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  • May 8, 2018

Want More Customers? 5 Tips to Increase Conversions

As a salesperson, this should sound familiar… You’re handed a list of prospects that you’re expected to run through, contact, pitch, and hopefully convert. Such is the sales prospecting business, which can be an arduous process even when you are getting conversions.

(BTW, sales can be less arduous if you use an AI-Powered, CRM, like Spiro, that eliminates data entry and does the busy work for you…)

But what about the salespeople who are truly struggling with their prospect lists? Here are 5 tips to help you get your prospects to convert.

1. Create a Strong Need for Your Leads

This may go without saying, but it is so important for you to create a strong need for your brand. You have to entice your leads with tasty tidbits that will make them want more, and hopefully unable to live, or work, without your products or services. By creating that need, you establish two things: a) that they have a problem and you have the solution, and b) a sense of urgency that will push them to take action.

Leads are human, just like their already-converted counterparts. That is to say that they want to be sold to because they don’t know what the solutions to their problems are. That’s why they listen to a good salesperson who knows how to solve their problem. When the salesperson brings doom-and-gloom to the table, but has a ray of light to dispel all that, he or she is going to win over the audience. If you are able to show them how they can’t live without your product and you have a real solution to their very real problem, than a sale typically ensues.

2. Use Clever Calls-to-Action

There is a variety of ways to get your conversions. These are known as calls-to-action, which prompt your prospects to further engage with your brand, resulting in sales conversions (when a prospect becomes a customer). A good call-to-action directs prospects all the way to the proverbial point-of-purchase. Whatever form the call-to-action originates in — print, website, check-in, social media, etc. — it always has the distinct job of getting those prospects pushed towards the sale.

Like ye olde carnival barkers back in the day, today’s calls-to-action have to be clever enough to penetrate the dense layer of other online sales media to get in front of prospects’ eyes. Then if they can get their attention, be persuasive enough to get a response to the call-to-action. How do you do this? You have to be clever. You have to be irresistible.

So what are some ways you can use calls-to-action? Try these for starters:

  1. Print ads are the most traditional calls-to-action, typically used in sales ads. These offer some sort of sales promotion; usually a discounted sale price, buy-one-get-one promo, or other limited deal. Think of the ubiquitous ads from the 20th century.
  2. Social media is the way that contemporary sales and marketing pros reach their audience, which builds brand authority and drives traffic. Social media posts can include informative and entertaining content, and can be used to implement promotions such as contests to a wide audience.
  3. Landing pages are used to grab prospects’ attention and therefore is an excellent way to build email lists for leads before directing them to your site.

Developing a call-to-action that works is not difficult, although you may need to do some homework before venturing out and creating these calls-to-action. Once you know who your audience is, you can tailor your calls-to-action to meet your specific audience’s demands.

3. It’s All About A/B Testing

Now, once you’re ready to test the waters with your new sales content and prospecting strategy, you’ll want to test your content with your audience. They say that five times as many people read the headlines over the body copy, which means that your headlines must be both engaging and provocative enough that it compels the reader to continue on to the body of the piece. This is known as A/B testing, which is essentially when you have two different versions of the same content that you will put out there to audiences. The version that garners the most attention (or rather the most responses) is the version you want to run in your campaign. Here are some examples of what can be tested:

    1. Headlines are easy to test; try writing one or two variations of each of your headlines to see what language works best (analytics can reveal exactly this).
    2. Video content is powerful and its inclusion all but guarantees high respondent rates.
    3. Copy (long- vs. short-form) that is written for any given piece of content should have variants as well. It’s important to remember that most prospects want to get to the point when it comes to reading sales copy, so testing which copy works best is needed.

Each piece of content you push out to prospects needs to be vetted before being implemented into your campaign, as it will save you from the trial and error of haphazardly throwing the content into the wind and waiting to see where the chips may fall. You’re doing a disservice to your prospects, your sale, and yourself (or whoever created said content). A/B testing is what all the pros do, and there’s no reason why you can’t do the same.

4. Quality over Quantity

Whether it’s inbound or outbound, sales content can get out of control, particularly if you’re producing a great deal of it. One thing to remember is that you must pump out high-quality content that will be more likely to convert those prospects. You don’t need to saturate the sales market with mediocre content; that does nothing for anyone, it only floods the pipeline with useless content that doesn’t work for anyone.

Instead, focus on creating the highest quality content you can. This means using professional copy, images, videos, and links. Since you are promoting your brand, you need to maintain the branded style guide with every piece of content you create. You’ll find that your prospects will appreciate the extra time and effort put into your content, which will manifest as conversions. When in doubt over whether a piece of content is working, review the content objectively to discern what is and isn’t working (remember the A/B testing), then revise it accordingly. Do your prospects respond better to text and images, or videos and polls? Audiences are savvier these days when it comes to sales, and if you present your brand with high-quality content, your audience will take note and want to be a part of it.

5. Giving Prospects a Great Experience

Whether you’re selling a product or service, eventually you will get conversions, but how do you ensure that the prospect is satisfied with their experience throughout the conversion process? You have to give your customers a great experience. Let’s say you have a shopping cart on your website. What is the checkout process like? Are there any opportunities for upselling or cross-selling? Is there a customer rewards program or any other type of customer perk at the point-of-purchase? Always keep the customer experience in mind, and your conversions will increase.