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Turning Leads Into Sales

Our own business at Reach24 is all about generating sales leads for our business to business clients but along the way we’ve picked up a few good tips for converting leads into sales.

Here’s one we use ourselves and I would rate this as the single most important thing you can do to convince a prospect that they want to engage your services.

Put simply, talk to your prospect as if the deal is already done. Tell them what they are going to get when - not if - the contract is signed. Explain the benefits that you are going to help them achieve.

Remember that you’re not trying to stiff your clients - you are providing a service they want and so their goals and ambitions are linked in with yours. You and your clients are, in many ways, a team.

Personally, I always ignore the ‘we offer this…it costs this’ part of the process and start with the ‘you will benefit this way, your business can achieve this with our help, together we are going to do great things for you’ side of things.

The costs, contract terms and so on are just mechanisms for achieving a positive working relationship with a prospect and should be treated as such.

If you get to the stage of the conversation where the prospect says “that all sounds great, I’m really interested…what’s it going to cost me”, then you are way more than halfway home.

If this all sounds a little vague and ill-defined, let me give you an example that you may be able to adapt for your own business.

We recently picked up an ansaphone message from a web designer looking for leads for his web design agency.

So, even before calling him back, we already had some useful information about this prospect.

That there was a genuine level of interest (otherwise he wouldn’t have taken the time to leave the message).
His initial concern was the price of the leads (he had said in his message that he saw that our leads cost FROM £18 each but he wanted to know the exact cost of web design leads).

Calling the guy back, the conversation went thus :

Me: Hi, it’s Mark from Reach24. You’d left a message on voicemail yesterday. You’re potentially looking for a source of good web design leads, I understand.

Web Designer: Yeah, that’s right. I was just trying to get an idea of cost and how it all works.

Me: Oh, that’s good ‘cos I was just calling to give you an idea of cost and how it all works…can I just ask where you’re located in the, um, real world.

[this is my first attempt at establishing a rapport with the client and showing that he’s talking to yer actual, real human being not just a representative of a company that wants his money]

Him: I’m in London.

Me: Right. So you’re just looking for leads from the London area? I only ask because a lot of the enquiries that we can bring you are from all around the UK and they don’t seem to mind where their web designers are located.

[note the ‘that we can bring you‘ - I’m already generating an association between his business and the end result of our service. IE: We can bring him leads from all over the UK.]

Him: We’re happy to have leads from wherever. We don’t want to get enquiries from Sunderland or somewhere a long way away that only wants a local designer though. I don’t want to pay for those…

Me: No, absolutely. Look, it’s not in our interest to bring you enquiries you don’t want. We do speak to all the enquiries first, so if you don’t want leads from businesses who want a local web designer, you won’t get them. It’s not a problem…we can pretty much do anything you want in terms of focusing the leads we’re going to get you.

For instance…well, let me ask you this…is there any particular areas you specialise in. Are you ASP guys or PHP/MySQL or do you mainly do ecommerce sites ?

[I’m showing him some of the benefits here….he’ll get the type of leads he wants, it’s in our interest to help him get those…and I still haven’t answered his question about costs and how it works !]

Him: Let me explain about us. We’ve only been going as a company for a year and we don’t do Windows, ASP.net, ColdFusion or any of that stuff. We are PHP and MySQL developers mainly and we have some great graphics people.

We’ve done a bunch of different stuff, but recently we’ve been involved in developing a couple of small social networking sites. That’s the kind of stuff we’re really into doing.

Me: Really ? We got a social networking enquiry fairly recently. It was for an upgrade of a niche dating site but they wanted members profile pages, blogs, the chance to add music. The whole MySpace type thing, in fact.

I’m just wondering if that lead might still be good…I could send that to you to start you off. It’s a few days old, but you can have it for nothing. Ya never know.

The reason I asked about whether you specialise is we can create some extra pages just to target your particular area of expertise. That works well for our other clients.

[Again, I’m showing the client the benefits as if we’ve already done the deal…I’m offering to send a free lead to ’start him off’. I’ve talked about ‘our other clients’. Everything is from the perspective of ‘the contract is a good as signed…let’s work out how to get the best leads possible’]

Him: OK. But how much does it cost. What’s the upfront cost.

Me: We don’t charge anything upfront. You just get invoiced for the leads we deliver. Web design leads are £19.00 each and we just invoice you at the beginning of each month for the leads we’ve delivered the month before.

[We’re getting to the ‘close’ now. If we’re going to convert this lead into a client, the next questions should be about the mechanism of how it works rather than whether it works]

Him: So, we just pay for the leads we get. How many leads can we get per month.

Me: Up to you. We’d like you to have 100 per month, but you can have from 10 up to whatever you think you can realistically handle. So, I guess the real question is : how many leads per month can you honestly cope with?

[That’s it. I’ve closed this lead…we’re now negotiating based on the size of his business and their capacity to convert the leads we will be providing. From here on in, we’re actually talking about clauses in the contract…ie: number of leads per month and so on.

The point is and I personally think it’s a valuable and useful one: at no point in the conversation did I try to sell him on the service. The assumption was always that he was going to sign. Believe me…this works for all businesses]

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This entry was posted on Friday, January 19th, 2007 at 9:22 pm and is filed under Reach24. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Turning Leads Into Sales

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