How to Improve Lead Conversions with CRM

How to Improve Lead Conversions:

How to improve lead conversions is a question that most sales and marketing professionals think about often. You are spending money to drive leads and improve your lead conversion rates with the hopes and objective to build more pipelines resulting in increased revenue.

However, first, do you know what your lead conversion rate is? What is the conversion rate by sales rep, by lead source? I bet most reading this cannot answer those questions, this is the first problem. How can you improve anything that you don’t know about current performance levels? How would you track improvement? How big is your lead conversion problem? The old adage “inspect what you expect” is incredibly important in sales.

Proper Sales Follow Up is Critical:

Do sales professionals intentionally ignore leads? Maybe in some cases but I don’t believe that professionals who have a large portion of their income based on performance intentionally ignore lead follow-up. So why, statistically, are numbers for proper leads follow-up so poor? For example, from some metrics, only 25% of salespeople make a 2nd attempt to contact and new lead, then they stop. Alarmingly, 48% of salespeople never make an attempt, and studies have also shown that 85% of sales are made on the fifth up to twelve contacts!

Sales professionals are as busy as everyone else today. When sales reps have 50, 100, or more leads to follow up on and X hours in the day, they tend to focus on leads that are active and engaged.

The problem with this approach is that less than 50% of new leads are ready to buy when they first contact your company. Let’s do the math, out of 100 leads, 50 are ready to buy. 25 will get qualified, now your close rate comes into play. Do you know your close rate on new leads? If not that’s a problem as well. Let’s say your close rate is 50% (a good rate of qualified leads to revenue) out of 100 leads you are now down to 12-13 leads.

If you had a solid lead follow-up and marketing nurture process, the research shows that you have a 70% greater chance at turning those 50 not ready to buy leads into revenue. One of the easiest ways to increase revenue is to simply convert more leads that you already have to revenue.

A CRM Solution:

Modern business solutions, such as ones designed just for proper follow-up for sales targeting both prospects and customers, are called Customer Relationship Management or CRM. The problems identified above can largely be traced to one cause – not having a sales tool like Power-CRM. Power-CRM is an easy-to-use, affordable, and effective sales tool to ensure that you have your sales team following up on early sales leads in the correct process. In a sense, the built-in, Business Process Flow (BFL) feature will mandate specific actions to be taken so that leads do not get ignored, remembering that it will take numerous attempts to qualify a lead, then nurture to close.

If you were using Power-CRM:

You would know your sales metrics and KPI’s – Power-CRM automatically tracks over 30 sales performance statistics (lead conversion rates, average response times on new leads, close rates, etc).
Lead conversions would improve – Power-CRM comes with a complete, out-of-box, best-practice lead/prospect management process that will assure every lead is properly followed up by sales.
Have a tightly integrated CRM system to Microsoft Outlook so that all of your new leads and existing contacts are synchronized into one solution.