Leads are the lifeblood of any business – you need a regular influx of new sales prospects to keep your sales team occupied and your bank account healthy. That’s why we’ve decided to take a detailed look at the whole process of lead generation and lead management from a perspective of small or medium business owner and with an obvious slant on business conducted online.
Although I agree that assumption is the mother of all mistakes, I’m writing this post with an assumption that you’ve done your market research, created your buyer personas and all other preparatory work.
Solving a pain point
Now that you know what bothers your customers and how you can solve their problem, you have to make sure the message is clear. Marketing material should be designed to position your product as the best possible solution for their specific problem.
Less is more, though. Remember that you only have a few seconds to capture visitor’s attention. If you can convey the core message in five bullet points, there’s no need to place 10 bullet points on your sales page.
Scarcity sells
Looking at the principle of supply and demand in any economics textbook, you’ll notice that when supply is limited, demand goes up. Although small and medium businesses can rarely influence demand in real terms, they can position their products to engineer low supply and create an offer than nobody can resist.
Using slogans like “offer ends on Bank Holiday Monday” or “offer limited to first 100 customers” creates a sense of scarcity and makes the leads more compelled to make a purchasing decision. You are expected to stick to your self-imposed scarcity rules, though. If you keep selling products at a discount after the deadline, your leads will learn to ignore your limited time offers in the future.
Pre-qualifying your leads with a low-price offer
Depending on the niche and chosen approach, marketers can take an inclusive route or an exclusive one. With inclusive offers you cast your net wide and hope a certain proportion of visitors will take up the offer and complete the purchase. Unless you’re selling hot commodity that’s got a wide market appeal, this approach will have a low conversion rate.
Exclusive approach creates a pre-qualifying barrier by introducing another cheaper offer. Why on earth would you want to create a barrier when everyone out there teaches you to remove as many barriers as possible to make purchasing decision extremely easy? This lets you segment your lead base.
For example, if you’re using an email subscriber base for marketing a product, once you’ve sent out a sequence of informative and educational material, follow it up with a lower price product to gauge the reaction. The leads that refused the pre-qualifier can be put through another round of informative emails or even dropped from the list, while the hot leads can be given an upsell of the main product.
Another way of pre-qualifying If you’re selling information product or service through means of content (blogging and/or positioning yourself as an influencer on social media) is to make it clear for the visitors that you are here to sell. Yes, your blog content might be accessible without payment, however, it is not free of charge.
This solves two issues: firstly, when you start selling, your leads won’t take offence because they will have formed a mindset of expecting you to start selling to them at some point. Secondly, you will only keep engagement with people who are somewhere on the buying journey thus removing the browsing traffic from the equation and improving your conversion rate.
Pricing your irresistible offer
Success of an offer is largely dependent upon correct pricing. The easiest way to create an irresistible offer at the right price is to take your competitor’s price and compare their product features with yours. Is your product that much better to justify a higher price? Or maybe you’re pricing yourself at the lower end of the scale? Lower price doesn’t automatically mean more sales. Buyers will lose confidence if a product is positioned too low.
There’s always a question of whether to keep the price even or use the popular odd pricing model. Of course, everyone understands that the only reason retailers use odd pricing rather than rounded pricing is to trick us. Nevertheless, odd pricing model still works. It is proven that buyers perceive odd prices to be significantly lower than the closest rounded figure.
So, if you’re selling something for £99.99, which is essentially a £100-product, customers won’t feel like they’ve spent a ‘ton’. Deep inside they’ll have a perception they’ve spent 90-something. Research by pragmaticpricing.com claims to have found another reason why odd pricing works.
If you feel you’re pricing your product above expectation of your target audience and there’s a solid justification for doing so, you might want to use comparative excuse. Businesses use this method when introducing a product with little or no competition (i.e. customers can’t compare your offer with other similar offers). For example, if you were to sell a £500 software product to coders who measure their day in cups of coffee, you could say “achieve incredible results for less than the cost of a cup of coffee per day…”
Guarantee the results
Because why wouldn’t you? If your product is designed to solve a pain point, it will be right for most customers. And the ones that hate your product? Well, they might actually make more difference to your success story than the ones who found it useful.
Because happy customers rarely spread positive feedback unless specifically asked to, while you can be sure that the unhappy ones will spare no effort to tell everyone how much they hated it.
Efficient customer support and no-quibble guarantee reduces flaming reviews to an absolute minimum. To a point where even people who’ve given up on your product because it wasn’t quite right for them would become part of your fanbase. They might even convert in the future when you have a different product that is better suited to them.
Social Proof
Which brings us to the question of social proof. Not having too many negative reviews is very important, however, you also need to make sure people are sharing their success stories thus helping you sell the product. For existing offers, this would mean to encourage (and incentivise) reviews from happy customers. As far as new offers are concerned, you’d give away review copies or sample units to influencers in exchange for a quote that you’d use on sales pages to make your offer truly irresistible.
We’ll be talking about social proof in more detail next time around when we'll look at other ways to make crowd work towards enhancing your sales process. Sign up for our newsletter to get notified of the next part in this series.
