Lead to Sales Conversion: Reasons why sales leads are shying away from your business

Marketing Process | Marketing Leads | Sales Leads | Customer acquisition

Arguably, these are four most critically important links in your customer acquisition process. It starts from the initial prospect point of contact to the actual customer acquisition.

The four broadly classified steps combine to form the ‘lead to sales conversion’ pipeline.

The prospect needs to get converted into a customer in the first place. Otherwise, you would be losing out on the future revenue opportunities such as customer retention and product up-selling.

This makes the ‘Lead to Sales Conversion’ into a process that requires close examination and optimization in all businesses. This close evaluation allows you to make the continuous improvement required to increase your customer acquisition rates.

Why your sales leads fail to become customers?

The final lead to sale conversion rate is below 10%, for almost all industry sectors. With this in mind, we can safely assume that almost all businesses are dissatisfied with their lead to sales transition rates.

But, what’s weighing down your higher rates of conversion.

In this infographic, we will try to capture the multiple reasons that are lowering your lead to sales conversion ratio. We will also try to uncover what could be possibly done to improve this conversion.

 

In simple words, ultimately providing a superior experience for the prospect is the surest way to ensure better leads to sales conversion.

You can always polish your website and run targeted marketing campaigns. But ultimately it’s the customer experience that determines your total customer acquisition.

If you can’t consistently deliver supreme customer experience, your hard-earned leads will go to waste.

Continuous Prospect Engagement even after a ‘No’

Most businesses are guilty of deciding too soon whether a prospect is going to become a paying customer or not too soon.

At the time, most of your customers are not ready to make the purchase at the initial point of communication.

 

They definitely need a gestation time before making their purchasing decision.

In-order to make sense of this trend, you need to consider the wide range of products that compete for your customer’s money and attention. It’s usual that your customers take the time to figure out their product options.

You can tackle this situation through repeatedly connecting with your customer base with the right messages.

And, this requires you to have a solid pre-sales engagement plan.

A CRM-based system lets you collect and segment your entire customer list. Further, you can accurately recognize the needs of this segment and engage with them based on the right message.

 

By qualifying each lead, you can evaluate the state of progress of each lead. This lets you further gauge the value of each individual lead.

Determine and Fix your Leaky Sales Funnel

According to studies, only the top 10% of your leads are likely to finally buy your product.

In this light, you cannot afford to have your effort evenly spread among the 100% of your audience. You need to start narrowing down your attention to the top portion of your interested prospects aka sales funnel.

For this, you need to determine the prospects who are likely to buy your product based on the initial interactions.

This will help you determine the probability of purchase by your visitors.

If you are unable to sufficiently determine the mood of your prospects, it will probably sever all the future communications with the prospect.

Collecting and Managing User Knowledge

We are living in an age of empowered users. They need to have a comprehensive knowledge of their products before they make the purchase decisions.

If you don’t have the provision to furnish adequate product knowledge, it means that you are already starting your customer relationship on the wrong foot.

This situation could be resolved by a knowledge based system.

A knowledge based system gives you the ability to furnish the adequate customer knowledge. This helps you convert and manage your customers.

 

This also helps you qualify your leads based on the product interest.

An accurate qualifying process lets you spend time on qualified leads that are the easiest to convert.

How to increase lead to customer transition rates

In our experience, most businesses are stuck with mediocre conversion rates. (Say below 7%).

You can try to strategize and tweak your marketing campaigns to increase this conversion rates. This could improve certain facets of your business.

You may even reach local maxima in your lead acquisition.

But an overall improvement needs you to manage your acquired leads.

Create eligibility Criterias

As we discussed, having to convert your prospects to customers take much time and energy. And it’s always a possibility that your marketing processes attract the wrong leads.

This could be filtered by recognizing the right prospects.

The suitable eligibility criteria’s will let you narrow down on your appropriate sales leads. This process allow you to engage and connect with your customers.

Create a solid conversion Plan

As discussed, the concept of sales funnel is all about prioritizing and organizing your prospects.

First, what makes a good conversion plan?

Let us show this by considering a world cup tournament.

Let’s say that we start with 32 teams. But ultimately, the final could be only played by two teams. You need to pick and prioritize between the 32 teams to eliminate the rest of 30 teams.

