One of the most important steps in the profit formula is to convert 10% more leads into paying customers. If that seems like a mammoth task, you’re certainly not alone. Many business owners struggle to execute the last step in their sales funnels—completing the actual sale!
Unfortunately, I’ve found that this problem is often self-inflicted. Many businesses roll out the most impressive marketing and advertising strategies, only to leave prospects hanging once they walk through their doors.
Here are some key tips to help you convert more of your prospects and leads into customers!
1. List the Needs of Your Ideal Customers
Every customer has a motivation for buying a product or service. It could be to solve a certain problem, avoid a potential problem, or fulfill a specific desire. As a business owner, it’s your responsibility to make sure that your entire staff is trained on how to interact with a customer that has these problems or needs.
Remember, customers visit your business with specific pain points. If you and your staff can’t alleviate those pain points, they will search elsewhere—resulting in many lost sales opportunities for your business!
2. Educate Your Prospects
You can’t expect a prospect or lead to purchase your product or service if they don’t understand what it is, how it works, and why they might need it.
This is why education is such an important cog in the sales funnel. Long before you hope to convert your lead into a paying customer, you should be educating them. Today, there are countless ways to achieve this. You might create blog content, white papers, or eBooks. You might create explainer videos, case studies, or maybe even your own podcast!
Find the channels that work best for your business, and consistently create new material to help educate your prospects. Remember, educated prospects become customers more often, and the customers who know more buy more.
3. Make It Easy to Complete a Purchase
Sometimes we can get in our own way. In many cases, there are leads that are ready and willing to buy, yet we make them jump through a half-dozen hoops in order to complete a purchase.
Evaluate all of your sales procedures and identify your “sales killers.” These are obstacles that make it more difficult for someone to buy from you. Anything that gets in the way of your prospect completing a sale isn’t worth it!
4. Continuously Invest in Employee Sales Training
Simply put, trained employees sell more. Why do you think that business owners, executives, or high-level managers often get involved in a high-ticket sale? Most of the time, it’s because they understand their products and services better than their other employees.
Of course, this is the wrong approach, as the business owner or manager ends up wasting time on something that another employee could achieve with a little training.
Train your employees so that they understand your products and services inside and out. This way, they will be able to stand on their own two feet when selling any of your business’s products—regardless of the number on the price tag!
5. Write a Script for All of Your Sales Employees
Consistent messaging is highly important for any business. The last thing you want is for one employee’s messaging to be entirely different than that of another employee’s messaging.
Get all of your sales employees on the same page by writing a script for them to follow. This doesn’t need to be a detailed sales pitch that they must repeat verbatim, but it should include a list of powerful questions that will help your employees best identify the prospect’s needs.
6. Manage Customer Expectations Before They Buy
It’s important for every business to deliver on its promises. If you can’t guarantee something, make sure your customer knows that before they complete the purchase.
Otherwise, your customer may act out in a handful of ways. At best, they may leave you for your competitor or return the product. At worst, they may leave you a scathing review online, or in certain cases, take legal action against you!
7. Lean on Social Proof
Customers are taught to be skeptical of advertising but are much more receptive to recommendations, reviews, and testimonials.
Fortunately, there are several ways to leverage these tools and convert more of your leads into customers. Display positive reviews on your website or social media page, or create short video testimonials that can be circulated online!