Chapter 2: Improve Lead Conversion

Lead conversions are what fuel your business. By improving lead conversion rates, you reduce the time and effort spent by sales teams on nurturing prospects and directly increase their efficiency. But how do you boost lead conversion? Lead-capture, organisation, and scoring discipline will help you increase conversion; and with Salesforce you can:

• Capture more leads by consolidating and automating lead entry
• Organise leads for success by prioritising leads with lead scoring
• Track lead generation efforts by measuring the lead conversion rate
• Nurture and grow leads by targeting leads using campaigns

Here’s how Salesforce helps improve lead conversion:

Using forms on your website, Salesforce automatically turns casual visitors into leads that are ready for sales reps to qualify. The form captures standard and custom information about a prospect or customer. Unique information is obtained via the form fields that ask customers to express their particular interest behind visiting your site.

Salesforce’s Web-to-Lead feature enables sales teams to:

• Quickly read the leads captured from the website by accessing the ‘lead list view’ 
• Use this information to identify the top prospects to contact on priority 
• Use the Salesforce dashboard to track the total number of leads generated from the company website, when they were generated, and their status
• Use Chatter to follow up with assigned sales reps directly on the dashboard report. You can tag them on a post to get status updates on an open lead and even find out if they need help! 

Watch this video to see the Web-to-Lead feature in action.

With Salesforce, you can score and prioritise leads. This allows your super-busy sales reps to focus on leads that matter.

Salesforce implements an AI-powered predictive lead scoring approach to double your lead conversion rate. Lead scores allow sales reps to identify leads that are ready to engage, those that require additional nurturing, and leads that are not fit for the business.

• Lead scoring is the process of assigning value to a particular lead, based on design, criteria, and behaviour
• One commonly used method for preliminary assessment of lead quality is BANT which stands for Budget Authority Need Timeline.

To score a lead, you generally give it a score on a scale of 1 to 5 or 1 to 10 based on the criteria you define. A higher score means a higher quality lead. The score for each category can be automatically displayed in Salesforce resulting from the information provided by your prospects. Next, in the lead list view, sales reps can easily spot the highest quality leads that have not been contacted. 

Watch this video for a step-by-step approach to prioritising leads with lead conversion best practices.

An organisation must measure their lead conversion rates to:

• Have clear visibility into the sales funnel performance
• Understand the ROI on marketing spend
• Enable sales and marketing teams to make well-informed decisions

Salesforce makes lead conversion measurement an effortless and accurate exercise for sales teams. The Salesforce dashboard has components such as Total Lead Count and Converted Leads. This provides a one-shot understanding of the effectiveness of your lead generation efforts on the overall sales pipeline and closed business. 

Dashboard view gives sales and marketing managers a snapshot of the total number of leads converted in a day and the total amount won. By dividing the total number of leads by the total converted, you can calculate the conversion rate.

Using the conversion rate along with the number of customers you need each month, you can predict how many leads need to be generated from your marketing efforts.

Watch this video for a use case-driven example of how to measure the lead conversion rate using Salesforce.

To ensure a steady flow of high-quality leads into your sales pipeline, it is important to reach out to prospects with planned communication. Campaigns can be a great lead nurturing strategy. Targeted campaigns ensure prospective customers are well-informed about your products and services by the time they talk to your sales rep. 

By using Salesforce Campaigns, you can:

• Target leads with specific communications based on their interests, activities, and more
• Create visibility, track, measure, and report on your marketing programs on Salesforce
• Significantly speed up your sales cycle