Nobody ever said that lead conversion was easy - not even at the best of times. But the array of different obstacles this year has made it a whole lot harder than ever before.
Turning marketing-qualified leads (MQLs) into opportunities has always arguably been the hardest challenge within sales and marketing because it’s largely based around interrupting people. But the prospective customer is always the person in the dominant position, especially in the past 8 months. This is because in a digital-only world, they can easily hang up the phone, ignore emails, block messages and just tune salespeople out.
It’s good news for Seth Godin, because it means that his vision of completely permission-based marketing is coming to fruition. But it’s bad news for hard-working sales and marketing executives whose livelihoods depend on lead conversion. And here's why it got a lot harder recently.
The challenges
The biggest challenge can be found in the fact that so many more people are now working from home. That makes it easier to connect with them, right? Wrong.
Unless you have mobile numbers for your prospective customers, or their employers have set up call diversion to put you in touch with them if you ring the office number, it’s very difficult to reach people over the phone now. And while there are theoretically ways and means of working around this to obtain mobile numbers, the legal status of doing so is questionable, especially in the era of GDPR.
For similar reasons, you can’t get to people at face-to-face events like exhibitions and conferences, either. Sure, most of these events have been replaced by virtual equivalents, but they are no substitute for face-to-face interaction and are naturally more difficult environments to connect with leads.
All this means that salespeople are limited to email and possibly LinkedIn as their only outbound tactics, which, whilst still effective tools, are struggling to maintain momentum.
The choice
Ultimately, at this moment in time, you have three choices of how to proceed. And as you’ll see here, two of them rely on hope much more than they do on expectation:
- Option 1: put everything on hold. Cancel all sales and marketing for the foreseeable future, and then, when the time is right, start again with the same interruptive methods you’ve used before. The problem here is it wastes all the hard work you’ve put in building your brand, it will cost a lot of money just to return to where you were at the start of 2020. Plus, this cancellation will last an as-yet-unknown period of time.
- Option 2: keep things close to home. This means stripping out the overt sales efforts to focus on core marketing like awareness and brand-building, without any fixed expectation of lead generation. This was a popular option for a number of brands when things got tough, and whilst it doesn't do any harm, it essentially keeps you stood in the same position.
- Option 3: bridge at least some of the gap with marketing. Accept that lead generation won’t reach the levels we were at at the start of 2020, but at least try to move the needle by using marketing to build at least some pipeline. This is no silver bullet by any means, but it’s the option we recommend, and we have some tips on what you can do to make the most of it…
The answer
The following tips are all little things you can do to help yourself in the tricky months ahead. None of them are a catch-all solution in isolation, but all can contribute to making the best out of a difficult situation:
- Replicate the outputs of a conversion call as much as possible. This is done by qualifying all the relevant data and sales intelligence, and finding out who else is involved in purchasing decisions. This enables contacts to self-serve their way through the process while supplying the key data-points.
- Flesh out your forms in such a way that higher-value pieces of data like mobile numbers are exchanged for higher-value content later in the funnel, at a time when prospective leads are far more likely to share that information.
- Look at alternative methods like leveraging buyer intent data or LinkedIn lead generation, but with the knowledge that they can be unreliable and risky.
- Play the long game by using multiple channels to be persistent without being invasive, and to nurture and build relationships over time.
To find out more on how you can get more from your lead conversion rate whatever the future holds, talk to the experts at ROMI Associates. Get in touch here.