 

And, all this will happen within the given time frame.

In the same way, you need to create a solid conversion plan that sifts through the prospects to reach your buying customers.

Align your sales and marketing activities

Most business suffer from disconnect between sales and marketing activities.

For example, let’s say that you receive an enquiry through a particular landing page or marketing channel. The further communications should be reflected in your sales conversions.

A unifying platform lets you align your sales and marketing communications. This will let you receive and store the information about your customer base.

Further, you can use this information to build accurate customer personas to target your marketing campaigns.

 

It allows you to collect accurate parameters such as focus demographics, location, behaviour history etc.

This data could be utilized to target your customer segments in social platforms such as Facebook and Instagram.

Take away:-

If you try to reverse engineer a high lead to sales conversion ratio, you will learn the value of better customer relationships.

This requires you to understand the fundamentals of a long-term customer conversion mechanism.

Reference: http://www.kapturecrm.com/blog/

Automate Prospective Student Engagement: Advantages of a Mobile CRM Software

Fostering student achievement in higher education and post-graduation has never been more crucial than in today’s academic climate. The prospective student base is much extensive and more diverse than ever before. As an obvious upshot, many colleges and universities are reconsidering their entire curriculum to meet a variety of student requirements.

It’s not so difficult to identify the student’s pulse. Now we are living in a world of apps. People, especially the young generation, keep downloading apps to fit every need in their lives- shopping, navigation, news, social and of course, utilities.

The Basic Factors behind Engaging Prospective Students

Student engagement is related to a vast range of outcomes and most of the students are looking for institutions that offer new experiences, fostering achievement and approving new technologies. Implementation of mobile technology for student engagement has hit the roof of higher education sector.

As students are now used to Facebook, Twitter, and Whatsapp, most of them expect better connectivity within the campus.

 

 

They prefer online access to any kind of information, be it application status, syllabus, specialized programs, college calendar or fee structure.

The efficiency in admission process plays a crucial role behind prospective student engagement. Since it is the first step to get into the institution, the entire admission process carries half of the impression in front of the students.

Integrating CRM Software in Campus Infrastructure

What could possibly be a role of CRM in education sector? As we know, CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. But when it comes to higher education, ‘Customer’ is often replaced with ‘Constituent’ for the better understanding of the role of CRM.

Education CRM software can be cohesive for the college and universities, as it incorporates all administrative systems in a single mobile application.

A CRM software helps in automating and managing communications for everyone in the institution, including current and prospective students, alumni, faculty members and non-teaching members.

It facilitates the users to personalize and customize both the message and the network they used to convey the information to their constituent.

An education CRM can help manage entire admission process with accuracy and reduced length of admission cycle.

More Engaged Students Entail Better Learning Outcomes

Learning and the process of enhancing your own individual knowledge base can be interesting with a mobile app. We need students everywhere to be truly motivated and be almost addicted to learning new things each and every day.

Students have frequent queries regarding everything, be it admission process, exams, class timetable, syllabus or information about sports clubs. An education CRM can integrate the option of live chat with the application, so that both the current and prospective students can get the desired information whenever they want.

It provides a unanimous platform to collaborate and bridge the gap between the authority and students.

It empower the entire student support system by automating the execution of student plan and institute curriculum.

A smart campus is altogether a motivating factor for a student. It plays a vital role in confirming complete student engagement and a great learning outcome.

Conclusion:-

As educational sector continues to evolve, it is imperative for the university and college administrators to keep an eye on how students’ requirements are changing as well. The ability to adopt new technology will make the institution more preferable for the students. Say bye-bye to old noticeboard and long lines in front of students’ enquiry counter; it’s time to ensure maximum connectivity and minimum wastage of time.

Reference: http://www.kapturecrm.com/blog/

The Key to Increase Your Sales: It’s All about Following-up

Following up with the clients and customers is one of the most vital business strategies a sales or marketing person can follow. It is now an established fact in sales and marketing sector. The follow-ups add value to the product or service and helps to build a long term relationship with the customer.

If you meet a really good prospect today, how long would you wait to follow-up with the client?

If you have no standardized plan to make follow-up calls or emails, let us show you some facts first. It will help clarify the entire scenario.

