Why? Let’s do some quick napkin math…(I’ll keep it simple for illustrative purposes)

Say you have 10 leads on the go (that’s people interested in whatever your core offering is).

And on any given week or month you’re pretty good at converting 2 of them into clients. Great!

Now let’s say you want to grow your business or cashflow. You need more clients or sales to do that. What are your options?

Option A) Go and get 10 more leads and convert another 2 customers, OR

Option B) Get better at converting your leads so you can convert 4 leads out of every 10 into customers.

Which one to do you think pays off better in both the short term AND long term? Hint: The one that doesn’t require you to learn how to generate more leads.

Now we’ll add one more number into the mix, your average revenue per customer (let’s go with $2500) and then see what happens if you get 10 leads per month over the course of 12 months.

Which Would Your Prefer?

It becomes pretty clear right?

OBVIOUSLY you’d go with Option B – Better Conversions.

Option B has a massive list of benefits:

• Cheaper marketing
• Cheaper cost-of-acquisition
• Cheaper leads
• Higher average revenue per lead
• Higher sales and revenue overall

PLUS, by converting more leads, you get more clients, which means more testimonials, which in turn helps convert more clients again. So you actually get better and getting better…Yay! for exponential returns right?

OK, so how do you go about getting better at converting leads?

Most people think they need to become some sales gun, or hammer the phones and “push for the close”. Pictures of sleezy car salesman come to light.

But nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, these days doing anything remotely like that just kills you dead in the water.

If you hadn’t noticed already, there’s a MASSIVE turn back towards person-to-person relationships. How things used to be. Good o’l fashion, genuine people helping each other out.

Things like talking over the phone, video calls, extra special gifts to make people feel like you actually care and that you’re not out to make a quick buck. These are all things that fall under the category of building brand loyalty.

In addition to this article, I highly recommend reading up on Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos. He literally wrote an entire book on how brand loyalty and the culture around it built their success.

For now though, let’s look at some quick and simple things you can do to help boost your brand loyalty, generate more engaged leads and ultimately convert more leads into customers.

How To Convert More Leads Into Clients

First thing to remember is put yourself in your customer’s shoes.

What does their day to day life look like? Is it hard for them to put aside the money that’s needed for your service? If it is, what can you do to make that easier for them?

When you answer those questions, it’s time to be empathetic and to show your leads and clients you actually do care.

#1
Give Something First

There have been hundreds of studies that have shown people are more prone to give something to you if they received something first.

I always like to refer to Gary Vaynerchuk’s book “Jab, jab, jab, right hook”. The basic premise is to first give, give, give before you ask. (Side tangent: We mentioned Gary in our business experts to follow blog post)

Ok, but how can you use this principle in your everyday business life? Simple…

Consider giving out free samples to your customers. Whether it be a free hour of consultation or a free trial of your service or a sample pack of your products. Give your customers a chance to try out your product first. Give them some way to “taste-test” or “try before they buy”.

Not sure how this can be done in your business? Consider this example. Vervita sells high-end juicers to restaurants and kitchens in parts of Europe. They know their potential customers very well, and because of this, they send out a fully functional product to their interested potential customers for a 15 day trial.

They use their CRM to know who showed interest in their product and ship them their sample product NO STRINGS ATTACHED. Can you imagine? But you know what the most fascinating thing is?

They say, after doing this tactic, only 1 out of every 15 don’t buy their product. Being given free samples is not the only factor that enabled this, but we’ll cover those shortly

Trust your product, trust your customer, and give it a go.    

#2
Group & Segment Your Customers

The second most crucial activity Vervita executed on was segmenting their customers (which simply means putting them into groups). And far from what you might think, they use an amazingly simple segmentation process.

They segment their customer by those who already bought their product and those who have shown interest. Pretty straightforward right?

They use a sales and workflow to track when someone reaches a point of showing interest, and they use order or sales history to track if someone has bought from them before.

Our customers, for example, do exactly the same thing. But they use Ninjodo to have this done automatically for them and in real-time.

