How To Convert Your Prospects Into Paying Customers

In order for your business to create profit, you need customers. But what happens when you’re attracting great prospects but you aren’t converting them into paying customers?

In any industry, attracting customers is essential to generate turnover and boost profits, enabling your business to grow. At ActionCOACH, we've worked with numerous businesses with the knowledge of how to use Sales and Marketing for growth. Despite this though, they often find their strategies fall short in generating the desired results, particularly in attracting crucial Marketing or Sales Qualified Leads. So one of the most asked questions to our coaches is: how can I effectively convert more prospects into paying customers?

The Key Differences Between Sales And Marketing

The most important thing to define is the boundary between marketing and sales. A lot of business owners get these two key business elements the wrong way around by putting sales first, then marketing when in reality, it’s marketing first and sales second. 

• Marketing is all about generating prospects who say “yes I'm interested in your product or service”. This can be through modern strategies such as social media or more traditional marketing avenues like leaflets posted through the mail. 
• Sales primarily involve turning prospects into customers, an area where many business owners struggle to achieve consistent conversions. By understanding these fundamental differences, we can begin to identify where in your sales process you might be losing potential customers.

What Is Your Unique Sales Proposition (USP)?

The first place to start is your Unique Sales Proposition or USP. What exactly is a USP? A USP is the key factor that sets your business apart from the competition, allowing you to rise above the crowd in a saturated marketplace. It's the ace up your sleeve that makes selling your product or service a whole lot easier.

When you are trying to find your USP there are three primary pillars to consider: price, convenience, and service. While all three have their place, creating a strong USP requires you to define your target market and understand what they need when looking for your product or service.

To pinpoint your USP, let’s start by addressing those three pillars and asking yourself which out of those three would make the biggest difference to your customer’s experience in your industry and what you could do differently to alleviate these pain points. Is it offering a better price, enhancing convenience, or elevating your level of service? 

Find out more in our article about crafting a strong USP.

Defining Your Sales Process

Once you have a well-defined USP, the next step toward boosting your conversion rate is to take a look at your sales process. Most businesses end up creating their sales process as they go, especially when you have a small sales team, which leaves big gaps for potential customers to fall through.

We suggest taking time to create a flowchart of your current sales process, every single step, no matter how small. These could be steps as simple as who answers the phone when it rings or who sends a welcome email to a prospect.

Once you have a flowchart of your current process, you can ask yourself how these processes can be systemised and automated. This can give your sales team clarity on every step of the customer's journey through the sales process. you and your team can then identify areas where potential customers are being lost in the system. By automating certain processes, like email communications, you ensure that prospects receive the necessary information they need on their path to becoming a customer. This automation not only maintains consistent engagement but also liberates your sales team's time, allowing them to concentrate on more critical aspects of the system. With a well-defined system in place, you can then shift focus to analyzing and enhancing the conversion rates at each stage of the process.

Before we move onto the next section, you may now be asking…”If I can improve any one of those steps, is my overall conversion rate going to improve? 

Absolutely! Then it's a case of testing and measuring the strategies that you have in place for improving those conversion rates. Once you're measuring your conversion rate and working out where the blockages might be and where the challenges are, you can see your overall conversion rate improve. 

Giving Your Customers An Experience, Not A Product

Our coaches often find that one of the biggest mistakes business owners make is selling the concept instead of the experience. What do we mean by that? 

In our experience, people don’t like feeling they're being sold to. If you just describe the product or service and how good you are, people get put off as they feel like they are being sold to and aren’t emotionally engaged with your product or service.

By giving your prospects an experience of your product or service that blows them away, you can increase their emotional engagement with your business and increase their likelihood of becoming loyal customers or as we like to call them, a raving fan! . 

Converting prospects into customers is difficult for any business regardless of size. Understanding the possible roadblocks that separate your prospects from becoming paying customers will give you insights into your target audience and also help define key processes in your business. Our learning centre has free ebooks, videos, and articles to help you overcome the challenges your business faces and reach success.

Getting professional support can be a great way to help you understand the potential stumbling blocks in your sales process. Use our coach finder tool to find your local ActionCOACH to find out how they can help you.