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Is your current lead generation strategy meeting–or exceeding–your marketing and sales goals? If your answer was no, read on.
An audit of your buyer personas can help solve three common lead generation workflow issues your sales and marketing teams may encounter. Rock-solid buyer personas will help you understand the intricacies of your buyer’s journey and tweak roadblocks in your sales pipeline.
The result? A streamlined sales process, optimized website content, and improved lead qualification.
Inquiry Calls That Lead Nowhere
The more you know about your prospects, the better you can focus your content to meet their needs and position your company as a specialist.
An incoming call from a prospective customer is an opportunity that all sales reps should capitalize on. However, if these calls do not result in the caller being led further down the sales funnel, you have a sales issue that requires immediate attention.
Understand Your Prospects and Where They are in the Sales Process
It’s crucial to record every inquiry call and review the tape as part of team training and your workflow audit. One common issue we see? The sales rep talks more than they listen during an introductory call. Organizations hire sales personnel for their ability to speak to the product and customer experience; help them learn how to engage and listen as well.
As a general rule, sales reps shouldn’t speak for more than 60 seconds at a time. After one minute, pause to allow the caller to get a word in or ask if they have further questions. The more the customer speaks, the more you’ll be able to come up with questions for optimizing the buyer persona.
When your sales team actively listens, they learn details like the caller’s pain points which they can then speak to and help the prospect to the next stage of a buyer’s journey. This engagement also helps your marketing team develop better lead magnets which speak directly to current prospects’ pain points. Active listening also builds rapport with the prospect and builds the foundation for a long term relationship with a future customer.
Over time, this provides your organization with a wealth of information you can incorporate into your lead generation strategy and digital sales content. When you use a third-party service for your lead generation campaigns, relay this information to them so they can create content, contact forms, and social media ads that are optimized. Be sure to share your detailed buyer persona business brief with your B2B lead generation agency.
Check Out The Ultimate Guide to B2B Lead Generation
Price Callers Who Take Up Sales Reps’ Time
One problem is callers who contact you to inquire about the price of your products or services. These are potential customers shopping around for the most affordable services. They can end up taking valuable time from your sales reps without resulting in a purchase. However, it’s possible to turn this demographic into the ideal buyer.
Below are a few strategies to help.
List Pricing on Your Website
First, minimize simple price calls from tire kickers who are not a good fit for your sales team to interact with. List your available price points directly on your website; you can always have a contact form for custom pricing for enterprise accounts or custom packages while listing your basic pricing models online. In fact, you should have a page dedicated solely to pricing for your various services or products on your site. Many B2B business pricing pages are ranked in the top 5-10 most viewed pages on their websites. The consumer interest is there; you may be losing potential customers who want to have a touch free sales experience and won’t call your team with questions. Having the information readily available on your website is a simple yet effective way to improve user experience.
Discuss the Value Provided
Another price caller strategy: create a pricing guide for your sales reps to review (or even a customer-facing pricing sheet they can share). This comprehensive guide lists the value of your service and the benefits customers get in relation to what they pay. With this information, your representatives may be better able to take price callers to the next stage of the sales funnel and a step closer to closing sales.
This guide should also contain proven conversion strategies, such as:
- Industry research that validates your claim about benefits and advantages associated with your service.
- An explanation of how the cost of your service or products helps the caller save money in the long run.
- A section on how the service/product has benefited past clients and how their life or business improved as a result. (Consider this the mini-case study section.)
- A limited-time offer, such as a free trial, that’s only valid if the prospect acts within a certain period after the phone call. Consider this your enticement, or call-to-action.
Declining Web Traffic or Qualified Leads
Web traffic and lead quality are great indicators of the quality of your content and website.
Have your analytics revealed declining website traffic?
Your first strategy should be to reevaluate your keyword practices. When your website traffic declines, it's likely that the keywords you’re targeting are too competitive or have low keyword density (they don’t have sufficient monthly search volumes to bring in traffic). It’s important that your lead generation consultant split-test keywords to determine which phrases are most lucrative to help bring new visitors to your site.
Focus on High-quality Content For Better Sales Enablement
Beyond keywords, also evaluate the nature of your content marketing. The lack of relevant or compelling content is a common problem that contributes to declining website traffic. What questions or phrases are your target customers searching for on Google when researching the services/products you provide? You want to be sure that your online content provides answers to the questions your prospects are asking Siri, Alexa, or other virtual search assistants. If your content isn’t relevant and engaging even people who do find your website will become one time visitors (a category Marketers dread) if your pages, blog, and other digital content don’t give them a reason to return.
Your content should talk about the customers’ needs more than the company itself. In other words, the website content shouldn’t read like an advertisement. The same goes for content on your company’s social media page.
Pointers For Compelling, SEO Friendly Digital Content
- Save the call-to-action and promotional language for the final paragraph.
- The content should be easy to skim with plenty of headers, sub-headers, and bullet points. Make the reader’s job easy and break up the text.
- Keep the paragraphs short to make the content friendly for mobile readers and those of us with short attention spans.
- The content should be informative and backed by research. Incorporate studies from independent sources to lend legitimacy to your claims.
- The content should benefit the reader in some way, either through actionable information or through educational information.
- Break up the paragraphs with images or even better, infographics. However, don’t overdo it as too many images can make a site slower to load. Be sure to optimize your images for quick load times.
- For long-form content, include “key takeaway” sections that summarize the important points in a few short sentences.
Driving quality traffic to your website is about being customer-centric, not talking about how great your services are. Remember to address customer pain points. After all, they came to your website because they have an issue that you may be able to resolve. Address the specific pain points and follow up with a clear-cut solution, which will drive the ideal customer into taking the next step.
Improve Your Market Research, Inbound Sales, and Digital Lead Generation
Is your website getting as many leads as it should? Use our website lead calculator to find out. Whittington Consulting can be of further service: our inbound marketing experts can assess your current marketing initiatives and metrics to provide strategic feedback to create your optimal sales funnel.
We’ll build the ideal buyer personas for your brand and industry to increase conversions in your strategic marketing plan. Check out our ultimate guide to B2B lead generation for further marketing advice and best practices.
