, Media and Offer –to pinpoint a client’s best prospects, build familiarity with their organization and need and use that intelligence to craft messaging that directly targets their state of readiness. Those simple, sound practices often get lost between a large-scale marketing campaign and the immediate pressure to close in a sales pitch. But they are key to reaping the most revenue from both efforts.

Market? What Market?
Many marketers, reluctant to miss any avenue of opportunity, define their target as broadly as possible and in so doing miss the chance to convincingly address the most potent prospects. A typical example is a company that perceives its target market to be the Fortune 500, when the most likely purchasers are actually a much smaller audience within that group. Companies that are quicker to see the value proposition of a client’s product, whether due to immediate business pains or because they are looking to enhance their own capabilities, are readier to respond at higher levels than others, so it makes sense to identify those segments and market to them specifically. Others, though still qualified, may be more hesitant and require different touch strategies and messaging before their sales potential can mature. They are still good sources of revenue, though, and if left behind in the rush to close will most likely end up directing that revenue to a competitor. Recognizing and nurturing their potential is crucial to pipeline development, future revenue and market share.

By applying market intelligence and finely-defined segmentation strategies, we have been successful in increasing sales performance while actually reducing marketing costs.

Reaching Out – The Right Way
Marketing campaigns can establish brand image without the prospect sensing a direct touch from the marketer. Sales calls can be insistent enough to irritate. Good lead honing falls somewhere between the two – enough contact to engage but enough space to respect the demands on a busy prospect.

The trick is knowing how to balance the contacts between both timing and type of outreach. Mixed media programs that use a combination of quality outbound calls, voicemail messages, email and direct mail, optimally scheduled for greatest effect, are the most effective use of marketing dollars. Every day, a large percentage of leads are abandoned by sales simply because the prospect did not respond to a few, single channel contact attempts. Sales people generally do not have the time or patience to make the multiple touches, which can run from as few as eight to as many as thirty, to identify, qualify and nurture prospects to a point of sales-readiness. Even immediate-need opportunities can take as many as a dozen attempts by sales to become effectively engaged.

A multi-touch strategy also allows the prospect to be contacted in his or her preferred manner. Most busy decision-makers are not willing or able to arbitrarily pre-empt their business day to respond to a telephone sales contact, but can reply to an email or voicemail at their convenience and schedule a time for follow up. Some prefer the anonymity of email, others are more comfortable with the personal appeal of voicemail. A combination, properly timed and executed, opens all channels of communication and thereby opens opportunities.

What Can You Say to Convince the Prospect?
As little as possible. Effective salespeople know that good prospects sell themselves by talking about their particular business challenges, opportunities on the horizon, and emerging issues that will affect business goals. Asking the right questions and then listening carefully to direct further discussion uncovers pain points that are most likely to motivate purchase. When the prospect’s needs are understood and can be matched to the benefits of a client’s product, the sales nurturing process is leap-frogged ahead. Testing messages and offers such as guarantees, discounts and extended financing within market sub-sections can result in powerful learning and increase campaign results dramatically.

What remains imperative is that contacts, whether direct or remote, be made in a professional manner, in accordance with best practices gleaned through market experience. Most of the time, these contacts will establish the prospect’s first active impression of the company, and the person making the contact must be assured, professional, approachable and credible. This won’t happen by accident. Training, constant coaching, a proven process and a thorough knowledge of the client’s offer are crucial to developing trust, interest and purchase interest. In addition, results should be constantly reviewed to assess the best strategies for each client, each product and each target segment.

Our clients have found that a prospect pool enticed by marketing and honed by the M2O process delivers leads that need their product, fit their qualifying parameters, are favorably pre-disposed to their brand and are ready to be sold. The sales teams, armed with precise business information on the prospects’ pains and priorities, are ready to sell.

The gas catches, the grate sears, and the meat sizzles. Slice off a big piece and bite down.

Dan McDade is the president of PointClear, a business-to-business sales and marketing services firm. Their industry focused solutions provide clients with high quality sales opportunities, effective market coverage and valuable market intelligence. PointClear clients include Ingenix, SGI, Microsoft and two of the world’s largest consultancies. Dan can be reached directly at dan.mcdade@pointclear.com or via phone at 678-533-2722.