Facts to Motivate You to Make Follow-up Calls

• Generally, it takes around 8 call attempts to reach a prospect. Whereas, most of the salespersons only make 2 attempts to reach a prospect.
• 44% of the salespersons give up after one follow-up.
• Around 80% of sales require 5 follow-up calls after meeting.
• Following up with web leads within 5 minutes ensures 9 times more likelihood of conversion.

 

Get a Clear Perspective by Following-up

Sometimes it sounds like people keep calling their customers only to make a good impression over them. But it’s not true. The primary concern of a follow-up call is to know where the client stands in the current deal. That is how you can get a clear perspective and a better understanding about the sales development factors.

Besides, follow-up calls can address possible problems earlier. Make sure to encourage your client or customer to ask questions to make everything clear. Answer all queries before ending the call. This way you’re also letting the client know that your business provides outstanding customer support, no matter what the situation is.

 

 

Add Value to Your Product or Service

While engaging in an initial selling process, reasonable frequent calls can add value to your service or product. Even if the deal appears to be closed, a follow-up call can help to express the you are interested in building long-term relationships.

When you have nothing to gain after you’ve made the sale, the client gradually trusts that you were telling the truth.

This kind of trust ensures not only customer satisfaction, but also the recommendations or referrals. Even the trust in a single product may turn into loyalty towards the entire brand. This can influence the future purchase decisions as well.

 

Follow-up Call: A deciding Factor behind Sale

You can easily imagine from your own purchasing experience. What are the most influencing factors behind a purchase? When you feel appreciated by the shop assistant, you are more likely to purchase more than one product from that shop.

Besides, follow-up call works as a reminder as well. It also helps to reach busy buyers and increase sales.

Managing All Contacts with One Tool: A Perfect Utility of CRM

Now, how to manage customer contact details easily? This is obviously a huge question. Besides, it is not just the question of managing contact details, a salesperson needs to remember a plenty of things- status of the deal, enquiry details, when to call the customer, the last conversation details, the background of the client, and many others.

 

 

One of the basic advantages of CRM is to leverage the access and management of entire customer support system, along with other necessary information. Below are the advantages you can get from a mobile Customer Relationship Management application:

• With a mobile CRM you can receive call reminder and meeting reminder.
• It helps to keep track of the sales progression.
• Before calling the customer you can see the call history and last conversation details.
• You can put new details and change the status of the prospect.
• You can create a ticket number for each customer enquiry.
• The ticket number will help you find the details and status of the customer enquiry.

Moreover, since all the customer-related information is stored in your mobile CRM, it helps you analyze the requirements of the customers and even anticipate their problems. All these increase customer satisfaction and secure sales, in addition to the higher profit margins.

Conclusion

In a nutshell, a salesperson should aim for a long term relationship with the customers, in spite of looking for the short-time profits. Hence, if you want to retain your customers for a long duration, you have to recognize the importance of following-up with the prospect. The CRM software enhances the sales possibilities with its call management facilities that boosts the entire selling process.

Reference: http://www.kapturecrm.com/blog/

Four Ways CRM platform improves the life of a Sales Manager

In most organizations, the sales managers carry responsibility to ensure that sales targets are met and revenue clock is constantly ticking. For the same reason, sales managers also take the most practical and pragmatic point of view of their sales processes.

You know, nothing could be a better eye-opener than the pressure of a fast approaching month-end to reach the sales target.

As a result, most managers have grown to think of sales management as a tight rope act. They need to constantly calculate and counter the different factors that are present 360 degrees.

This leads to a sales manager being constantly overwhelmed and out of steam to make important decisions.

At any point of time, there could be different thought threads running through the mind of a sales manager.

Clearly, these questions have unclear answers or even may be simply irrelevant. As a result the concerned decision maker may simply end-up confused and/or in a constant bad mood.

A Sales CRM empowers the sales managers to take decisions based on the available business data. It also helps you discover practical business insights that will lead you towards taking right decisions.

In this article, we will be discussing about the different ways and significance of making the right decisions to improve your business. We will also look into the underlying challenges in sales management that can determine your sales proficiency.

What’s the Toughest Part in Sales Management?

From its end-to-end, sales process goes through independent activities and processes. For this, you need to first determine the underlying mechanism of sales management.

Sales Management is a series of steps that independently determine whether your end-prospect sticks or drop-off from your business radar.

