Accelerate Lead Collection To Boost Your Sales

Does your business need more prospects and customers?  All of us would welcome having our sales funnel filled with solid prospects.  If your business depends on identifying sales leads on a regular basis, a couple simple actions on your website and the use of a landing page can greatly accelerate and focus your process of lead collection.

Get An Early Start

If you have a strong sales conversion rate once you start a conversation with a prospect, your goal is to identify more of the right people to engage in sales discussions.  The earlier you can identify a prospect, the earlier you can close a sale. 

For businesses with a lower sales close rate, focusing prospects on your key value proposition early in their research / shopping process can help you engage and close more customers who value what you offer.

Accelerate Your Speed To Leads On Your Website

For many organizations, marketing campaigns drive prospects to the company website.  While this is an effective way to quickly provide access to all of your company information, prospects may visit your website several times before they reach out to contact you to start a conversation – and become a sales lead.  I recommend sending prospects first to a landing page – more on that thought below.

Whether you send prospects directly to your webpage or they land there after starting on your landing page, keep relationship building a top priority on your website.

The easier it is for a prospect to find what they need and to give you their contact information while on your website, the earlier you can start a conversation to gain their business.  Here are some key steps you can take on your website to accelerate this process:

• Incorporate the image and message from your marketing campaign on your homepage.  Let them know they have gone to the right place – and align your benefit communication across all consumer touchpoints.  This reduces your bounce rate and engages web visitors in your content.
• Place an easy to find “Request More Information” link on the upper navigation on your website.  This should be in addition to contact information.  You will get more leads by providing links for both “Request Information” and “Contact Us”.
• Keep your web navigation simple and feature the most commonly sought out information as choices in your navigation bar.
• Include a video that explains your core value proposition that ends with a call to action to request more information or to contact you directly.

Identify Leads Even Sooner With A Landing Page

Through the use of a marketing landing page, you can engage prospects earlier in your marketing campaign – and boost the conversion rate of prospects to leads and then to customers.  According to Omniture, online advertising campaigns that use landing pages typically see a conversion rate improvement of at least 25%. 

You speed up your lead capture as your marketing sends prospects directly to your landing page where you collect their contact information right away.  This can shorten the time from advertising through information collection from weeks or months to a single day. 

Prospects see your ad, click through to your landing page, provide their information in exchange for more information and then can click through to your website.  You are now collecting lead contact data at the start of their search process rather than once they have visited your site several times.  Because landing pages have become a more common tool, consumers are used to giving away some basic contact information in exchange for something from you.

Optimize Your Landing Page To Boost Sales

Here are a few proven best practices you can use on a landing page to boost your impact and effectiveness.  These include:

• Engaging visual and simple benefit communication that ties to marketing campaign – connect the dots to minimize friction.  The goal of the landing page is drive the action of starting a conversation. Optimize your landing page to remove anything that causes prospects to leave before giving you their contact information.
• Offer of value for value – collect contact information in exchange for:  brochure, white paper, free trial, discount, etc.
• Use a simple, short form to capture key contact information.  Collect only the information you need to start the conversation.  Start with name, email, a question/comment box and perhaps a city and state if needed.  Including too many information capture fields will cause prospects to avoid filling out your form. You can collect additional information in your future touch points with new leads.
• Offer a simple thank you page that delivers the promised value once you collect their contact information.  Also include a link to your website on the thank you page.
• Make your landing page mobile friendly.  This is a must today.  According to Media Behavior Institute’s 2013  “USA Touchpoints” study, over 40% of US adults (age 18- 64) use a mobile phone to access the Internet weekly.  Expect that to grow to over 50% in 2014.  For most businesses, this includes your prospects.  If you build your landing page using responsive technology, your prospects can and will likely engage with you across all mobile formats.
• If you are using Google AdWords in your campaign, make sure you use your search keywords in your landing page copy and headlines.  The more closely you are aligned, the more likely you are to win your ad bids and deliver valuable prospects to your landing page. 
• Use A/B testing to optimize your efforts.  Test variations of your landing page to optimize your results.  Ongoing testing of different single variables such as your headline, image, benefit description, information capture form and call to action can help you identify the optimal combination of landing page elements to boost your conversation rate.
• Also use your landing page to optimize your digital marketing.  By placing ad pixels on your landing page, you can track your not only your traffic by marketing source, but also your conversion by marketing source.
• Optimizing your landing page can take some time, but your actions will yield solid results in boosting your conversion of prospects to leads.  Then your sales team just needs to close the sale! 

