Are your leads lost?

It’s easy to gather names of interested parties at trade shows. To gather emails of interested people with a simple lead magnet download on your home page.

But then what happens to those leads?

Many of them won’t be ready for a sales call yet. They need to gather more information.

It takes 5-12 touchpoints for a B2B lead to be ready to convert. And, more and more, B2B buyers are doing more research on their own before they are ready to reach out.

They are closer to buying when they first get in touch with a company. This is because they’ve already consumed a lot of marketing material.

How can you keep those interested leads on the path?

There are three sections where you might lose leads. Let’s walk through a single way to recapture them at each stage.

The easiest place to lose leads is on your website.

These are often leads you may never know about. You invested in creating a powerful website. You’ve invested in content marketing, paid advertising, SEO or a slew of other options to bring in more traffic.

But traffic is what I call a “vanity metric.” It doesn’t matter how many people show up to your website. What matters is how many of those people take action.

Every stage of the buyer’s journey needs to have a next step.

A call to action.

A trackable action that results in moving to the next stage.

This includes your website and content marketing.

Stop the Window Shopping

The first place you want to recapture leads is on your website. You may have dozens or hundreds of people who are highly interested.

People online are looking with a purpose. They have a long list of resources they can find at a click of a button.

If a visitor doesn’t believe they’re in the right place within a few seconds, they’ll leave.

Consider a way to connect with those visitors, create a line of communication and bring them back to your materials.

The simple way to connect is to create an opt-in on your site.

This is an exchange of information. Gather the basic information to add them to your email list and give them a highly valuable piece of content in return.

Many of these first time visitors won’t be ready for a sales call. They barely know you. You want to create something they do want, and won’t mind exchanging an email address for.

More Conversions at Trade Shows

You meet dozens of people in a few short days at trade shows. Following up with every single potential lead takes a lot of time.

Create content and follow-up sequences to put on automatic.

The first message should be personalized. It can be a short and quick reminder of what you discussed. You met a lot of people there, but so did they. They’ll appreciate the reminder.

This is not the time to start sending product updates or other information unrelated to them. Instead, send the information they need to move to the next step in the buyer’s journey.

If you attended a show in the last six months and haven’t been in touch since the first follow-up, there’s never a better time to reach out.

Reconnect and also ask if they’re still interested in your product. Poor quality leads are taking up space in your email provider and on your sales and marketing team’s duties.

Re-Engage Your Email List

Once you have permission to contact people, you want to stay in touch on a regular basis. If you don’t have any kind of automated email or newsletter being sent out, it’s easy to lose touch.

The people you already have on a list are the most valuable. They’ve already shown an interest.

Now it’s time to see if the interest is still there.

Go through your CRM and email provider and find everyone who hasn’t interacted with you recently. This could be anything from opening a message, to a reply, to answering a phone call.

Create a re-engagement campaign that highlights why you’re a good choice. Most importantly, ask them to take an action.

Use the open rate, click-through rate and conversion rate to classify your list. Those who are dormant can be put into their own category or removed.

You’ve taken a lot of time to gather these leads. You want to know where in the process each of these leads are and start to devise plans to move them to the next step.

If a lead takes 18 months to convert and another takes 3 months, that’s okay. You want to always be moving them to a next step. Automation is your friend to achieve this without overwhelming your team.

An Outside Perspective

You can set all of this up on your own.

Go through all of your leads and assign them to a category…

Create campaigns for each category…

Devise a next step for each category…

Plan out a strategy for re-engagement…

Or, you could get an outside perspective. Receive a complete plan based on your buyer’s journey.

Often, we’re too close to our own marketing or product to see the small cracks. You know everything there is to know about your offering, but your future buyers don’t.

Request a Concierge Conversion Method Call to dive into what is and isn’t working and get a solid strategy on how to increase conversions.