How to master sales conversions in online business
In last week’s blog, I revisited the concept that there are 5 critical skill sets that are needed to build your online business successfully, and discussed skill #3 which is Communicating with your Audience. You can learn about it by visiting last week’s blog here.
This week, I’ll cover key skill #4 which is Mastering Sales Conversions. As you might imagine, the entire point of building an audience, engaging with them, and communicating with them…. is so you can serve them, give them value, and ultimately sell them something that solves a problem for them.
Let’s start by clarifying some terms that are common in online business when discussing sales conversions:
Leads = A person connected to you or your business in some way who fits within your target audience. At some point they have established a point of connection, but your communication to them is still only one way (i.e. they read your emails, newsletters, social media posts, etc).
Prospect = A Lead who has raised their hand to indicate that they are interested in pursuing more information about a product or service you offer. At this point, the communication has started flowing both ways.
Hot Prospect = A highly engaged prospect who has shown through their level of engagement that they have moved from ‘curious’ to ‘serious’ and are a likely buyer.
In the world of online business, generating leads is critical because as you can see, leads turn into prospects, and prospects turn into buyers. This process requires effective communication that gives them value, answers their questions, addresses their objections, and ultimately shows them that the product or service you offer can solve a problem for them.
The ratio of how many people translate from lead to prospect to hot prospect and ultimately to a buyer is called your “conversion rates”.
Conversion rates show the health of your business
For example, if you had an audience of 100 people and 25 showed interest in an offer, your lead conversion would be 25%. If of those 25 people, 10 followed up on learning more, your prospect conversion rate would be 40%. Then, if 2 out of those 10 people made a purchase, your sales conversion rate would be 20%. As you can see, each conversion factor is compared back to the previous population.
It’s surprising how many online business owners have never heard of conversion rates, or either don’t track them or don’t know how. Whether you are a network marketer, affiliate marketer, or an online business owner building your own brand and selling your own products, you need to track these conversion factors!
The difference between amateurs and professionals often comes down to those who track and those who don’t
If you’re seeing the importance of tracking your numbers but don’t even know how to start generating leads or how to master following up with prospects effectively, it’s time to up your game. Lead generation and prospect follow ups are the most important factors in online business sales conversions. If you have no lead generation and prospect follow-up CRM system, your business isn’t really a business - it’s just a hobby!
If you are in network marketing and don’t have a system to track leads and prospects, you can get the best network marketing training & lead tracking system here.
If you are in affiliate marketing and don’t have a system to track leads and prospects, you can get the best affiliate training here.
If you are creating and selling your own branded content, courses, etc. and don’t have a system to track leads, prospects, and sales, you can get the best all-in-one system here.
One of the biggest challenges people struggle with is that even if you have a great lead & prospect tracking system, often times sales require talking with someone voice to voice or face to face. This can be especially true if the product or service you are selling is a high ticket offer or if you don’t have much rapport built up yet with your prospect.
If your business relies on attracting clients and ultimately driving towards a phone call, video meeting, or face to face meeting, a consultation funnel is ideal for your business.
In-person requests are 34 times more successful than those made over email (source).
The sales conversion rate for in-person sales meetings is 40% (source).
As you can see, driving towards a face to face meeting dramatically increases the odds of a sales conversion, particularly for higher ticket offers.
A consultation funnel allows you to draw hot prospects to you by leveraging social media, and will result in a flood of hot prospects booking themselves onto your calendar. You can automate the posts, the messages with the prospects, the calendar bookings, and the scheduling of a video meeting.
With a consultation funnel, hot prospects book themselves on your calendar and the entire process is completely automated until you meet face to face!
Use of a consultation funnel also reduces the amount of rejection that you need to face, and it can be a huge confidence boost to see notifications of calendar bookings popping up on your phone!
To learn more about using consultation funnels for network or affiliate marketing, you can get a free training on the topic here.
In next week’s blog I’ll cover Key Skill #5: Tenacity & Grit. In the meantime, sit down to identify your daily and weekly lead generation metrics, your prospect conversion metrics, your sales conversion metrics, and identify areas where you need to up your game.
If you don’t have the correct lead and prospect tracking systems, scroll up to grab the appropriate ones so that you can begin to master skill #4!