As inbound marketers, we work really hard to generate leads for our salespeople. We labor away at content revisions, review analytics and trends, optimize for SEO, schedule tweets and posts, and do everything in our power to get qualified visitors to the site to ultimately convert into leads. 

But what happens when a lead comes in, goes through the sales funnel, and your salespeople make critical mistakes that jeopardize your chance of closing the deal?

Your salespeople could be wasting your hard earned inbound leads by not following up correctly, often enough, or at all. Keep reading, we have a solution! 

Outbound prospecting for new business has always been a bit of a numbers game. Years ago, when I first started as a Sales Development Rep, the formula was simple. If you made 100 phone calls, you could expect 10 appointments, and at least 1 of those prospects would turn into a client. The numbers would vary from industry to industry and market to market, but that was the standard everyone was shooting for.

Outbound prospecting is still a numbers game today. Unfortunately, the numbers are just a lot bigger. It requires more phone calls and more emails than ever before to get fewer responses, fewer appointments, and fewer clients. Why is it so hard? What’s changed?

There are no shortcuts in life. You may have heard this phrase before, but it absolutely rings true when it comes to generating leads through inbound marketing. We often hear marketers ask if there are ways they can supplement the marketing leads they capture on their website to boost results with email marketing.

Sometimes when you generate leads via inbound marketing, you can get a lot of information about your prospects and leads when they fill out a lead capture form. It really depends, though, on what you're willing to ask.

You can ask things like name, phone number, email, company name, industry, revenue, and more. There's a lot of different variables you can ask for.

The tricky part is, when you ask for too much information, you might limit the number of people that are willing to provide all of that to you. Consequently, this might limit the number of leads you could generate.

You’ve invested time, energy, and money on creating a great inbound marketing plan. You’re regularly publishing strategic content that is attracting new visitors to your website daily. You’re promoting your campaigns effectively with a mix of organic and paid efforts. But you just aren’t seeing the leads come in. Sound familiar? That’s because driving traffic to your website is only half the battle. What happens once they get there is what makes the difference between a visitor that comes and goes, and a visitor that raises their hand by filling out a form or taking an action.

There are many reasons why this might be the case, but I’m going to share three of the top reasons we see time and time again causing a low visitor to lead conversion rate.

While working with a client recently, we noticed that they were seeing high numbers of traffic to their blog posts but not as many CTA clicks and conversions as we’d like. We felt that we were following all of the typical CTA best practices including a variety of CTAs for different stages of the journey and on various topics, smart CTAs, CTAs that stood out on the website, and so forth.

However, conversions still seemed slightly stalled, and we knew we could do more. So, we looked a bit closer at the analytics and found that the time on page was a little low – likely too low to actually be finishing the blog posts in their entirety and seeing our closing CTAs. This is pretty common in our content-rich world; people scan and then move on.  

Every day, I talk to business leaders who share some common sales challenges. Whether it's a business owner, VP of Sales, or a VP of marketing, the struggles are often the same. I often get asked these questions:

• How can we generate more qualified leads for our sales team?
• How can we get our sales team in front of more opportunities?

Yet, when I go to their websites, what I often find, is websites that are old, boring, static, and basically online brochures. This might be great for communicating your brand message, but its one-way communication. That could have worked back in 2008 or 2009, but it's 2019, and your prospects (and your market) expect so much more!

It's easy to assume that more leads is the answer to many of your sales problems, and as a lead generation company, you’d think we’d agree. However, what we’ve found working with many different businesses, in many different industries, is that not enough leads isn’t always the root of the problem.

Instead, it's incredibly common that organizations are not set up to properly qualify, hand-off, follow up with, and convert the leads they are generating, letting those hard-earned marketing efforts go to waste. 

To truly determine if your business is A) ready for more leads and B) making the most of the leads you’re currently generating, it's vital to take a look at some important metrics/areas. Here’s the short list:

Lead flow is a very important, and often-overlooked, step when building an inbound marketing or lead generation strategy. In this one-minute video, I touch on what lead flow is, who is involved, what the process looks like, and more.

I'm starting today's blog post off with a few stats:

• 74% of B2B buyers choose a company that is first to help them with useful content
• 50% of B2B buyers use LinkedIn when making purchase decisions.
• 94% of B2B marketers use LinkedIn to distribute content.
• 7 out of 10 professionals describe LinkedIn as a trustworthy source of professional content.
• 1 out of 3 professionals on the planet are on LinkedIn.
• 200 conversions per minute are happening on LinkedIn.

Okay, great. Let's all give LinkedIn a big pat on the back. Those are some intense and super interesting stats to a person in the B2B marketing and sales industries... or they should be. If you aren't interested in capitalizing on these stats, you can stop reading. If you are interested in a 'hack' to help you capitalize and capture some of this focused attention from LinkedIn, keep reading.