If you are looking to improve just one part of sales without looking into the next, it will guarantee no final sales improvement.

The following pie chart segments the different activities that consume the day of a sales manager.

 

In retrospective, the sales managers are hardly able to allocate 60% of their time towards the activities that could change their financial bottom lines. This may turn sales into a grinding process that may burn-out or lead the managers into taking the wrong decisions.

In this dilemma, sales CRM platform can help managers by providing a consolidated decision making pipeline.

But, how can a data management platform like CRM be an aid to decision making apparatus.

Well, let’s discuss.

1. Better Initial Prospecting with CRM

Almost all sales managers still unanimously vote the initial prospecting to be the toughest and critical part of their entire sales process.

If you are able to start with a pool of high quality prospects, it will present the best opportunity to meet your final target. Without quality prospecting, all your follow-up sales process gets diluted or loses its proficiency.

So, how can you determine who’s the right prospect? These are the chief qualities of a good prospect.

 

 

 

In short, good prospecting will add to the value of your product and service. A bad prospect can waste your time or lead to unhappy customers. Meanwhile good prospecting leads to better customer understanding.

The sales CRM can consolidate all lead information and particular query to a single dashboard.

 

 

This gives easy overview of the present customer variety, preferences and leading sources of customer queries.

2. Develop panache for Higher Sales Conversions

As a universal truth, only about 40% of the sales executives will fulfill their sales targets. The others usually fail to close the deals or need help to get through the final sales stages.

By handling all activities through an integrated platform, the managers can have an oversight of all undergoing processes. It allows you to consolidate and drive your process forward. This also helps you achieve better sales conversions.

3. Qualifying a definite Sales Strategy

The role of sales managers doesn’t just end with taking decisions concerning current situations. The end strategy should concern measuring and improving the existing sales strategies.

In usual situations, decision making gets constricted to the steps that may immediately increase the sales volume. For example, the sales manager may try to get over a sales slump by increasing the marketing budget or hiring new sales employees.

Instead of just taking impulsive decisions based on limited factors, the CRM platform helps you take focused and informed decisions.

A CRM software helps you get a 360 degree view of the surrounding circumstances. This may help you answer the following important questions.

Is it getting interest of high quality prospects? Is it maintaining a long-term sales pipeline? Should you offer more pre-sales services to clients? Are clients using your product or service the right way?

The CRM reports help you visualize the collected data to make important decisions in the least amount of time.This increases your capability from just plainly theorizing on your important business aspects.

For example, consider the report that consolidates the lead to sales progress.

 

 

 

By taking any particular day for the analysis, you can evaluate the quality of the leads. Further, this simple analysis also lets you follow the right steps that lead to maximum performance.

Manage Easy and instant Communications

Most sales managers thrive on making right communication to their sales teams. This may include sales tactics to sales approvals, which cannot be normally pre-meditated.

Kapture CRM instant ticketing and messaging lets you communicate with the sales teams. This avoids periodic delays and gaps in communicating with one’s team.

Conclusion:-

The sales management could be described as a series of decisions, where any single decision may determine your final sales outcome. The sales CRM could potentially help you nail each of these significant decisions.

Steps to make a smarter and sharper CRM-oriented sales team – Kapture CRM

It is no secret that an organization’s greatest strength is a successful sales team. A strong sales team can create the right business image. In the modern dog-eat-dog world, organizational growth presents visible and invisible challenges to the sales team that cannot be overcome by grit and sweat anymore. A successful sales team is a combination of enthusiastic team mates, solid leadership driving them in a focused way, and the right tool that can become a valuable and efficient component propelling the organization to greater heights. A CRM system is a sales effectiveness software tool that can equip the sales team with data that benefits them on the run.

The following are the 9 steps to make a smarter and sharper CRM-oriented sales team :

1. Convincing the sales team into CRM adoption

Sales teams are generally people-oriented and not software-oriented, and seem resistant to any kind of change. They do not understand the personal benefits of using a CRM system and view it simply as a management tool that wastes their time. Demonstrating the aspects of CRM such as automating common tasks like providing follow-up reminders, scheduling of tasks, etc.; automatically pulling contact information from email or social media communication; and providing all the critical sales information on a single platform will convince them into CRM adoption. Once on CRM, the sales team will have more time to focus on productivity and performance.

