A Few Best Practices for Turning Leads into Customers

By: Steve Heuring, Partner at Audienz Marketing

Guest AuthorsB2B technologyForecasting & Performance Management

By Steve Heuring On Sep 21, 2021

A Few Best Practices for Turning Leads into Customers

Converting B2B marketing leads into qualified sales opportunities remains a common challenge. While marketing and sales teams may both want to create great customer experiences and grow revenue, there is frequently a disconnect in the approach the two teams take. Not enough businesses have yet recognised that by connecting their marketing and sales functions they will be better able to raise the customer experience and increase sales.

So, what are our five keys to digital sales acceleration, which I would like to discuss in this article.

Map a holistic customer journey  

Marketing and sales teams often have different perspectives on the customer journey, even if their objectives are the same. Marketing may view the early stages of the customer journey in an automation platform, but once that lead becomes an opportunity it goes into a CRM system where the sales team views the information. This risks creating a disconnect between the two, both in terms of visibility and in how the teams operate. It’s critical to bring these two teams together. The marketing team should know the company’s sales process; to understand sales roles and pipeline stages so that they can design a connected journey that moves from awareness through to winning a customer. Similarly, the sales team needs to know the history of the lead and have access to as much information as possible about the journey the prospect has taken.

Look for buying signals

The key to getting to qualified opportunities faster is to set up ways of measuring the prospect’s propensity to buy. This is about determining where they are in their journey – are they researching the market; evaluating which products or services to buy or are they actually ready to make a purchase. The answers will determine whether to nurture the lead or move them into the opportunity stage of the sales funnel. Here are a few proven tactics you can use to capture this information:

Incorporate a short survey into your campaign and include a simple question to ask where they are on their buying journey
In the registration form for gated content, include an optional question about where they are in the process
Use chatbots on landing pages to make it easy and instantaneous for prospects with purchasing questions to connect with you
Always include a “contact me now” option in the buyer’s path

There are also AI-enabled prospecting data solutions available that can predict readiness to buy. These tools are increasingly effective at connecting marketers with targeted audiences that have a high propensity to purchase.

Inspire direct engagement  

Campaign activity offers useful data for personalizing prospect engagement. For example, those who downloaded a white paper on one subject might respond well to an invitation to a short online workshop on the same topic.

An effective way to inspire your target audience to engage more directly is inviting them to exclusive “roundtable” events. This helps establish trust and deeper engagement by enabling potential customers to join in a discussion with their peers around common challenges they face and best practices for addressing those challenges. For example, a company offering data security solutions could host a roundtable for Chief Security Officers to discuss industry challenges around cloud security.

Another way to reduce the barrier to direct engagement is to invite groups of prospects to “immersion sessions” to get hands-on with overcoming blockers and driving toward their desired business outcomes.

Recently, Audienz helped a client identify that a major blocker for prospects buying cloud solution was the lack of a clear roadmap on what happens after they make a purchasing decision. Together, we developed a “Create Your Cloud Roadmap” workshop, to engage in hands-on, immersive road mapping sessions with prospects. This kind of thing builds trust by offering something helpful to potential customers.

Reinvent the offer

There is a reason many offers involve discounted pricing. They are often very effective. This is an important part of the offer strategy, and it is worth the effort to assess your competitors’ offers and make sure yours sets you apart.

But, beyond pricing, in B2B technology many purchasers prioritize other criteria, such as ease of deployment or the ability to customize their solution. Technology sellers can offer a lot of value by taking a consultative view. Consider offers for free or discounted technical services such as deployment consulting and training.

How you communicate the offer is critical. Pricing and offers for technology products can often be complicated. In many cases, communicating the offer in a clear way and helping customers navigate the offers available to them is as important as the offer itself. It’s important to spend the time and effort needed to develop effective offer communications that can be used by both marketing and sales teams.

End To End Measurement

A key part of accelerating success in your campaigns is how you track and optimize results. It is helpful here to create a view of your buyer’s journey that includes the metrics you use to measure success at each phase. Even if marketing and sales data resides in two different systems, creating a simple overview will keep you on top of what optimizations need to be made to your campaign tactics. When developing campaign reporting, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with data, so prioritize the metrics that are most informative and that you can act on. At the end of the day, it’s about reaching your audience with something useful and relevant to them, and these metrics can help you keep track of where you’re successful in these efforts.