When talking with clients, I find qualifying leads is as important, or more important than developing the leads in the first place. For various reasons such as the history of being a strong resource in the industry, or having a solution that isn’t a commodity, generating awareness and leads aren’t as big of a challenge. What can be more challenging is understanding the quality of the lead, their interest, their fit, and their desire to take action. I’m finding clients are struggling with speaking to poor leads, wasted sales time, lower sales conversion, higher costs per lead and proving a return to their leaders. Included below is set of tips and strategies engineered to help you overcome these challenges.
I’ve shared in earlier blogs how important it is to understand who your buyer is and what challenges your persona faces applicable to your solutions. Next, it’s vital to understand what triggers cause your persona to begin looking for information? What is their process for accessing information? How do they evaluate solutions, and what factors are most important to them? Are there additional decision makers associated with a decision related to your solution? If so, what factors are most important to them? To learn more click this link:
Once you know your personas at this level, the next step is developing content that supports your buyers through their journey. When thinking about your customer’s buyer journey consider three stages laid out by Hubspot:
- Awareness-identifying they have an issue or challenge. They begin digging deeper into this challenge to confirm its validity and determine its importance.
- Consideration-the buyer has confirmed the challenge as a priority, given it a name, and is now seeking information on potential solutions.
- The decision-the buyer now has reviewed potential solutions and is now considering which solution they will choose.
Think about your product/solution and your buyers. What content can you provide in each step? What would help your buyers understand the pain points they’re experiencing in greater detail, how your product/solution can help them, and why your product/solution is the best fit for them?
Some content formats can include:
- Video
- White Papers
- Infographics
- Blog Posts
- Social Media Posts
- LinkedIn Groups
For this example consider a blog-post written by you that a prospect lands on because it matches one of their pain points. It’s vital once you provide information on their specific challenge that you provide a clear call to action that offers them information on solutions available to solve their problem. Think a button that offers a free ebook, or video that provides a solution designed exactly for that challenge. Make sure you have a tool for measuring the traffic visiting your content, and clicking through your call to action. In this example, it’s vital you drive your buyer to a landing page that is specific to your call to action offer. Whatever the content you promoted on the blog, you want to make focus entirely on in your landing page. Share very quickly in 1-3 sentences why your visitor wants to download the content. If you can add a video, or image that relates to your offer as it helps the visitor more quickly understand what they’ll be getting if they fill out your form fill. (Share their contact information) You are aiming for a 20% conversion on this page. If 100 people visit your landing page your goal should be that 20 share their information to access your content. If you aren’t seeing 20% consider:
- Is the content perfectly built for your persona?
- Do you have the correct persona in mind?
- Do you understand the persona’s needs?
- Is your offer clear?
- Did you get the most impactful message to your persona within 10 seconds?
Congratulations visitors are clicking through your call to action to visit your landing page, and are sharing their information to review the content you created! Now you want to make sure they receive a thank you page that will thank them for their interest. Then you will want to set the right expectations; will they receive the offer now, if not when? If you are offering another value how long until they can expect receipt? Include additional offers for native content that follows the sales process. If they downloaded information related to their pain point, what questions do you frequently hear from clients that you could share in advance? Provide opportunities for visitors to socially share your content.
Chances are if they found your information valuable they know others that would find this information to be helpful. Add navigation on the thank you page encouraging your visitors to learn more about your solutions. At this point, they’ve reached your thank you page because they have found tremendous value in your content. Additional offers to learn more would most likely be appreciated. When this entire process is complete, you can easily identify which of your leads went through this process and are most interested in your solutions. I’m not suggesting you ignore prospects that fell through your funnel earlier, but I do recommend focusing first on those prospects that completed your process as it helps: prove the value of your efforts, show true lead generation, improving sales conversion, and decreasing wasted sales time.