2. Providing adequate training of the CRM software

Conducting training sessions enables the sales team to accept the benefits of the CRM softwareand appreciate its role in improving productivity. Make sure the team is geared up before they use the system for sales activities to ensure a smooth work flow.

3. Enabling Mobility

The sales team should have the luxury of easy access to data when they are on the go. Mobile access can be offered to CRM systems to make it simpler to login anywhere and anytime, making data available on their fingertips.

4. Collaboration through CRM

CRM gives room to collaboration, which works as a catalyst to the system. Different access profiles can be created for the team members based on their individual needs. The software can give access to real-time data, follow files, leads, cases, etc. and get alert messages in case of any changes. The benefit of social collaboration platforms is being able to access the right people and information on a mobile device through CRM, which can be a game-winner !

5. Integrate Configure Price Quote with CRM

Another way to empower the sales team is to arm them with detailed data from the pre-sales CRM software, such as the source of the lead, whether it is a prospective lead, specifications and requirements to understand the costumer better, access to pricing list to help configure product solutions and price them, and then produce an accurate and attractive proposal to convey that information.

Eliminating the need for the sales team to manually create quotations on separate systems saves a lot of time and energy. CRM can generate documents and quotations based on the requirements and other specific details. This also minimizes data entry errors.

6. Using CRM to drive sales strategy and account planning

Whatever the type of organization, be it a highly transnational business or a very consultative relationship-based business, good planning stems from the information stored. The CRM stores all the information, ideally on the cloud, so that it is accessible on a single platform in real-time. The plan is nothing but a link between these pieces of information that hints at a particular approach that clinches the maximum deal for the sales team. The post-sales software stores data that helps in building reports that highlight activities and trends to predict future patterns of sales. Doing this will help the sales team to draw correlations between the objective milestones in the sales process and the likelihood of winning more deals.

7. Assessing daily plans, pipelines and forecasts with CRM

The sales team must be equipped to assess their plans, know about the pipelines and be able to forecast the consequences of their plans. Creating, assigning and executing daily sales plans can be done using the sales CRM software. The CRM helps in implementing the daily process such as creating realistic sales targets, assigning tasks, processing leads, making transit plans, and managing lead flow. The CRM helps to identify opportunities in the pipeline and total bookings on probability. It tracks activities such as latest opportunities, biggest deals, stalled opportunities, etc. This helps to forecast the long term and short term targets. The CRM system provides a better picture of the revenue system, which helps to collaborate on opportunities that affect the forecast, and do so with a concrete understanding of how the actions will affect the outcome. This is when forecasting becomes truly collaborative.

8. Win-win sales technique is a reality with CRM

The sales team has nightmares when a potential customer is unreasonable and adamant about the demands and gets fixed on getting deals that fit their way. Often, sales people try to convince the clients for a win-win strategy, but at some point give in to their demands or folds. In such situations, the sales guys often simply desire for a common ground. CRM analysis provides necessary insights and augments the insights to act in a competitive environment. It also documents the difficult client demands in a systematic way, which helps in formulating and directing the strategies to make each sales decision with more intelligence.

9. Build a team of top performers with CRM

The sales team is driven by incentives, and poaching opportunities from each other is a real snag for team performance. This could lead to an environment where the customer could potentially pit one sales person against another, and that is not conducive for a win-win situation during a deal closure. The culprit could be an under performer and the root cause could be anything ranging from insufficiently qualified leads, ill-organized methods of assigning leads, unable to identify hot leads or shelved prospective deals. CRM application is a one-time solution to these problems. With a CRM system in place, there will not be any under performers, and the team will have an environment that will help in building an entire team of top performers!

Reference: http://www.kapturecrm.com/blog/

9 Steps to make a smarter and sharper CRM-oriented sales team

It is no secret that an organization’s greatest strength is a successful sales team. A strong sales team can create a right business image. In the modern era of dog-eat-dog world, organizational growth presents visible and invisible challenges to the sales team that cannot be overcome by grit and sweat anymore. A successful sales team is a combination of enthusiastic team mates, solid leadership driving them in a focused way and the right tool that can become a valuable and efficient component propelling the organization to greater heights. The CRM system is a sales effectiveness software tool that can equip the sales team with data which benefits them on the run.

