Whether a lead comes through your website, or from Google, Yelp or paid advertising, many business owners admit that they struggle with taking the lead from prospect to customer.
So you're getting more leads from the Internet, but you may feel that they aren't good. Or maybe they are quality leads, but you're having trouble converting your leads due to a less than stellar sales process.
Video Summary: Getting More Sales from Online Leads
The key to turning your leads into sales is to understand your buyer's journey (the psychology of your customer) once they have called you or filled out a form on your website.
By understanding your customer you're able to take them through the following process to turn your website visitors into sales:
- Be empathetic to the needs and concerns of your customer.
- Ask for the sale by offering your lead with a quote or free proposal.
- Follow-up with your lead based on the time frame which your customers typically make a decision.
- Nurture your leads through automation.
Keep in mind, turning prospects into customers is based on how you follow-up.
By implementing these steps, which we discuss in our 6-step game plan process, you'll pick up extra leads (and revenue) that you were perviously leaving on the table.
Watch the video above for a more in-depth overview on how to increase sales in your business.
If you want to know how we've helped businesses like yours grow substantially, download a free copy of our 6 Step Inbound Marketing Playbook.
Quotes to Consider
Full Video Transcript
Hey, what’s going on?
You know, I know a lot of you out there are struggling to make sales after you get these web leads. I hear from a lot of business owners, talked to a lot of companies that are finally starting getting leads from the web. Maybe they’re getting them from Google, maybe they’re getting them from Yelp, maybe they’re getting them through their blog, maybe they’re getting them through paid advertising,
What I hear often and I want to address in this video is I hear that the quality of the leads are not good, or I hear that the leads just aren’t converting,
What I want to address in this video is actually sort of a mini case study and it happened to me, so I want to put you through the story that I went through and show you an example of a marvelous, magnificent sales process that happened after the lead was generated, right?
So you're spending all this money to get leads online whether it’s AdWords, whether you're using Yelp and Yelp Ads and Google, whatever it may be. Maybe you're outsourced, outsourcing the marketing like you would to a company like ours or maybe you're doing it in-house, but either way, you're spending money to acquire a lead. We call it cost per acquisition or cost per lead,
If you understand the cost of acquisition in your business, then you're going to understand how to wire a process like the one that I’m about to describe.
And I’m in my house right now. I’ve got to catch a plane. My son is graduating from college this week, so… But this was on my mind, so I wanted to share with you:
I’m driving down the freeway, and a rock busts my windshield, right? So rock busts my windshield at 65 miles an hour, now at this point, I’ve never had a windshield busted like this and I was really nervous to whether or not I should even drive home or not. So, I finally get the car home, but guess what? Now it’s Saturday.
Saturday, and this was Friday by the way, so Saturday, I am now wondering, can I get this windshield fixed over the weekend? Because I’ve got a massively busy schedule on Monday, right? So what do I do?
I do like anybody else, I google "windshield repair Las Vegas," right? Trying to find windshield repair companies. so at this point, I don’t have a clue that anybody’s open. So I get on the phone with this company, and here’s how the call goes, and I’m going to go through this as fast as I can but there are so many nuggets inside of this call.
So I get on the phone and I start talking with this lady, she starts doing her typical probing: is the car safe? Et cetera, et cetera, starts getting my name and information, and she’s super, super polite. Let me be really clear about this, super polite, so I think that’s part one.
Number one, she was very empathetic to my needs and my concerns. She, like, literally walked me into the understanding that they said, “We definitely understand where you're coming from. We want to do everything we can to get you taken care of.”
Well, what I didn’t know until later in the call, three minutes into the call, was that they weren’t even open that weekend. Matter of fact, many of the windshield repair companies, they’re not open on the weekends, so we take this call through, she’s gathering information from me, she’s getting some information, and I say, of course, the magical question and this is where it comes in, like if you are in an industry where people typically want to get three quotes or free proposals, and it happens whether you're in an emergency service business, it happens in professional services, it happens consulting,
So you're probably dealing with people that want to shop around to a certain degree, and this is where we hear a lot of business owners complain, is that leads aren’t good from the internet.
Well, truth of the matter is you're not doing what this company does, I guarantee you, and if you do this which is something we talk about in our six-step game plan process, which is actually step number four and five, you're going to pick up some extra leads and extra revenue that you are just leaving on the table.
So here’s how the call went:
So I find out that A, they’re not open, but B, I asked the magical question: How much does it cost? Right? What does it cost me to get this thing fixed? So she gives me a price.
Now, the price, it is what it is. I had no idea though in context because she was the first company I called. I had no idea if that was a good price or a bad price. So what do I typically say? I’m a typical consumer, what do I say?
“Hey, well, let me shop around. Thanks for your time.”
She knows, here’s what’s important, she understands the buyer’s journey in their business so well that she knew that if I got off the telephone that I was going to likely call a competitor that was cheaper than their offering was. Now, not by much, but probably by about 15%, and because they’re a nationwide company, they advertise and do some things that probably smaller companies don’t do.
She knew that I was going to find a cheaper price, so here’s what she did, this is magical, you guys, listen to this: So she’s still very nice and sweet. She’s not trying to hard close me whatsoever. She simply says to me, “May I give you this quote? I understand you're going to call some other companies, but may I send you this quote via e-mail?”
