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So you have a stellar lead-converting plan in place and you have your team working on it. The important question, however, is: are all the efforts reaping new customers? Are all those leads converting?
Sales conversion rate is a good metric to track in your sales dashboard, in order to learn the answers to these questions as it gives you the rate at which you’re converting leads into customers.
Once you start calculating it, you’ll have a snapshot of how well you are doing in terms of sales conversions.
Next step? Increasing the rate at which you convert leads into customers, which brings us to this blog post’s very purpose.
We asked 26 experts about how they increase their sales conversion rates. They had some amazing insights that we’re going to share with you below. In total, you’ll learn the following today:
Let’s dig in:
Less than 10% seems like a good sales conversion rate as the majority of the experts we surveyed say that their current sales conversion rate is somewhere less than 10%.
Research also concludes that around 10% is a good sales conversion rate with the average conversion rate across industries being 2.5%.
But how you calculate your sales conversion rate also plays an essential role here. This could be the sales you make divided by the total number of visitors you get and multiplied by 100 to get a percentage.
So if you got, say 100 visitors a month and made 20 sales, your conversion rate would be 20/100 x 100 giving you 20% conversion rate. However, our survey showed that only about 10% of the respondents calculate their sales conversion rate using this tactic.
The majority (about 35%) calculate their conversion rate by taking the number of sales and dividing them by the qualified leads. Another popular method that about 32% of the respondents use is dividing the sales made by total leads.
So, before you go about increasing your sales conversion rate, it’s important you settle on how you’d like to calculate it first. Then, emulate the 14 tips that we share with you below.
From leveraging the power of video to creating automated follow-up campaigns, our experts shared some great tips.
Let’s give you the tips first, followed by their details:
To decide which goals meet the SMART criteria, sales managers need to look at sales analytics for their teams and monitor sales KPIs, for example:
Based on these metrics, and in light of other revenue-based and activity-based goals, you can identify and set desired goals for future performance, but how to get this information?
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing an overview of your sales team’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up this Sales Analytics Overview Dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
“It starts with the quality of the leads,” notes Fistbump Media’s Dan King. “So our Sales and Marketing functions work really closely together to ensure we’re getting the right kinds of leads who are going to be most likely to convert.
From a marketing perspective, we’re not interested in just driving lots of traffic and leads. We’ll consider fewer leads a success if they are the right leads. So marketing and sales work closely to identify the reasons people make their buying decision for various products/services, and then we create the marketing campaigns to specifically hit those points.”
Get a broader overview of all the leads in your funnel using this sales leads dashboard.
Related: 11 Expert Tips for Driving More Sales Qualified Leads
“If you are firm that your product or service will offer great value, you can guarantee results,” advises CocoSign’s Caroline Lee. “This is one tactic we implemented to help customers take quick action.
Wouldn’t you take action if someone guarantees you a certain outcome? Again, there’s a lot of risk factor involved in this, and implementing this strategy is based on the value you offer.”
Besides, Lee shares you can also “infuse ‘fear of missing out,’ this helps customers to spark action. Offer a limited time incentive to attract attention.”
The team at Care Lamps has recently tried to leverage videos in order to increase their sales conversion rate. Ian Turner explains, “We recently trialed adding a lifestyle video, showcasing one of our products in use. This has increased our conversion rate of this product by 0.5%.”
Dave Popple’s team at Psynet Group has noticed some interesting results as they told their inactive leads they were moving on. Popple writes, “the most effective thing that we did was to reach out and tell them that we are assuming they are not interested (after 2 months of no movement) and that we will move on.
This is not as much of a sales tactic as it is courtesy to stop calling and filling up their email box as well as a means to keep our sales team from wasting time. This simple message put 70% of our prospects back in play and half of those 70 have signed an SOW.
We calculate conversion as sales/first meeting with a consultant. We have a system in which the sales team generates interest and the consultant has the first meeting. This is probably closest to your sales/opportunities ratio.”
A couple of our expert respondents applaud the role that a clear and optimized call to action plays in boosting the sales conversion rate.
Jennifer Neylon from My Supplement Store shares, “We have found that adding more CTA or Call to Actions throughout our content has resulted in improved sales conversions rates.
For example, on our homepage banners, we have tested adding CTA buttons that link directly to products or pages, and have found that customers are more likely to click the button embedded in the banner than the banner alone. The same goes for adding CTA buttons in email marketing, etc.”
In the same vein, CarVertical’s Arnas Vasiliauskas comments, “Our key to boosting our sales conversion rates is to reinforce the value of our content by designing strong CTA headlines and forging a unique and relevant content body. We make sure that the audience’s attention is maintained by promoting engagement all throughout the whole content.”
Wicklewood’s Rosie Axford goes into the optimization details: “Test various uses of color on call to actions along the conversion funnel. Obviously, the most important place to look when you are increasing conversions is along the conversion funnel.”
“At all points on the conversion funnel, we have hundreds of different A/B tests running. Out of all the tests we ran, the most interesting test was on the cart page. The site had a progress bar that ran along the top of the cart page that told you how close you were to getting free delivery (when you spent £29), the default design (version A) had a grey progress bar and when you achieved free delivery it would turn green.
On the other hand, version B was green by default even if you hadn’t achieved the necessary spending. We found that Version B dramatically outperformed version A. In our initial test against a small segment of the site traffic, we saw an increased conversion rate of 8%,” continues Axford.
Related: How to Write a Call to Action: Increase Your Conversions with 16 Proven Tips for Crafting CTAs
A click-worthy CTA with an equally engaging headline makes the best combination for improving your sales conversion rate opines Darren Litt from Hiya Health Products.
“Above all, you need to focus on two components — the headline and the call to action. Simplify what’s valuable or relevant about your product and state it succinctly. There may be other competing ads next to yours, so your headline should answer why your product is the solution.
