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5 Overlooked Conversion Points (and 1 piece of advice) for Long Sales Cycles

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“We do most of our sales in person.”
“We’re not out there selling widgets. Each job is unique.”
“Our website is more for just ‘getting the word’ out than selling.”
“We’re a creative services firm, not a commodity.”
“Our product requires a lot of education.”

All of the above statements have two things in common.

First, they are all valid statements. These are common concerns for businesses with long sales cycles. It’s more difficult to sell a custom website, a car, or an in depth consultation than it is to sell an iPad, t-shirt, or DVD. That is just the nature of sales.

Second, not a single one of those statements is any reason why a business shouldn’t track conversion rates.

Whether you’re measuring them or not, numerous conversion points are already a part of your sales process. They are the actions that turn a visitor into a lead and eventually a customer.

Identifying conversion points requires an understanding of your buyer’s needs and your current sales process, and how you can automate to meet the needs of both parties. Chances are you are already converting business, via education, raising awareness, or pure lead development, by hand. The role of your website, of your conversion points, is to turn those conversions, into an automated process.

Towards that end, here are five common conversion points that many organizations with a long sales cycle overlook because, frankly, they seem too simple.

Contact Forms

The conversion point that’s typically closest to the sale is the Contact Form. The contact form makes it easy to track conversion rates and conversion paths (what pages were visited immediately prior to conversion). Forms also allow you some fancy business process integration, such as alternating who with your company receives the email and populating directly into your CRM.

Demo Requests

request_demo_buttonDemo Requests are a close cousin to Contact Forms. As a conversion point, the Demo Request generally signals that a visitor is gathering information in hopes of establishing whether you would make a good Fit [1]. Your Demo Request feature should capture all the pertinent information your team needs to help that visitor. That means you’re going to likely need a prepared and tested demo for each of your primary use cases.

Email Subscriptions

newsletter-signupEmail is the undisputed ROI champ [2], which makes your email list the perfect place to slowly nurture ready leads. After conversion, your email list works in two ways – education through timed-releases of material, and awareness generation via your regular newsletter. Pair both of these and your conversion point helps craft sales long before leads hit your sales team.

Social Shares

social-share-flatSocial Shares are not merely about expanding reach and generating awareness. Shares also serve as a good way of validating message fit [3], as a visitor taking time to share your content is usually signaling agreement. This type of conversion tends to sit near the top of your sales funnel, but trending upwards helps you understand what your audience wants, and that keeps the funnel full.

Blog Comments

Blog comments are slowly dying, with the bulk of reader-to-reader conversation moving to social channels, but this scarcity makes blog comments more valuable, not less. The modern blog comment happens largely for one of two reasons – the reader agrees and wants to publicly associate with the blogger or brand, or the reader disagrees and wishes to establish a sense of superiority via correcting the author. When it comes to sales, the first is valuable, but don’t give up on the second, comment conversations are a good way to turn potential negatives into positives.

That One Piece of Advice

The trick with conversions on a long sales cycle is not only to understand your sales cycle, but also how each of these conversion points fit with the needs of your actual buyers.

Talk to your salespeople and map out what works to turn prospects into customers and then map those to conversion points from the bottom of the funnel (most likely to convert) to the top. Starting with the bottom of the funnel means that should you get a conversion-ready prospect, you will already have the infrastructure in place to capitalize on that conversion.

All that’s left after you’ve built your conversion points is data collection and optimization [4].

Image courtesy of johnhope14 

 

The post 5 Overlooked Conversion Points (and 1 piece of advice) for Long Sales Cycles appeared first on Recurve.


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