And I’m thinking, “Well, why sure, that would be great, then I don’t have to remember it,” so she gets my e-mail address over the telephone with permission to send me the quote, so we finished that part of that dialogue, but here is magic, here’s where the magic comes in: Without high-pressuring me, she says, “If I could give you a 20% discount right now, would you go ahead and schedule the appointment for Monday when we open, so we can have your technician come out to you?” And that’s where the magic came in.
Again, in sales, once you’ve paid to get the lead to call you or fill out a form on your website, you have to really understand the psychology of your buyer so you can do everything you possibly can to win that deal.
The funny thing is I still said to her, I said, “You know,” I said, “That sounds cool, but I don’t know if 20% off the price you gave me is a good price, and as any consumer you’d understand I’d want to get kind of the best price,” and she says, “Of course, of course.” She goes, “But I can certainly send you the e-mail with the quote so that you have it by Monday.” I said, “Yes.” She says, “Thank you for your time,” blah, blah, blah, “We hope to have the opportunity to work with you on Monday.”
So again, this is Saturday, everything’s closed. She knows, probably, that I’m not going to call anybody else or get anybody else on the phone until Monday and I’m not going to make a decision until Monday, but what she understands, what she understands, what the company understands, what the marketing and sales team understands is that I’m going to make a decision within the next 24 to 48 hours, and it probably doesn’t matter if it’s a Saturday or a Monday or a Tuesday, but this is an emergency situation. I’ve got to get it fixed ASAP. I got things to do, I got appointments, I got kids, so they understand the buyer’s journey. So I get the quote within probably 15 or 20 minutes via e-mail.
Here’s where the good stuff comes in. We talk about it in terms of automated nurturing in step four of our game plan.
What they did was I ended up receiving an e-mail not—so I got that on Saturday, and then within 24 hours, I got a follow-up e-mail asking if I received the quote and if I’ve reviewed the quote and if I had any questions about the quote, and so I didn’t receive any more phone calls, and then Monday morning, what do you think happened? The minute they opened, one of their sales techs called me, probably 8:00 in the morning because again, they understand that if I get on the phone with another quote or two for a windshield repair company, they’re still a little bit above the market, and again, they’re a nationwide company, their price would have ended up not being bad,
So here’s the punchline:
- A, she asks for permission during an emergency scenario, emergency service call, knowing that I’m going to make a decision ASAP. She asks for permission to send me the quote via e-mail.
- That was step number one, just in case step number two which asked for the sale, just in case when she asked for the sale when she gave me the discount, in case that didn’t happen she still had my e-mail to give me the quote.
- Step three was I got a second e-mail within that 24 to 48-hour window just validating that I got the quote, and if I had any questions to give them a call.
- Four, they gave me a call first thing on Monday morning to try to get back into my top of my awareness before I called another company.
So messaging there is that you got to understand your buyer’s journey and the time frame under which they’re going to make a decision.
It’s not uncommon for a consumer to want to shop around. That’s just normal. That’s not their fault. They’ve been taught to do it and they should do it, and if you’re a prudent buyer of services and goods, you’d probably do it too.
What you’ve got to do though, is when you think about marketing and sales, you’ve got to connect those two. The leads aren’t bad; it’s very possibly your sales process is lacking what we call the follow-up necessary to take a normal buyer through the buyer’s journey and get them to the finish line,
So we say that you, A, have to understand your buyer’s journey. Psychologically, you’ve got to understand what’s going in their mind at that time.
Number one, I was inconvenienced.
Number two, I had things to do, and I was in a hurry.
Number three, I wanted to save money, and they understand that that happens to their customers every single day, so what they’ve done is the orchestrated their process around, A, a high quality sales call, a high quality inbound call, B, an information gathering sequence, C, what I would call a relationship development process because again, I got off the phone with her and I felt completely taken care of even though they were closed. I mean in the way they took the call to the process before they even told me they were closed, because I was talking to a call center, was brilliant, number four, I got the automated follow-up e-mail with the quote, number five, I got the follow-up the next day, number six, it was passed onto the sales team and they called me, and not only did they call me that day, they called me twice [laughing] that day.
So here’s the punchline, I ended up not going with them not because of their price. Their price ended up being within $10 of another company that I called, but it happened to be that a client of ours at our agency happened to be in the field and of course I gave him a call because we got a personal relationship with him.
But I got to tell you that as we wrap up this video, this messaging, this dialogue around getting the lead from the web and then having a very decided and considered process for how you're following up in sales,
You know we say that the fortune is in the follow-up,
So many of you out there are working hard to get these leads but you're not thinking through the follow-up. You’ll say, “Well, we followed up once, or we gave them the quote, or we sent them the proposal,” and then there’s nothing else that happens after that.
Let me tell you, if I had another rock break my windshield any time soon, I would have no problem calling that company back and I wouldn’t even search anywhere else assuming our guy or our client was not in the business anymore or out of the area, what have you.
So I want to wrap the video up by simply saying, understanding your buyer’s journey, we talk so much about and it’s not the sexiest thing we talk about when it comes to online marketing. Traffic leads and all this other stuff seem to be more exciting, but really understanding your buyer’s journey and then building a process that is going to map round their journey, emotionally and empathetically, is really where you're going to win a lot more sales in your business.
So listen, let me know if you liked this video. Let me know if you like these tips. If you do, be sure to like or subscribe to our channel, share this with a friend, and note something in the comment that if you got a takeaway from this. Let me know if you’d like me to create more videos like this.
My name is Darrell Evans; I’m a co-founder with Yokel Local Internet Marketing. I got to catch a plane and see my son graduate. It’s a really exciting weekend for us in our family. Take care.
