The number one issue that our clients struggle with is closing the leads that we deliver to them.
Does this sound familiar to your business?
While we can help our clients optimize their sales funnel to get buyers interested in your business, we can’t help you complete that next, and most important, step: picking up the phone.
Some clients simply don’t fit your business model. But if you’re business is consistently losing warm leads then it’s most likely a symptom of the sales process itself.
Every piece of your sales funnel is interconnected and designed to create the most cohesive relationship between buyer and seller possible. If you’re paying for leads, but unable to convert those leads, then you’re wasting your revenue and spoiling your opportunity.
Here, our team of sales experts will walk you through the five essentials of selling in a service-based and product-based market, as well as how to integrate your sales process with your team to improve your ongoing engagement.
1. Market Your Unique Selling Position
Perhaps the most overlooked sales principle by startups and SMEs, your value statement needs to reflect your unique selling position.
For example, our company leverages our industry experience and industry connections as a unique selling position. As a result, you can expect to have your account handled by professionals who have worked with similar companies in the past and experienced success in doing so.
Chances are, you operate in an incredibly competitive market unless you’ve invented a new product or service. As such, you need to ask yourself, “why would a prospect choose you over another company.”
In the digital marketing space, we often compete with 20 other companies at one time just to make it to the proposal phase. But we’re able to limit the competition around us by sticking to what makes us unique; our industry experience and prowess.
Sit down with your sales team and staff and look inward to identify the characteristics that make your company different from your competition. Not only can you leverage this proposition to improve your sales process, but also our marketing message.
2. Be Experts at What You Sell
Sales is sales, nothing less and nothing more. Only, the advent of technology has flipped this hypothesis on its head. Our customers are no longer persuaded by “ranking first on Google.”
We have to back up what we say with the knowledge to justify our products and how they can help our customers.
One way we do this for our customers is by providing our customers with a soft audit of some of the most obvious bugs that can be fixed on their site. Additionally, we do precursory competitor research to determine what services can best help our clients.
By making our sales staff experts in our services, they can deliver our clients greater value from sales to onboarding.
3. Get Prospects to Talk About Their Personal Needs
More and more, buyers are demanding more personalized connections with brands. Even in advertising, younger audiences are demanding that brands be less ‘salesy’ and more informative.
The best thing you can do to learn more about your customers and acquire greater value from them is by getting them to talk about their pain points.
From here, you can offer personalized messaging that addresses buyers’ needs and forms a connection with them. You can also get to the heart of issues that other companies have ignored or failed to address.
Instead of focusing the conversation about what your company can do for customers, why not find out what it needs to do to help your customer.
4. Go Above and Beyond the Phone Call
Call the client, follow up with an email, and wait for a response. How many times do you think this process is successful? Even at a 5% success rate, that’s 95 warm leads out of 100 you’re losing.
If you’re looking to personalize your sales process, then you need to go above and beyond a single one-off phone call.
At LSEO, we frequently send out customers video audits that showcase what is wrong with their website and how we can help. Sure, it’s time-consuming and expensive, but it can increase your lead close rates by anywhere up to 50%.
We’ve even created jingles for leads and got on sales calls wearing their own merchandise. Sure, some of it is a bit cheesy, but it also shows our customers our appreciation and how far we are willing to go during our engagement.
5. Always Follow Up
Finally, don’t limit your interaction with a buyer to just one phone call or email chain. Continue to engage warm leads through consistent follow-up and video conferences if you want to really increase your chances of conversion.
You can give potential buyers free merchandise or custom videos that they have to interact with.
Even if some time has elapsed, you can hit them with an email or an ad reminding them of your business services, in case they are dissatisfied with their current provider.
Maybe you’ve rebranded or added more services that will benefit these buyers. Regardless, never let previous leads fade away without contacting them one more time. Even just asking leads how they are doing and how their current service provider is treating them is enough to at least spur a conversation.
Additional Tips to Keep in Mind
On the other hand, if you happen to close a sale, you can leverage these tips to improve your engagement that can lead to more sales in the future.
Manage Expectations
This is perhaps the largest mistake that we’re even guilty of. It’s easy to get swept up in a sales call and to promise the world to a client. Sure, we’ve even said we can help you, at least, get close to ranking on page 1 of Google. This is a mistake.
In our niche industry, people often have the wrong expectations about digital marketing. They think it’s a silver bullet for rankings and that the industry operates like it’s still 2010.
This is a struggle for us, but by educating our clients and managing expectations, we can exceed them. In fact, we can improve our relationship by being honest and truthful with each other; and not by disappointing the client.
Only Offer Products that Benefit Buyers
It’s always tempting to offer clients superfluous services that don’t provide a retrun for their investment.
At our company, we pride ourselves on offering services that can position to perform well in search. Instead of wasting our client’s money, we can deliver the results, which leaves them more open for upsells int the future and a longer-term relationship.
By managing expectations and delivering results, we can create raving fans that help us grow our business!
Create Raving Fans Throughout Your Engagement
Did you know it’s 5x more expensive to acquire a new customer than to keep a new one? Between ad spend, marketing campaigns, and the time it takes to convert a warm lead, we can instead focus more on building stronger relationships with existing ones.
This is not to say that you should disregard everything we’ve said and halt your sales strategy, but you can grow your business faster by allocating resources to building relationships with your current clients.
Satisfied clients translate to positive reviews and even referrals that help us grow our business and form stronger relationships. Successful relationships can even be used for award submissions in your industry.
These perks all position our business as an expert within our industry, which can be used as marketing collateral for future sales.
Conclusion
You may not realize it, but that first point of contact with a customer could determine the future of the relationship far beyond making the sale. It can serve as the difference between a profitable engagement and a wasted opportunity.
By optimizing your sales process, you not only increase your chances of securing a sale but also in making a client satisfied with your business.