Then add a clear call to action. What’s the next step you want your prospect to make? How can you present this call to action in an incentivizing way? What can you offer upfront to compel them to click and complete the call to action?”
“When consumers want to learn about a product or service, live chat is one of the most effortless ways to go, it’s super beneficial,” points out Incrementors SEO Services’ Brack Nelson. “To add live chat to your site, you can use plugins like Chatra or Zopim.”
Shawn Breyer of The Hive Law appreciates following-up with leads. Breyer explains how they did it: “We created an automated follow-up campaign. We did this by setting up retargeting and emailing leads. We placed Google Ads and Facebook Pixels on our forms’ thank you pages.
We retarget them with Display Ads, YouTube Ads, and Facebook Ads. We also send them an automated email sequence. All these pieces of content include testimonials, education, and offers. Implementing this has increased our conversions by 37%.”
At Filter King, Rick Hoskins explains they use SMS alerts to increase their sales conversion rate.
“The customer chooses when they want to receive a reminder to replace their air and/or furnace filters. Filters need to be changed regularly and with life happening it is often that they are forgotten. SMS alerts go straight to someone’s cell to remind them. It is a free service we offer, which increases the number of subscribers.
Having an SMS alert is more advantageous than an email or app alert. Often notifications are turned off for apps, but never for SMS. Direct calls and SMS are still regarded as private lines. The conversation rate from these alerts is very satisfactory.”
“Improving our sales conversion rate relies on our ongoing consumer research, website optimizations, and updates based on our website data in analytics,” Youtech’s Elizabeth Weatherby says.
“We can learn a lot when we look at our website analytics, click paths, heat maps, and more, to learn about where on our site we can make updates and optimizations to improve the online buying experience.
Our SEO efforts have allowed us to make necessary adjustments to our site design and set up to better assist users in converting. When we make updates to the way our services and vehicle offerings are presented, users gravitate towards certain styles and website booking formats than others. With these A/B tests and ongoing optimizations, we’re able to see our direct efforts when calculating sales from online bookings that came from organic users!”
Next up is another useful tip for improving your sales conversion rate – this one’s from Jonathan Aufray of GrowthHackers who says, “to improve our sales conversion rate, we created content for each part of the funnel. Whether your lead is on the brand awareness, discovery, consideration, or interest phase, we’ve got content to share with them.
This content is in different formats (Blog posts, e-books, infographics, case studies, etc.) and we’re ready to answer most of their questions or concerns.” Use this sales funnel dashboard to measure the impact of your produced content in converting leads in your sales funnel.
This gives you an edge over others as you add a human touch to your interaction with your leads. Here’s how others are doing so:
“We analyzed over 500 leads in a matrix to determine the greatest correlating factor between a raw lead and a converted sale. We used things like number of emails sent, emails responded, sales calls made, length of time from lead to conversion, locale, and industry.
We found the number one converting factor was whether or not the lead had a personalized sales call within two days after making contact. That simple action increased lead to conversion by over 200%.” – Nate Nead, SEO.co. Measure the impact personalization has in the number of sales calls booked using this sales dashboard software.
“We primarily use email outreach to target qualified prospects for our marketing firm. By implementing a more personalized approach in our outreach, showcasing the thorough background research on the company we’re speaking to, and tailoring our message towards their goals, we’ve been able to increase our response rates by more than 35%.
To take it one step further, we’ve found that telling corny dad jokes in cold outreach campaigns can lead to a 13% increase in total conversion value for us, no kidding” – Sean Chaudhary, AlchemyLeads.
“The most impactful addition we’ve made to our sales process is doing Loom videos in conjunction with our pitch deck. Adding color via voice, sound, and video to the presentation makes all the difference.
We also delayed the delivery of this pitch until we already know the prospect is serious and willing to purchase. In the past, we’ve put work into the deck and pitch too early and had wasted effort. Now we’re really careful about filtering, but when we know we have a good fit, we go all in on personalization.” – Alex Birkett, Omniscient Digital.
Two of our respondents suggest you give live demos to increase your sales conversion rate. For Nick Hollinger at Visitor Queeu, this has led to a sales conversion increase by “2-3x.”
Smartlook’s Lukas Mehnert shares another important point here: make your demo button easily accessible Mehnert elaborates, “We decided to add a ‘Request demo’ button to the top menu. That’s how wherever the user is on the product page, he has the link handy. We also worked on the demo page, listing the most important gains after signing up for a demo call. As we noticed, more visitors engaged with the demo, and it resulted in increased conversion.”
For the folks at Superior Honda, a sales CRM has been a great help. Irene Wambui Muchai Lopez comments, “Implementing a sales CRM has greatly helped in improving our sales conversion rate. Often times keeping up with leads can be quite overwhelming on busy weeks so by having a sales CRM, we’re able to better keep track of our leads and ensure no lead slips through the cracks.
We’re also able to set reminders to continue to catch up with leads until the sale is closed won or lost. We do not only catch up with leads with regards to the sales process but by sending a friendly card, you can help maintain a positive relationship with your lead so they keep you top of mind when they’re ready to close that deal.”
Browse through these free CRM dashboard examples here.
Editor’s note: Take advantage of your CRM features by tracking important data such as how many sales are individually closed by each member of your sales team. If you are a HubSpot user, here’s how you can easily track Close Rate by Sales Rep in HubSpot CRM along with some advanced options you might want to consider.
There’s a lot that you can do to convert leads into sales. Most of all, focus on making it an excellent experience for your lead – from the first touchpoint to the point they convert, even beyond so they can turn into your loyal customers.
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Masooma is a freelance writer for SaaS and a lover to-do lists. When she's not writing, she usually has her head buried in a business book or fantasy novel.
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