The majority of your leads won’t automatically convert into sales by simply being sent through your conversion funnel. It will often require additional help to produce the conversion. Here are eight tips to help your business convert more leads into sales.

1. Offer an incentive

Name one person that doesn’t like free stuff. Offering a free gift or providing a special time sensitive discount is a great way to push leads to convert. The discount doesn’t have to be something outrageous and the free gift doesn’t have to have a high monetary value. The average consumer simply can’t pass up a free offer or a limited-time discount.

2. Ask for the sale

How is asking for the sale ground breaking marketing advice? It’s not — it’s actually common sense, but something that many businesses just don’t do. Ask your leads if they are ready to purchase and watch how many reply “yes.” They became a lead because they were interested in what your business offers. Food for thought: if your business doesn’t ask for the sale your competitor will.

3. Dangle the potential ROI carrot

If your product or service has the potential to increase your lead’s return on investment, then make sure you remind them. This is asking them, “So, when are you ready to increase your revenue?” Reminding them that you are offering a solution that will help them make more money will often push them to convert.

4. Develop a great FAQ page on your website

Many leads won’t convert because they have questions that they need answered before they pull the trigger. Answer common questions that your leads might have and make it prominent on your website. Talk to your sales team and customer service reps to put together a list of common frequently asked questions.

5. Set a time limit

Establish a “no communication” deadline to remove unresponsive leads from your marketing funnel. Example: “We have not heard from you in 30 days. Even though this will be our final communication, please feel free to reach out to us in the future if you have any questions.” This will often cause a reaction — and if it doesn’t then it prevents your sales team from wasting valuable time and energy on a dead lead.

6. Simple follow-up

A quick follow-up email or phone call asking your leads if they have any additional questions will often get them back into purchase mode. This is an effective way of quickly converting leads into sales before a lot of time passes. My company immediately contacts all of the leads that are generated through our website and then we also follow-up with them a few days later, offering to answer any questions that they might have. The simple follow-up will close a large percentage of leads for virtually every industry.

7. Make sure your email marketing stands out

There is a good chance that your leads are being marketed to by competitors as well, so you need to make sure that your emails stand out from the overly promotional emails that are likely to be flooding their inboxes. Include things like fun facts about your company or your local area — and make sure that your emails don’t read like overly aggressive and pushy sales letters. Clever emails really grab the attention of your leads and make your company stand out.

8. Ask your leads questions

If you ask your leads a question they will often reply. Something such as, “It has been over a week since we have heard from you. Have you had a chance to go over the materials and make a decision?” is a great way to apply the pressure while also opening up the dialogue to discover additional questions or concerns the lead might have.

Creating lead nurturing strategy

Lead nurturing is all about sharing relevant, personalized and targeted information to ensure that you stay on top of the buyer’s mind. In order to do this, you need to get a good overview of what types of buyers you have and what kind of information they need in each phase of the buying process.

You can do this by:

• Interviewing prospects and/or customers
• Interviewing sales team
• Mining in-house database to identify characteristics of best and/or worst customers
• Interviewing customer service
• Using keyword research to identify topics of interest
• Monitoring activity on social media sites

Once you’ve gathered this information, you can create personas which mirror your prospective customers.

Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on data about demographics & online behavior, along with educated speculation about their histories, motivations & concerns.

They help us to understand our prospective customers better, and make it easier for us to tailor content to the specific needs, behaviors, and concerns of different groups.

Understanding lead funnel & Sales Funnel

You’ve heard this before – Marketing is from Venus and Sales is from Mars because the two can never agree. Sales are always pointing the finger at Marketing and saying, “You don’t give me enough leads.” Marketing always shoots back, “Yes, we do. You just don’t follow up on the leads.” And the dilemma goes on and on.

The first step that must be taken is that marketing and sales first have to agree on the definition of a lead. How do you begin defining a lead?

We say that there are two types of leads. There are the marketing leads and there are the sales leads. Marketing leads are at the top of the funnel and Sales leads are lower in the funnel. Both are leads. It’s just a question of what you do with which lead and who owns what lead.

We defined a lead as someone who has responded to our marketing communications, whether it is from a marketing campaign, paid search campaign or direct mailing. We allocate one person per country who is responsible for logging the leads and qualifying them.

If the lead is ready to enter into a sales process, then that lead is sent to a sales person to handle in the CRM. If the lead isn’t ready to enter into a sales process, then that lead is owned by Marketing and entered into a lead nurturing process where the lead is kept warm until she became more sales-ready.

Keep in mind that every business can or will define a lead differently. The above is just an example of how you can do it.