As you plan your 2014 marketing and sales efforts, consider adding a landing page to your marketing mix if you do not already have one.  If you have a landing page in place, take steps to test and optimize your efforts and effectiveness.  Also take time to review your website home page and navigation.  Make it easy for visitors to find what they need and to request more information.  These simple changes will help you get off to a more productive start in the New Year.

---

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blend website.

GrowthSpring Group is a unique strategic growth and marketing innovation firm that helps clients accelerate sales and profit growth. We help you identify and implement new business insights, opportunities, winning strategies and plans. www.GrowthSpringGroup.com

Connect the Dots…Align Your Metrics and Boost Your Marketing ROI

As marketers, we are increasingly focused on measuring marketing initiatives to guide our efforts and assess our Marketing ROI.  We are reading about Big Data and how we need to embrace it.  We read blogs, articles, and research data to catch the next big trend.  And often, we can miss the important data on our laptops that shows how and where we are limiting our own marketing effectiveness.

While many marketing departments are now measuring their programs, they are often too busy to make sure their digital marketing initiatives are aligned and their metrics are set up to report progress toward top strategic goals.

Measuring Campaigns Is Not Enough

I have worked with companies that have long lists of metrics that they measure month after month.  “If you do not measure it, you cannot improve it” is their mantra.  Many companies may be good at measuring their actions, but the can miss the insights in the data if they do not look at the right data in combination.  Many know their click-through rates for individual email, Google AdWords, or digital ad campaigns, but they do not know the sales conversion rates that came from those efforts.

In my last blog, I shared how many marketing funnels are leaking.  This often occurs when marketing initiatives and their corresponding metrics are not aligned strategically to top objectives.  Many companies place marketing campaigns in market and feel good about generating activity, but do not stop to understand if they also produced achievement.

Marketers need to shift from measuring to results at the top of their funnel to measuring effectiveness from top to bottom.  For a B2B campaign, we not only need to know how many total leads a campaign generates, but also how many qualified leads and active prospects as well as how many prospects become customers and their size of purchase.  By aligning our data, we shift from measuring productivity of an individual initiative to managing and optimizing our portfolio of marketing investments – and boosting our marketing ROI.

Manage One Funnel, Not Two

One of the reasons many companies do not truly understand their marketing effectiveness is that the top and bottom of their funnel are managed in two different departments.  Marketing manages awareness generation and engagement at the top of the funnel.  Sales is responsible for converting prospects into buyers at the bottom of the funnel.  Marketing measures results in terms of how many prospects they produce, and all prospects are counted as having equal value in some companies.  The Sales department is then measured on how many prospects it converts to buyers—regardless of where the prospects came from or how ready they are to buy. 

By measuring the same prospect with different objectives, two funnels are created.  The Marketing funnel drops prospects into the Sales funnel.  Insight, alignment, and productivity are often lost.  By aligning your metrics measurement and connecting the dots throughout one integrated funnel, you will be able to understand the quality of each prospect and the results produced by different marketing efforts.  This results in better insights, and allows you to better manage your marketing portfolio.

Make Your Data More Productive – Leverage Your Analytics Tool Set

Many companies use their top-line analytics reporting to only look at topline conversions—click through rates and resulting web traffic. 

Those in ecommerce are often skilled in leveraging web analytics.  They not only know which campaign drove sales, they are customizing email messaging and landing page design via A/B testing to optimize the impact of their efforts.  Not every company has reached this level of sophistication.  They often have been “too busy” to fully learn the tools available to them. 

If you use Google Analytics or other tracking tools to track visits and time on site, invest time to learn how these tools can also be used to set campaign goals and evaluate multi-channel funnels (which elements of your integrated marketing efforts produces the most sales).  You will be able to track and evaluate the effectiveness of different marketing initiatives to produce the most valuable prospects.

Make sure your own data is used powerfully.  Often, you can create greater short-term sales growth by improving your targeting and retaining your best prospects than by investing to launch an incremental marketing campaign.

Once your marketing and sales metrics and analysis are more fully aligned, your next big sales trend could be come from a highly functioning marketing and sales funnel.  With a robust funnel in place, the marketing ROI of all of your programs will improve.

“The ability to take data – to be able to understand it, to process it, to extract value from it, to visualize it, to communicate it is going to be a hugely important skill in the next decades.”

– Hal Varian, Chief Economist, Google

---

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blend website.

GrowthSpring Group is a unique strategic growth and marketing innovation firm that helps clients accelerate sales and profit growth. We help you identify and implement new business insights, opportunities, winning strategies and plans. 

www.GrowthSpringGroup.com

Do You Know Where Your Marketing Funnel Is Leaking – And How To Stop It?

