siliconindia | | December 20218In FOCUSHOW TO LEARN MORE ABOUT YOUR LEADS & INCREASE CONVERSIONSBY si TEAMGenerating leads is a vital challenge that many businesses face, but focusing too much on lead gen at the expense of lead nurture and closing sales is a serious waste of resources.Sales conversion rates can vary wildly by industry, but 45 percent of the firms polled recently by DataBox reported a rate of less than 10 percent. This means that regardless of the situation you're in, the lion's share of your leads will inevitably become dead ends. Rather than focusing only on how to continually increase the flow of incoming leads, it's important to also work on improving your conversion in tandem.This is especially true if you find lead gen-eration is an expensive process for your business.Sometimes your conversion rate will stay stubbornly low because of the industry you're in. If this is the case for your company, it's all the more important to be able to quickly disqualify the leads that are unlikely to convert. This frees up time for your nurture efforts and sales reps to follow up with more promising options.To a great extent, knowing to which leads you ought to pay the most attention comes down to having access to the right information. With poor data, it's hard to know who is unlikely to convert and who you should get on the phone with as soon as possible. This is what lead scoring is all about.The more you can learn about your leads before you contact them, the more likely you are to be able to convert them. On the flip side, if you learn something undesirable about a lead, you can disqualify them faster too. This article will help to bridge your information gap.Work backwards based on what's already workingOne way to learn about how you should be prioritizing is to focus on the loyal customers you already have.Engage with them and ask them if they are willing to tell you more about themselves. You could incentivize them by entering them into a raffle for free products or subscriptions if you find not many are willing to talk.From this data gathering, you can better understand what traits are common in those who have previously converted and start to compile useful `buyer persona' sketches. Then you can sort leads based on whether they meet the same criteria. For instance, you might find that of the current customer base, most have less than ten employees, so you can target other companies who are of a similar size.You may find the assumptions you make of your customer base don't actually reflect reality. This can also inform shifts in your lead generation too as you hone in on the groups most likely to buy.While you can use manual research to enrich your leads, for most businesses, it's better to invest in a tool that does it for you instead
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