Conversions. You will hear Rattleback talk a lot about them. In fact, in this post and over my next couple posts you’re going to learn a lot about the process of gaining viable conversions. So, I encourage you to keep coming back because you’ll specifically learn:
- The correct conversion process to drive more meaningful business development conversations
- What to do with those leads after they convert
If you don’t want to keep coming back, simply sign up for our blog digest over on the right and we’ll send the content directly to you. In this post though, I’m going to explain the mindset your early-entry web visitors are in and introduce you to the common conversion point pitfalls you need to avoid. Because when it comes to coaching, you first need to demonstrate the mistake before illustrating how to correct it.
In our experience, most professional service firms look at conversions as records in a database who sit there in idle mode because the web form wasn’t monitored well or because a sales person reached out to find out the sales lead was “not interested.” The reason those conversions aren’t interested though is because they were not properly nurtured through the sales process with a series of conversion points. We’re all guilty of going for the sales conversation too fast and as a result get a lot of cold shoulders.
How Not to Approach Conversions
Every firm or company likely has some sort of form on their website to encourage a conversion. The problem lies with most firms only thinking about the end point in a sales process when implementing a form into their website. That is, using the form to have a sales conversation. Because of this, we often only see firms using two types of forms:
Request a quote form: This is the end all be all. At the end of the day we all want a sales conversation. So why wouldn’t someone submit this to start the conversation? Well…we’ll get into that in a second.
Contact us form: These types of forms are often only used by job seekers or vendors wanting employment information or wanting our business. Very rarely do you see a viable prospect come through this type of conversion point.
The issues with only having these two types of conversion points are:
- You’re asking for too much information: Go to your forms and tell me if they are asking a user to fill out more than 5 fields of data. My guess is the answer is yes. The reason is because you want to have a sales conversation and therefore want to know everything right away. However, did you know your users don’t want to provide it? Long forms that ask for a lot of information signal to the visitor that you are going to study them and are going to contact them for a sales pitch, which they’re simply not ready for. In fact, a recent study by MindShare showed that 76% of people actively try to enter as little personal information as possible when filling out forms on websites.
- You’re in the wrong stage of the buying process: Most of your early-entry web visitors are information seeking and not yet buying. Because of that, why would they want to contact you in a “general” way? If you don’t have the answer to their question, they’re moving on to the next Google search result. And if they’re only seeking information, they’re surely not going to submit a request for a quote.
How to Think About Conversions
When marketing a professional services firm we have to to understand that most visitors to our websites are initially only seeking information. We have to think about the content we have available and implement a strategy on how to go about slicing that content up to demonstrate expertise, answer the visitor’s specific question, and eventually encourage more conversions. Next, we need the proper systems in place to manage those conversions and to automate the prospect qualifying process slightly through nurturing and lead scoring. This will help you identify the most viable leads you should put resources towards. Do this effectively, and I promise your “not interested” conversations will turn into more “tell me more” conversations.
Come back within a couple weeks and I’ll help you understand how to go about implementing a proper conversion process which I briefly hit on above to drive more meaningful sales conversations.