A sales rep arrives for an appointment with a prospective client. He has a hot lead – or so he thinks. The rep begins his pitch. A few minutes in, the prospective client’s eyes glaze over. The pitch is fine. The problem is, it’s for a product that has little relevance to their business. The rep leaves the meeting quietly cursing the marketing department for providing an inappropriate lead.
The above scenario points to a communication breakdown between sales and marketing – a costly problem with which many of us will be familiar. Lesson number one then when it comes to lead conversion: integral to the whole process is a healthy dialogue between those providing the leads and those acting upon them.
“The importance of fostering a mutually supportive relationship between sales and marketing is particularly relevant when it comes to converting sales leads in a B2B environment,” says Graham Ellor, director of planning at TDA. “Almost all purchasing decisions will involve some level of bureaucracy. This is compounded by the nature of many supplier relationships. Something that can be straightforward in B2C can be fraught with complexities in a B2B situation. A more strategic, joined-up approach is needed to overcome these obstacles.”
Right place, wrong time
Our fictional sales rep was politely shown the door for trying to sell something the prospective client didn’t need. However, there are numerous reasons why lead conversion can break down at this stage. One of the most common is that the rep is in the right place at the wrong time.
Ian Rawlins, managing director of the Newbury Group, takes us back a couple of stages in the lead conversion process to the initial gathering of data by marketers. Crucial in this fact-finding mission, he argues, is that one gains an understanding of where the potential client is within the buying cycle. “If a business is acting on a lead from its website, then chances are that the person will have shopped around and be quite close to actually buying. As such, the sales person will be meeting somebody who is sales-ready,” says Rawlins.
“In conversations between sales and marketing, there must be very clear definitions around what point the person is in the buying cycle. In other sectors, especially ‘high ticket’ sales, building relationships face-to-face is very important. Target companies need to be met earlier in the buying cycle and so a sales person’s expectation of a good lead will be different, not necessarily in quality but in timeframe.”
Of course, there are all manner of ways in which a business can generate leads and all types of organisations selling their services in this burgeoning industry. Unquestionably, the most high profile of these in recent times has been search engine optimisation (SEO). As businesses look increasingly online to generate leads, the importance of using the right language on their website – in generating hits and, consequently, leads – has become ever more pronounced.
SEO is a complicated business, however, done correctly it can form the backbone of an organisation’s lead generation process. Ian Harris, CEO of Search Laboratory, certainly agrees. Harris suggests SEO is a process that, over time, involves tweaking the language on websites with the ultimate aim of bringing in the right kind of leads – and lots of them.
“The first thing we do when working with any client is to generate as many leads as possible, regardless of quality,” he says. “When the data starts moving through the system and the sales start happening, we will carry out periodic reviews. We might look at all the sales a client has had in a particular quarter and then go back to the source, the keywords they emanated from and so on.”
Clean up your act
Integral to this whole process is that lessons are learnt all along the way. The keyword used in the search is attached to the initial enquiry so the enquiry can be judged and ultimately monetised. This information can then be fed back so efforts and resources can be focused on those key words that are bringing in most value.
Such a diligent approach is particularly important in the B2B sector where the sell is often more complex. “It is so important to understand not just what your business is selling but how people search for it,” Harris says. “Businesses that don’t understand this can often end up paying for the wrong kinds of leads.”
Historically, success in lead conversion has been something of a numbers game. Your sales staff hit the phones all day and the law of averages did the rest. The problem with this, however, is twofold: it wastes time and resources and it demoralises sales staff. The smarter database provision firms have got wise to this and now go to great lengths to ‘clean up’ the information they provide to clients.
Richard Lloyd is general manager of InfoUK, a database firm with more than two million telephone-verified businesses on its books. “When you have a vast number of leads you need a proper process in place to ensure the best leads are accessed first, and by the most appropriate sales channel,” he says.
“There is nothing worse than lots of leads that go nowhere to begin with; it doesn’t take many poor leads for a whole campaign to be written off by the sales channel. Therefore, our aim is to seek out ‘look-alike’ leads that are based on our clients’ best and most profitable customers.”
Let’s move back to our hypothetical sales rep then. This time the lead is decent and the prospective client might be exactly that. Time, one might think, to move in for the kill. Or maybe not.
Personalisation pays off
In the multi-layered world of B2B, a softly-softly approach is often the order of the day in turning a lead into a sale suggests Philip Shuldham-Legh, director of communications at The Listening Company. He says, “Converting prospect leads into sales is typically more complex and challenging in the B2B industry because the process involves many more ‘customers’ at the decision-making level. But like consumers, business prospects have their own views about how they want to be talked to and brands need to respect that over and above anything else.
“Gone are the days of salespeople being able to say ‘you have to buy this now, on this call, because you can’t call me back and I can’t send you any more information.’ This pressured and inflexible approach can do untold damage to how a brand is perceived.”
Shuldham-Legh alludes to the ongoing nature of the sales process in the B2B arena – a process that involves businesses utilising an array of communications channels to warm up a prospective client up and keeping them on the backburner until a sale is ready to happen.
He says, “B2B sales is invariably about profiling and qualifying first, then selling. What companies learn during the initial stages generally sets the rules of the game moving forward and having a system that allows companies to combine communication channels seamlessly and simultaneously means the approach used can truly be tailored to the prospect’s preferences.”
The message in this is clear: converting what – on the face of it – is a decent lead is not necessarily straightforward. Or as Robert Wadman, strategy director at Carlson Marketing puts it, “Getting someone to raise their hand is easy – you can always buy a response but moving that to a sale is more difficult.”
Like Shuldham-Legh, Wadman believes prospective clients need to be nurtured and reassured before being gently guided towards a sale. He says, “Treat [prospects] as customers from the first interaction: treat them with respect, gain their trust and demonstrate that you have an interest in their needs. Sustain their trust in your brand by providing useful content for them to consume over time. Offer your content across a blend of channels – some people respond better to face-to-face, others prefer the distance of the web. Continue to provide opportunities for them to raise their hand again and indicate they are back in-market. Finally, think about the buying cycle for your product – if you missed the opportunity this time, ask them when they’ll next be buying.”
Clearly, then, lead conversion is no cakewalk. It takes planning, investment, time and effort. Data needs to be qualified and lines of communications between sales and marketing cleared. It’s a process and often a lengthy one at that. It is worth remembering, however, that achieving the end goal of this process needn’t necessarily be rocket science.
“Selling is about a personalised approach, understanding and providing solutions for the prospect’s business needs,” says Rawlins. “It is not about pitching some prospects and features in a generic way. A prospect will warm to and buy from a sales person who has clearly spent time appreciating the subtleties of their sector of business.”
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