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How to turn sales leads into dollars

Written by: Louise Pope

Article Overview: One of the most difficult things for any business to do is to generate and convert sales leads. Sales leads are the heartbeat for any organisation. If you have no sales leads, you do not have sales, and that is not a good state for your company to be in.

How to turn sales leads into dollars

One of the most difficult things for any business to do is to generate and convert sales leads. Sales leads are the heartbeat for any organisation. If you have no sales leads, you do not have sales, and that is not a good state for your company to be in.

Having leads which don’t convert can be the most frustrating thing about running your own small business. Lets be honest its actually pretty easy to attract attention to your business these days. The internet has made it simple to give your business marketing presence and online advertising or search engine optimisation drives traffic to your site. However the key to successful business is not just attracting prospects or traffic but converting these into revenue.

Converting leads is the life blood to any organisation the following tips should help you:

Track and measure - First you need to know how your business currently performs. Set up a simple system to monitor the number of leads your business gets and where they come from, then compare these figures to your sales figures and look at your conversion ratios. For example you might find leads from direct advertising turn into business, where as only 10% of visitors to your website make a purchase. Differences such as this can give you an insight into why different marketing methods produce different conversion rates. Once you have the facts you can work on improving these areas.

Identify you leads - Categorise each lead into three categories, "A" category are the ones most likely to purchase something very soon, "B" leads are those that are most likely going to buy, at some point. And "C" leads are the ones that you are not sure about, but want to keep in touch with just in case. Contact your "A" leads the most often, perhaps weekly, while "C" leads may only get a monthly newsletter.

Identify your target market - You need to know who your most likely buyers are. Marketing to everyone doesn’t work, because no product or service appeals to everyone. Marketing to an irrelevant audience has the effect of weakening your conversion rate. That’s because these people are attracted to you but rarely buy. You have wasted time and resources on them. Find out who really buys, then tighten your marketing efforts to fully focus on working closet to the dollar.

Under promise and over deliver - Review your marketing materials to see if they promise things your business cannot really deliver. Low conversion rates can be an indication that prospects are being attracted by marketing materials, but when they chat to your sales team just don’t believe the business can live up to its promises. Do something special for your lead. Immediately upon meeting or speaking with a new lead, make it a priority to do something special right away. If it is their birthday or anniversary coming up, send a card. Maybe you have extra tickets for a local sports event? Remember its the small things that make a difference.

Make sure sales staff know how to present - Do they really understand the benefits of the business and how to communicate them to buyers? Are they making it easy for potential customers to say yes? Define your business in a single sentence. Generating leads requires marketing messages that communicate what it is that you do, make or sell. The more succinctly you can define it, the more effectively you can communicate it. Sometimes it can be beneficial to get an outsider to act as a mystery customer and try to buy from your business. Are there too many hoops to jump through or barriers to have to break down? Over time your sales process can become complicated without you realising it.

Overcome Objections - If a lead is threatening to walk away, you need to find out why. Can you overcome their objection? Often times a lead may have more questions or will let you know why they are saying no at this time. Is it cost? Can you offer them financing or another option? Whatever their objection, work on overcoming it.

And Finally -

Ask for the business - I have seen many talented sales staff over the years become complacent they do all the ground work but forget the crucial question, ask the potential customer to buy from you. So many businesses forget to do this! Ask questions about their needs, work out how you can fulfill these needs, then ask if they want to buy. If it’s a “no” right now, put in place a system to keep asking until they say yes. Don’t be ashamed to do this; often there is money on the table and all you have to do is ask for it.

While these are just a few tips… hopefully they’ll increase your conversion ratios.

Good luck

Louise

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Article Tags: business marketing, conversion ratios, direct advertising, heartbeat, life blood, nbsp, presence, prospects, rsquo, sales leads, search engine, small business, successful business, traffic



Related Forum Posts
Re: Conversion rates - Great point Kevin, word-of-mouth is a great way to convert leads as they are being recommended by someone they trust. My job is converting website visitors into leads, and of the leads we get from the website/s we convert around a 12.5% (of leads). At this point I think our website is the best leads vehicle right now.
Re: Sales with no start up fees. - Hey Mary, Have you tried help wanted ads? There are a ton of IT & sales people out of work right now, if there is no cost to become a reseller, how about running an ad for a commission sales person that has sold advertising or software before? Set them up with a reseller website, some business cards, provide some training and get them to get your leads onto a webinar using gotomeeting or one like that? I have had success with this in other venues with sales, not software, but similar arena.
Re: How much time during the week do you devote to prospecting? - I like to think of this as a case of the 80/20 rule. For me the key to my business is generating leads for it, I have a system in place that will allows me to automate a lot of the work, I still need people flowing into the system, so in order to answer your question I would say i spend 80 % of my time marketing my business. I think for most businesses,networkers and sales people the problem of too many leads would be a real nice one!!!
Re: How to Promote a MLM Business? - I guess I was more talking about how to get leads to work. You could not just stop there. In-fact you would have to follow-up with everyone of those people that signed up. MLM is hard and I think the people that are best at it have a big personality. It is sales in every way. You have to be a good sales person and a presenter.
Re: The Boom In Social Media - [quote="WebBizIdeas.com":1tq4bauz]Good post terri, I also feel that time management plays a large role in having a sucessful social media strategy. Why do you think 22 percent said social media was not profitable for them? Jeff[/quote:1tq4bauz] Thanks, Jeff. If I had to guess, based on some questions folks are posting right here on evancarmichael.com forums, I'd say they don't see it as profitable because they aren't seeing clicks turn into sales. And I'd say they are missing the point. My ROI on Twitter and Facebook isn't the sales that I make -- it's the relationships I have built. Some of those turn into subscribers, which is an ROI of sorts. But the most important ROI is the people I've met who I've gotten to know and respect, who like and retweet what I post, who tell others about me, and vice versa. Some of those relationships eventually turn into clients, but that's not why I'm there...and that I think makes all the difference.


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