Companies are 60% to 90% of the way through their buying process before reaching out to one of your sales people. Is your company ready for this growing trend?
I recently gave a talk on a global webinar that drew over 1800 registrants and 750 + participants. The topic was titled "From Social to Customer: Convert more leads using CRM and Marketing Automation-B2B” It has almost been a week and I am still responding to leads that were generated by that webinar. It was organized and hosted by for whom we are Canada's largest Gold certified partner. While I was responding to the responses from the free diagnostic assessment we provided during the webinar it became more clear to me than ever before that there are only really 3 must do's for converting more leads from your web site. And here they are:
- Create compelling content to attract people to your site: Most marketers say that content is king. They are so right. Did you know in a recent survey the highest budget item in marketing for 2014 was content creation? Where do you start? Get your experts to put their brilliance into words and have marketing Jazz it up a little. Have you ever brought one of the company's smart guys to a meeting and the customer is blown away? Don’t underestimate how powerful a blog post by one of your experts can be. When people are searching for solutions to their business issues, they will search and find the post. Having a blog post that contains many of the problems your company solves will also double for the search phrases people will most likely use in search engines to find answers to their problems. Have the blog post link back to your site. Here they will find valuable gated content that they will request allowing you to start the nurture process. You have those tools right? Ten years ago a sales person could not do their job without a cell phone, now, with how companies buy, you cannot go another month without tools to track and nurture web visitors.
- Use tools to Track and Nurture Web visitors: Let’s say you own a retail store and a potential customer just walked in the door; you would not just ignore them- would you? You would reach out and say hello. You may even ask for their email address and phone number so that when they leave the store you can attract them back with a sale, discount or other valuable activity. Do the same on your web site, don’t ignore these visitors. Use tools like to track visitors, to automate the sales lead hand over, and to draw in the visitors. These are all powerful, must have tools these days.
- Lead Nurture: Not everyone will land on your site and buy right away. We all know this. It is intuitive. So why hand a “LEAD” to a sales person just because someone downloaded a copy of your latest white paper or case study. Let them simmer for a while by putting them on a digital drip campaign or nurture. We chose the marketing automation tool for this as it sits inside our CRM and workflow will hand the lead over to sales automatically when they are ready to buy. Nurturing web visitors takes thought and application of a sales process structure. It is well worth the investment.
There are of course other factors in driving web lead conversion. If you believe the statistic that people are 60% to 90% of the way through their buying process before they reach out to a person, then if you do not put these three things in place before your competitors do you may be sorry you did not get on the band wagon sooner. For more information and ideas on how to put all this in place, feel free to visit our web site or watch for my next speaking engagement posted on our site and in my LinkedIn profile. You may also be interested in how your company stacks up by taking this complementary web and social lead capability assessment. Find out how well your company is doing and learn what you can do to get even better!
Rob Triggs
Vice President of Sales and Marketing
