If you have stumbled on this blog, chances are you have captured a handful of leads in Zoho CRM but you need better clarity in streamlining the lead conversion process. Managing them all with due diligence and priority is hard. Plus, you must already know that not all leads turn into a sale. So, it always comes down to the age-old controversial question “When should I convert a lead?” An easy answer to this is “It depends!”
Why is this question controversial? Because every business is unique and there are several variables to determine. There is no definitive answer to this. Ideally, you should convert a lead when you want to establish a relationship with them and leverage it to turn into a sale. But since every business operation differs from one another, what I can give you is the right mindset – a baseline to start this critical process that meets your service standards. So, suit up!
For starters, you need to get your basics right.
Leads are people from your niche audience who are interested in your products and services. They come along with a probability of transitioning into a paying customer and that will bring success to your business. But not all of them have the same potential or quality. You need to prioritize and manage your leads in a structured way to increase the number of leads and convert them into opportunities.
Converting leads is fundamentally the joint effort of the sales and marketing departments of your enterprise. While lead generation is about turning prospects into leads, conversion requires adequate nurturing strategies such as behavior automation, retargeting, and email nurturing. According to a recent report, 53% of marketers spend at least half of their budget on lead generation. Another report shows that 56% of leads are not ready to buy. Spending hundreds of dollars on generating leads goes in vain when you do not nurture them through stages.
A lead should go through several stages of conversion before it steps into the sales funnel. They start as a lead (a prospect from your niche audience) and grow into a marketing-qualified lead or MQL. At the final stage of this process, they turn into a sales-qualified lead. Therefore, you can guess that to convert a high-quality lead, you need to nurture them at every stage until they transform into paying customers. However, since no two businesses work in the same pattern, you must work out a unique lead conversion strategy that is tailored to your captured leads.
That is a critical question to answer. Converting them into opportunities is kind of the first threshold that they have passed. Here are some tips that you can follow.
Start with the basics. Document all the available information in Zoho CRM software including, source, industry, product query plus company and employee size in case of a B2B lead. For example, in a website, you can embed a web form so that if a prospect wants to inquire about a particular product or service, they can fill it in with their details for more information. This helps them to learn more on the one hand, on the other, you get adequate information that can help you align with your conversion metrics.
Now as a business person who is heading an entire organization, you must know which platform houses the maximum of your leads, and from which channel most leads get engaged with your marketing efforts – your website, social media platforms, or newsletters. Ensure that you engage with them from where they are and prioritize those channels.
Again a tricky business. How do you recognize that a lead is ready to make a purchase? For instance, someone who merely reacts to your blog posts on social media is not likely ready for a purchase. But someone who has shown interest in your products/ services, responded to your communication and inquires about your price points, exhibits a purchase readiness. Without proper analysis of leads with predetermined benchmarks, if you send an unqualified lead to your sales team, it might result in a loss of resources. The only lucrative way to figure this out is to collaborate with your sales team to determine the benchmarks that differentiate a high-intent lead from a low-intent one.
Working under the same organization implies your marketing and sales teams are working to achieve a shared objective – to make your business a success. The very first instance of this ‘must-have’ collaboration is the lead conversion strategy. To make them work in order, you need to agree on a handoff cadence or a service-level agreement (SLA) that works for both teams. It typically helps you to outline an agreement between a customer and a business. But you can also use it internally to agree on terms from both your sales and marketing ends to strategize lead conversion. You can strategize this while including each team’s goals, initiatives, and accountability measures.
You have got your basics right. You are collaborating and bringing out the best work. A determined process of lead conversion. Now you are ready to determine your conversion point. Here’s how you can determine that.
Before you convert a lead, you must have several questions popped up in your head. For example, have the leads agreed to see a demonstration? What is their region/location of business operations? You can have so many criteria to check before you mark a particular lead as qualified. Structure this information-gathering process with defined criteria in BANT parameters. The acronym stands for budget, authority, need, and timeline.
You need to gather information about their budget before you proceed. Understand whether the prospect is willing and able to meet your expectations for the services you provide.
Determine whether the associate who inquired about your product/ service has the authority to make decisions for the client.
Identify whether the lead’s requirements are aligned with the products you are offering, or whether there are customizations to be made.
This is another critical point to consider as it can influence your leads’ purchasing process – a tentative date when can they ultimately make a decision.
BANT is a significant part of the sales process because it helps sales reps qualify leads. But you must understand that this information is not to be gathered as a series of yes/ no questions. Instead, you can apply BANT parameters as building blocks for the discovery call. With these parameters in mind, you can identify the best promising leads, categorize them (Hot, Warm, and Cold leads), and prioritize them for conversion.
The next crucial part here is to capture information and document them in a centralized platform and that is Zoho CRM for you.
Lead scoring is a common methodology to assign a numerical value to a lead based on their communication response, activity, and data quality. Their behavioral pattern indicates their likelihood of being converted as an opportunity. Lead scoring metrics help you optimize marketing efforts by recognizing and prioritizing leads with the highest potential.
Scoring rules help qualify prospects based on various parameters such as their behavior, demography, or other key details of their persona. The higher the score, the more likely the prospect is to become a customer. While lead scoring varies from business to business and there are multiple ways to score your leads, you can narrow them down into the following categories.
You can score your leads as per the information provided by the prospects themselves. You can capture their information from web forms, live chatbots (like Zoho SalesIQ), or surveys.
Demographic Information: You need accurate information about their age, gender, geographic location, industry type, and company size.
Job, title, role: Determine the authority/ position, management level, and particular departments in their respective organization.
Firm Information: years in operation, revenue, and annual budget.
Purchase intent: Budget availability, timeline of delivery, and particular requirements in customizations.
Interaction Touchpoints: communication response, webinar attendance, event registrations, and purchase history.
This is all about capturing and analyzing a prospect’s data points on their online activity and behavior. You can track this information through marketing automation tools and web analytics platforms.
Website behavior: Pages viewed, number of page visits, time spent on the website.
Content engagement: Blogs, whitepapers, case studies, eBooks downloads, or watching video tutorials, or webinars.
Email engagement: Email opens, click-through rates, interactions with links or attachments
Social media activity: Likes, comments, shares, mentions, followership
Online advertising response: Clicks on ads, engagement on ad campaigns
Customer support interactions: Live chat conversations and support ticket submissions.
Lead conversion becomes a fast process when your leads are of high quality. This is where your marketing efforts become effective.
When you define a lead conversion process, you must ensure that you evaluate the best marketing channels and your KPIs (Key Performance Indicators). With Zoho CRM in place, you track and run reports of your lead sources determine whether the prospects meet your criteria, and move forward with conversion decision.
Converting leads is tricky as it depends on your business. There is no pre-defined set of guidelines. So, you must select and convert your leads as per your organization’s standards which can enunciated through cross-team collaboration, strategy, and a lot of experimentation.
Next, let’s say, you are successful in converting leads. Then what? You need to turn them into paying customers by winning opportunities and repeating business. Lead conversion is a stepping stone. The entire sales process has a lot more to it. And that is where you need Zoho CRM – a cloud-based centralized platform that helps you manage all your business operations on the go. Take a look at this informative video down below.
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