How to build a lead conversion process
There are four steps of a lead funnel: the awareness stage, the interest stage, the decision stage, and the action stage. All of these steps are important in turning a potential customer into a paying customer and illustrate the entire customer journey.
But to understand conversion rate optimization, you should start with the fundamentals of the lead conversion process. The path from prospect to customer isn’t always the same for all businesses or people, but the lead-building process isn’t radically different between implementations.
Here is how to build a lead conversion process that works for your business:
Generate leads
You’re already converting leads, so you should have a good grasp of lead generation. Nevertheless, you can always improve on generating leads. It’s always possible to increase lead generation and optimize the process to capture more quality leads.
Remember that not all leads are the same. Some prospects have a far greater interest in what you’re offering than others. So, utilizing techniques designed to generate more qualified leads will directly translate to more lead conversions.
Capture leads
You need to capture leads in the way that makes the most sense for your brand or business. The lead capture method might not be ideal for your goals and objectives.
You may have a great content marketing strategy utilizing a blog and podcast, but if the most suitable prospects spend most of their time on social media, then you’re not capturing the right leads, or you’re not leveraging the additional platforms available to you.
You need to figure out which platforms your target audience spends the most time on and create a marketing strategy that appeals to them.
Qualify leads
Once leads enter the ecosystem of your business, you need to qualify them.
How a business qualifies a lead will vary, especially between marketing qualification and sales qualification. Nevertheless, using a lead scoring system to vet leads can help.
Nurture leads
In truth, lead nurturing should occur at every step of the lead conversion process. You want to guide your leads and give them what they need.
How are your relationships with your leads? Some leads may fail to convert because they feel your brand or service isn’t trying to speak to them as an individual.
More personalization in your lead nurturing may just lead to more conversions. Many lead nurturing automation tools can help you with this process while also ensuring your efforts don’t come off as impersonal or generic.
Present the product or service
Are you showing off your product or service in the best light? Can your leads understand the value you’re offering them?
How you present the product or services you're selling plays an important role in the lead conversion process. One way to figure out what might work best is to look at successful competitors in the industry.
Handle objections
Don’t disqualify a lead because of a sales objection. Instead, handle the objection.
By handling sales objections efficiently, you can still move a lead along the funnel. Or, you can use the situation to learn if you truly have an unqualified lead or if a little more nurturing can push the lead to convert.
But under no circumstances should you let a sales objection turn into an automatic disqualification of a lead.
Close the sale
If you have leads falling off right before closing, then something in the conversion process went wrong. From beginning to end, the lead conversion process should give your sales team all the insight they need about your lead.
If they’re not closing the sale once the lead makes it to that point, they need to reevaluate their lead qualification criteria and closing methods.
In some cases, you can lose a lead before closing for other reasons, such as losing out to a competitor at the end or having a website that makes it difficult to navigate or shop from.
Follow-up
Marketing and sales funnels don’t end with lead conversion. You should always follow up with converted leads and do what you can to keep the goodwill and potential return visit from your customer.
Just as lead nurturing exists at every part of this process, it also exists at the end of the process as well. A satisfied customer can and will bring you other prospects just as likely to become qualified leads.
Just by revisiting your lead conversion strategy, you’ll likely see numerous ways in which you can improve on the individual parts of the process. When you break it down into steps that you can look at individually, you can more easily figure out where things work best and what things might cause your lead conversion process to break down later.