The following are the 9 Steps to make a smarter and sharper CRM-oriented sales team:
1. Convincing the sales team into CRM adoption
Sales teams are mostly people-oriented and not software-oriented and seem resistant to any change. They do not understand the personal benefits of using a CRM system and view it simply as a management tool that wastes their time. Demonstrating the aspects of CRM such as automating common tasks like providing follow-up reminders, scheduling of tasks, etc.; automatically pulling contact information from email or social media communication; and providing all critical sales information on a single platform will convince them into CRM adoption. Once on CRM, the sales team will have more time to focus on productivity and performance.

2. Providing adequate training of the CRM software
Conducting training sessions enable the sales team to accept the benefits of the CRMsoftware and appreciate its role in improving productivity. Make sure the team is geared up before they use the system for sales activities to ensure a smooth work flow.

3. Enabling Mobility
The sales team should have the luxury of an easy access to data when they are on the go. Mobile access can be offered to CRM systems to make it simpler to login anywhere, anytime making the data available at their fingertips.

4. Collaboration through CRM

CRM gives room for collaboration which works as a catalyst to the system. Different access profiles can be created for the team members based on their individual needs. The software can give access to the real-time data, follow files, leads, cases, etc. And get alert messages in case of any changes. The benefit of social collaboration platforms is being able to access the right people and information on a mobile device through CRM which can be a game-winner!

5. Integrate Configure Price Quote with CRM

Another way to empower the sales team is to arm them with the detailed data from the pre sales CRM software like the source of the lead, whether it is a prospective lead, specifications and requirements to understand the customer better, access to the pricing list to help configure product solutions and price them, and then produce an accurate and attractive proposal to convey that information.
Eliminating the need for the sales team to manually create quotations on separate systems saves a lot of time and energy. CRM can generate documents and quotations based on the requirements and other details. This minimizes data entry errors.

6. Using CRM to drive sales strategy and account planning

Whatever the type of organization, be it a highly transnational business or a very consultative, relationship-based business, a good planning stems from the information stored. The CRM stores all information, ideally in the cloud so the information are accessible on a single platform in real time. The plan is nothing but a link between these pieces of information that hints at a particular approach which clinches the maximum deal for the sales team. The post sales software stores data that help in building reports that highlight activities and trends that predict future patterns of sales. Doing this will help the sales team to draw correlations between the objective milestones in the sales process and the likelihood of winning more deals.

7. Assessing daily plans, pipelines and forecasts with CRM

The sales team must be equipped to assess their plans, know about the pipelines and be able to forecast the consequences of their plans. Creating, assigning and executing daily sales plans can be done using the sales CRM software. The CRM helps in implementing the daily process such as creating realistic sales targets, assigning tasks, processing leads, making transit plans, and managing lead flow. The CRM helps to identify opportunities in the pipeline and total bookings on probability. It tracks activities such as latest opportunities, biggest deals, stalled opportunities etc. This helps to forecast the long term and short term targets. The CRM provides a better picture of the revenue system which helps to collaborate on opportunities that affect the forecast, and do so with a concrete understanding of how the actions will affect the outcome. This is when forecasting becomes truly collaborative.

8. Win-win sales technique is a reality with CRM

The sales team has nightmares when a potential customer is unreasonable and adamant about the demands and gets fixed on getting deal fitting their way. Often, sales people try to convince clients for a win-win strategy, but at some point give in to their demands or folds the demands. In such situations, sales guys often desire, for a common ground at finding a middle ground. CRM analysis provides necessary insights and augments the insights to act in a competitive environment. It also documents difficult client demands in a systematic way which helps in formulating and directing the strategies to make each sales decision with more intelligence.

9. Build a team of top performers with CRM

The sales team is driven by incentives and poaching opportunities from each other is a real snag to the team performance. This could lead to an environment where the customer could potentially pit one sales person against another that is not conducive for a Win-Win situation during a deal closure. The culprit could be an under performer and the root cause could be anything ranging from insufficient qualified leads, ill organized methods of assigning leads, unable to identify hot leads or shelved prospective deals. The CRM application is a one-time solution to these problems. With a CRM system in place there will not be any under performers, the team will have an environment that will help in building an entire team of top performers!

Reference: http://www.kapturecrm.com/blog/

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