How to shorten sales cycles and improve conversion rates

It’s a scenario that is played out in sales meetings up and down the country—in fact, all over the world—‘how can we improve our sales conversion rate and shorten our sales cycle?’

While it may be tempting to think of price incentives or more features to close deals, in many cases the real key to converting more deals, more quickly, is to ensure that the sales team are spending their time talking to prospects who are ready to buy.

The reality is that for many businesses a lead is a lead and there is no real way to differentiate between a motivated buyer and a time waster other than the sales team spending time qualifying them.

The problem here is two-fold:

The majority of websites only form of conversion is a contact form that in most cases provides little insight into the mindset of the website visitor and their readiness to buy. An even bigger problem created by this approach is all of the lost contact opportunities from those visitors who did not want to fill out a contact form, as they did not want to present themselves as prospects.

Secondly, for most businesses, there is no ability to nurture website visitors until they are ready to make a purchase decision.

The solution though is both simple and cost effective – marketing automation.

There are a plethora of well established and proven marketing automation systems available, whose purpose is to nurture would be buyers until they are ready to engage with the sales team. 

One such system, SharpSpring which is the system used by Brand Xperiences, offers a range of useful tools for nurturing would be customers:

- Visitor ID to track anonymous users and the content they interact with
- Personalisation to encourage visitors to identify themselves
- Email marketing to build awareness and rapport through regular communications
- Lead scoring to qualify the prospect based on their activity and identify when they are ready to buy
- Pipeline to present opportunities to the sales team and help them close the sale
- Life of the lead—to provide a full history of each contacts interactions with the business across the website, email marketing and social media channels

This means that the sales team are spending their time selling to motivated and engaged prospects when they are ready to buy resulting in improved conversion rates and shorter sales cycles.