Your sales and marketing funnel can be like a pair of pants with a hole in the pocket.  You don’t notice the hole at first.  You notice it, however, when you start losing things out the hole, like small coins.  While you hate to lose any money, it gets really frustrating (and more costly) when the hole grows large enough that you lose your keys or something else really valuable.

Putting your budget dollars into a leaky sales and marketing funnel is very much like putting money in a pocket with a hole in it.  You will inevitably lose some of your money, but you may not know how much.

Finding Those Sales and Marketing Funnel Leaks

The problem is all sales and marketing funnels leak.  Whether you are marketing for B2B sales leads, selling consumer products in store or online, driving diners to a restaurant, or recruiting new students to your university, your marketing and sales funnel is leaking.  The leaks in your marketing funnel cost you money—and potential customers.  The good news is that if you know where it’s leaking, you can take appropriate steps to help stop the leaks or at least minimize their impact.

A thorough analysis of your marketing and sales analytics can reveal where your funnel is leaking.  The first challenge is to find and understand the leaks.  The next challenge is to identify how to stop or reduce the leaks.  How many people who see your ads and read your emails actually visit your store or website?  How many of those who reach your website ask for information or make a purchase?  How many people leave a store without buying what they came in to buy?  It’s critically important to know what is and is not working within each step of your marketing and selling funnel.  More importantly, you need to understand how your customers are making decisions at each step in their purchase decision journey.

It is critical to understand your sales and marketing funnel and your customers’ purchase decision process in order to optimize your market effectiveness and marketing ROI. 

• You need to identify your Points of Loss (POL)—where you are losing people at each step in your funnel.

• You also need to understand your Points of Influence (POI)—the key points in the decision process where you can win or lose the engagement of your potential customers as they move towards making a purchase decision.  These are the points in the decision process where your potential customers seek information on what they want to buy.  You need to understand what these POI’s are and who/what is influencing them at each one. 

POL’s and POI’s are your key leverage points in making your marketing and sales process much more productive. 

Adding More Sales Productivity to Your Marketing Funnel

There are three key ways to build sales productivity in your current marketing and selling funnel:

• Put more total people in the funnel.  Your funnel still leaks, but more people in should mean more people out.  If only 1-5% of the people at the top of your funnel actually buy from you or sign up for your services, you need to first focus on improving your funnel rather than putting more people into it.

• Put more of the right people in the funnel.  You hope to attract and sell more of your target audience.  But, if you don’t clearly understand why they are choosing you, this approach will not be fully effective.

• Retain more of the right people in the funnel.  By slowing or stopping the leaks in your funnel, you will optimize your efforts to attract and retain more target customers.  This is usually a much more productive near-term effort versus just spending more on ads or offering promotions.

Our work with clients shows that the leaks in a funnel can happen for very different reasons.  Some can be as simple as the wrong web link was attached to an ad or email, sending the right person to the wrong place on your website.  They don’t find what they want, get frustrated, and leave your website.

Other leaks come from only communicating the features of a product or service but not the most relevant benefits.  Often, a leak comes from not providing the key information a target customer wants to learn prior to deciding where to shop and what to buy.  While these leaks sound like marketing fundamentals, they happen frequently in different stages of marketing funnels.

Shoppers stay in the funnels that best fit their shopping process and POI’s.  Companies who best understand how their customers shop and make purchase decisions and can align their marketing funnel with customer information needs will boost their funnel productivity, sales, and marketing ROI.  If your competition understands your customers’ shopping and decision process better than you do, your marketing funnel will become less effective and you will lose share to your competitors.

Unfortunately, today’s lean marketing and very busy staffs often don’t have enough time to invest in understanding their Points of Loss and Points of Influence.  Whether your internal team does this work or you get outside help, your marketing will be much more productive if you take time to understand why each of your key marketing initiatives may or may not be working effectively in your marketing funnel process.

Are programs ineffective because your funnel process is leaking or are you just not effectively engaging your target customers?  Once you better understand your Points of Loss (POL) and your Points of Influence (POI), you can more effectively focus your efforts and marketing investments in the right place.  Once your sales and marketing funnel works well and you know how to best engage and sell your target customer, you will accelerate your market success!

---

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blend website.

GrowthSpring Group is a unique strategic growth and marketing innovation firm that helps clients accelerate sales and profit growth. We help you identify and implement new business insights, opportunities, winning strategies and plans. 

www.GrowthSpringGroup.com

Have You Identified How To Achieve Your Next Step Change In Growth?