At any moment, they can look and know exactly where a particular lead or customer is at, how they are segmented, whether they’ve bought from them or not, and what’s supposed to happen next.

Here’s a quick video on how a lead or customer would look you were managing them this way:

 

Once you start looking into segmenting, you’ll think of all sorts of ways to group and categorise your leads and customers, but as you saw here, you don’t need to over do it. In the end, it will really just come down to a couple of key segments to help you to know where to focus.

Take a look at how to manage your sales and workflows, after that start a free trial and give this technique a try.

#3
Be Multi-Channel

We all wish we had fewer emails to deal with, but there’s something that get’s lost when relying solely on the time-delayed, written word that is email.

Did you ever have an argument or misunderstanding with someone (maybe your spouse, a friend, heck even a customer) over chat, text or email, and then have it completely cleared up or resolved when you’re face-to-face or talking on the phone?

Furthermore, did you ever get an important email go straight to your spam folder? That happens often in your communications with clients.

Do whatever you can to move people into a real-time conversation.

Use Facebook Messenger, WhatsApp, Live Chat on your site. Ideally though, just get leads on the phone as soon as you can. I’m sure you’ll agree you convert leads far better when you get to speak with them.

“But Simon, I have clients all over the world. It would be too costly to call all those people.”

Well so does Ninjodo. So how do we do it? Skype enables you to call landlines and smartphones all over the world for a ridiculously low fixed monthly fee!

And if you both have Skype, as we find many people do, you can even just call them for free. Not to mention have a video call or screen share if you want.

Sometimes the problem can’t be solved over email. But you also don’t have to be physically in front of the person either. Use your phone, video chat, messenger, LinkedIn, Facebook, whatever. Just don’t rely on only one method or channel.

Doing so will allow you to have more normal conversations with people and as such implement the next tip much better.

#4
Feedback is King

One of the most important factors in the decision process of the seller is trustworthiness.

Do I trust this vendor enough with my hard earned money to deliver on what they are promising?

The most powerful tactic in your arsenal here is to have great social-proof in the form of testimonials and reviews. Whenever someone mentions you somewhere online, that can make or break you or at the very least your next sale.

Strive to have all positive (but honest) feedback and reviews on not just your website, but also Facebook, Google and LinkedIn (your profile).

Pro Tip: Monitor your mentions online to say thanks for the good guys and clear up any bad blood. You can use tools like Google Alerts, Mention.

Bonus Tips

One part of the customer journey that people don’t really think about from the customer’s perspective is payment.

Make it as easy as possible for people to pay you. Don’t just offer Paypal for example because it’s easy for you to set up. Not everyone uses or wants to use Paypal.

Always make sure you’ve got an additional alternative payment gateway like Stripe or Eway to accept credit cards and easily allow you to process refunds if needed.

If you’re really on the ball, look into accepting cryptocurrency such as BitCoin payments which is a huge untapped market.

Other than that make sure you’ve de-risked things for your customers. Offer as long a guarantee as you can and make sure you follow through if something fails. Vervita for example, gives a long 2 year guarantee for their products and it really pays off.

The beautiful thing is that you’ll rarely have to act on those guarantees (provided you’re not selling crap), but you present yourself as a considerably more trustworthy vendor to your potential clients and customers.

All of this helps you to become the feedback KING (or Queen for the ladies). Your customers in turn love you and won’t be able to hold their excitement about your company.

So what are some action steps you can do right now, to help put this stuff into play (don’t let the last 10mins go to waste!)

Action Items to Set Your Company Up For Success

First thing to do is to set up your procedures.

This is really annoying to hear when it’s just you. But as someone who recently went through onboarding two new team members, having some sort of systems and documentation in place really speeds up the process and requires less time from yourself in the training up process.

Action Item #1

Take answering the phone for example, always answer the phone in the same way eg. “Hi {CustomerName} it’s {My Name} from Ninjodo, how can I help you?”.

Action Item #2

Another place you can standardise things is through your email signature.