5 Ways to Bridge The Gap Between Lead Gen & Sales
Bridging The Gap Between
Lead Generation & Sales
Want actual sales, not just leads?
Companies struggle between generating leads and creating sales. It’s painful, stressful, and confusing. Your company spent all that cash to get leads in the door. Now, it’s time to get that return on investment.
How do companies bridge the gap between lead gen and sales?
What can they do on the marketing side of things to help move prospects through the sales pipeline to support sales teams?
Here are five ways companies can bridge the gap between lead generation and sales.
5 Ways Companies Can
Convert More Leads into Sales
#1 – Email Campaigns -> Warm Phone Prospecting or Pre-Scheduled Calls
The challenge with telemarketing is focus. Where does your outbound sales team focus their energies to produce results?
Email marketing can help with that.
Simply send an email campaign to your list. Monitor who opens and clicks the email. Then, export that information from your email platform and pass it along your sales team to follow-up with the people who clicked and opened.
Of course, you’ll need phone numbers associated with email address to make this strategy successful. And, please don’t tell them that, “Hey, I see you opened our email!” in a phone call.
But by focusing on the prospects who are engaged with email marketing, your sales team can focus on the 20% of the list that will drive 80% of the results (#ParetoPrinciple).
Depending on the volume of engagement your marketing emails receive, your sales team may even want to further segment the leads by running their own, slightly more customized email campaigns using CRM tools like those included HubSpot or Stream CRM.
Doing so will not only further segmented your warm leads from the red-hot-ready-to-buy-leads, but prospecting campaigns can also be designed to pre-schedule phone conversations, cutting back on your team having to play phone tag with prospective customers.
Click HERE to Learn How to Automate Your Very Own Email Prospecting Campaigns
#2 – PPC Campaigns -> Email Nurture Sequence
The purpose of a pay per click (PPC) advertising campaign is to capture customer information – not necessarily provide information.
For higher volume PPC campaigns, implementing an email nurture sequence gives your sales team an opportunity to share more information about a product or service so that the prospect is primed and ready to convert to a customer.
How does it work?
Think of a PPC campaign that is using an ebook as an offer on the landing page. The customer inputs their information and downloads the ebook. The download then triggers an email nurture sequence with several emails sent over a period of time that peaks the interest of the prospect and inspires them to learn more.
Without an email nurture sequence your sales team has to follow-up with each prospect individually. An email nurture sequence multiplies the effort of your team, and increases the engagement of prospects.
#3 – SEO -> Pop-Up Campaigns -> Automation Sequences
Organic traffic from SEO provides reliable (and predictable) traffic each month. This REALLY helps in forecasting sales and growing your business. You know that if you rank well for a keyword that is searched “X” number of times per month, then “X” percentage of that traffic will convert to leads.
But what about the much larger percentage of traffic that won’t convert?
For that traffic, implementing a pop up and correlating an automation sequence will help maximize this repeatable traffic.
What’s an email nurture sequence? And what pop up should you implement to capture visitor information?
The pop ups we see work best are exit intent pop ups with compelling offers. Exit intent pop ups appear when a visitor is about to leave the site without completing your desired outcome (i.e. – filling out a contact form). Customize this exit intent pop up with content related to the landing page, and then build out an email automation sequence using a service like MailChimp to send targeted emails to that new sign up.
These popups increase the number of people in your pipeline while email nurturing sequences give prospects reasons to convert to a customer.
#4 – Lead Inquiry -> Remarketing -> Branding During Sales Cycle
It’s a pet peeve of every salesperson. You have a great phone call with a prospect. You’re 90% certain they’re going to convert to a customer. Then, they go dark.
Remarketing to inbound leads keeps your company top of mind and helps prospects come back without your sales team doing multiple rounds of outreach (and sometimes, discounting!).
How do you remarket to leads?
Set up conversion tracking on your site. Utilize tracking codes from the likes of Facebook (i.e. Facebook Pixel) and Google (i.e. Google Analytics Pixel). Run specific branding ads to your group of recently converted leads so they see your brand on the sites they visit most.
You can utilize tracking codes, or you can upload a lead list of contact information to social media sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter to remarket to prospective customer bases.
Remarketing is relatively inexpensive, makes your company appear bigger than you are, and again – maximizes the efforts of your sales team.
#5 – Postcards -> Unique Follow-Up
Direct mail. Yes, it’s really a way to bridge the gap between lead gen and sales.
Imagine you abandoned your cart while shopping. Two days later you receive a postcard in the mail with a $5 off coupon for the product you abandoned.
Think that would help convert a prospect into a customer?
Even ff it doesn’t, your company will certainly stand out from all the noise that brands compete with online.
As more online marketing tactics emerge to capture the interest of customers online, unique offline follow-ups will help your company stand out that much more and close more deals.
For more unique follow-up ideas and strategies n how to harness the lost art of direct mail marketing read, Explode Your Book of Business by Sending Gifts and Notes They’ll Never Forget.
Bridging The Gap Between
Lead Gen & Sales
There are companies who do bridge the gap between lead gen and sales really well. They’re the ones who are integrating SEO, PPC, Email, and Social into their sales efforts. They are also measuring the ROI of these efforts by taking a look at their inbound close rates.
Want actual sales?
Try out the tactics above to achieve a mutually symbiotic relationship between your marketing and sales teams. Your sales team won’t see an increase in their efforts – just an increase in close rates for inbound leads.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Brett Farmiloe is the CEO of Markitors and an advisor to an organizational leadership degree program. Search “digital marketing company” and you should see Markitors on the first page of Google nationwide.
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