Does your company’s business plan always tend to have the same approach – the annual plan is based on growing sales and profits steadily through incremental line extensions, a variation on last year’s promotions or low-risk geographic expansion? Is your planning process often more about controlling costs and risk than driving significant growth? 

“Growing sales 3-5% in in our key product segments combined with some targeted cost cutting will allow us to achieve our financial goals.”

Does your annual business planning process fall short of generating breakthrough ideas that could achieve real step-changes in growth?

If you are hitting your financial targets year after year, staying on the current plan could make sense.  It could be the right fit for your company.  But for others, if you are not growing as fast as you or your stakeholders would like, or if your competitors are out innovating you, it could be time to consider a fresh approach.

It may be time to invest in new product or marketing innovation, but the first innovation you may want to consider is in your planning process.  Sometimes an organization’s commitment to its annual planning ritual can be a constraint to achieving significant year-on-year growth.

As a strategic growth consultant, I often see companies that either have not identified or pursued new opportunities, or they have created enough of their own roadblocks that they cannot achieve their growth aspirations.  They are so used to planning incrementally that they miss key opportunities to transform their company and achieve breakthrough growth.

Looking back on your career, have you worked for companies that:

• Just updated the promotional calendar each year to align with last year’s events?
• Only developed and launched new products that were close-in line extensions because the risk of failure was lower – but often just ended up cannibalizing existing sales?
• Defined their market segments so tightly that there was little room for growth?
• Spent time and money each year just to churn customers with competitors – with the real results being lower prices, lower margins and modest, if any, share gains?

If these are familiar scenarios, let me share three planning steps to try this planning cycle to help you identify potential new approaches to accelerate your success.  They include:

• Revisit what made you successful – What insights from your success-to-date can be applied to drive new growth with new products or new markets?
• Redefine to create new advantage – Change the definition of your market to allow you to change how you go to market.
• Remove the barrier – what is holding you back from achieving greater growth? How will you remove both internal and external barriers – or change the game so they no longer constrain you?

Here are some examples of how to apply these steps when reviewing different components of your business plan:

Who you are selling?

• Revisit: Which customer segments value your brand and your products?  Why?  Are there other customer segments that are similar that would also value your brand for the same reasons?  (e.g. travel gear vs. camping gear)
• Redefine: Is your market defined too narrowly?  Can you expand the definition of who you are selling by redefining your market.  Either expand up or down the supply chain or expand to include other segments in the larger category that includes you.  (e.g. breakfast buyers vs. breakfast cereal buyers)
• Remove: Remove barriers to purchase by being available in new channels, in new forms or at new price points (e.g. develop a special pack that will help you gain distribution into new retailers – or – add ecommerce as a sales channel)

What you are selling?

• Revisit:  the benefits and attributes that differentiate you vs. the category you compete in.  (e.g. easy-to-use, stylish, unbreakable)
• Redefine: What are adjacent categories where you can apply these same attributes to introduce relevant new products that go beyond line extensions to your core market.
• Remove: Remove resistance to launching into new categories.  Put together a new product development team that combines brand experience and product development strength with fresh innovative thinking.  Do not include people who are locked into old biases and approaches that could limit the potential of your new innovations.

How you are selling?

• Revisit: How are you engaging, educating, exciting your target and how do you close the sale?
• Redefine: How you disrupt your target customer in new ways to enable them to clearly see the differentiated value in your products versus competitors.
• Remove: Remove your own sales prevention processes that create friction for customers trying to do business with you.  Take a fresh look at how easy or hard it is to buy from you.

Before you introduce these planning steps, look at your internal planning team.  Do they view the planning process as an opportunity or a burden?  Do they take delight or dread being on the company’s annual planning team?  Is it time to bring some fresh perspective onto the planning team by including others beyond department heads and your finance staff?

This is one set of tools to energize your planning process.  If you are on calendar year timing for your fiscal year, your planning process will begin soon.  Look at how you can infuse your planning this year with new energy and some fresh thinking.  If your company’s planning team is resistant, consider bringing in someone from the outside to help your team take a fresh look with the help of an outsider’s perspective.  This could be the year you develop the plan that changes the future of your company!

This blog was originally posted by GrowthSpring Group on the MENG Blend website.

GrowthSpring Group is a marketing innovation and growth strategy firm focused on accelerating your sales and profit growth. We help you identify new business growth insights & opportunities and execute winning strategies & plans. www.GrowthSpringGroup.com