Convert more leads by pinpointing bottlenecks

This article was included in the November 8th, 2016 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.

Having lots of leads is always a good thing. It means that you have plenty of opportunities, and that it’s time to get busy. However, having lots of leads doesn’t always translate to lots of sales. The in-between process of converting a lead into a sale can be long, and you will inevitably lose some leads along the way. Being able to catch a problem early on is important, but the key to minimizing this is to know exactly where in your lead conversion process this is happening most frequently.

Judi Watts, Director of Hampton Event Hire, invested lots of money and time into generating leads. Social media, search engine optimization, and Google AdWords have all done a tremendous job in bringing prospects to her company. But one thing she noticed was that she was losing more leads than she would like as they moved through the pipeline:

“We get a lot of leads every day as inquiries come through. What we have just identified, however, is that we need to improve our conversion. We need to work on converting those leads because we’ve reached a point where investing all that money into pulling in leads isn’t helpful if we are not converting them as much as we should be. So now we need to invest time into converting those leads that we already have instead of generating more and more leads.

The CRM helps because it lets me see exact numbers: how many leads, and how many closed sales we have. Seeing a much larger number of leads compared to sales made us aware of the scale of this problem that we’re tackling. Now that we know where the problem is, we can start developing a targeted solution.”

-Judi Watts, Director of Hampton Event Hire

Tip to try: The bar graphs on Your Workspace show you at a glance the number of leads and prospects you have in each status of your pipeline process. Try revisiting these graphs regularly to get a visual representation of how your pipelines are looking. Is anything amiss? Is your graph too top heavy? Is there a particular step in the process that leads seem to be stuck on? This information helps you think about changes like whether or not you should be doing more follow-ups, or if something in particular isn’t working in your lead conversion process.

If you want to see more numbers, try filtering out your report to see lists of leads that came in over a specific period of time, and you will be able to calculate a rough estimate of your conversion rate.  Click here for a tutorial on how you can use your pipeline report to perform some calculations.

Being able to identify problems is an important part of growing a business, and the CRM can help you catch any issues before they snowball into larger ones by keeping all your information in one place. We hope this helps and if you have any questions or want some ideas on how else you can use your pipeline reports, feel free to contact us!

‍