Marketers usually put a lot of thought and effort into crafting the perfect campaign, from choosing the ideal audience to streamlining their marketing techniques and more. Drawing in customers is the primary goal of any marketing strategy, but conversions come from closing the sales loop.
Things like crafting the customer journey, establishing relationships with the buyer and defining the ideal purchaser are all remixes to this particular tune. Even the successful sales funnel method uses a similar idea to get consumers to click the “Buy Now” button. Here, 13 professionals from Forbes Agency Council examine the most effective ways that businesses can seek to close their sales loop.
Members share their best advice for closing the sales loop with a prospective customer.
Photos courtesy of the individual members
1. Include Sales From The Start
Especially in business-to-business scenarios, ensuring the sales team is brought into the campaign is the single most important success driver. The end customer expects campaigns to be hyper-personalized, which means understanding and catering to their needs, blockers and goals. To drive meaningful results, include sales early, starting from the ideation stage, and maintain their involvement throughout the campaign life cycle. – Andrew Au, Intercept Group
2. Make The First Move
Making the first offer to the customer at a “no risk” or free trial is still a compelling way to draw the customer in for a close. Let them test and live with the brand with the intention that they will become a long-time user. Therefore, “lifetime customer value” metrics are calculated, which is the real value to a brand. – Jessica Hawthorne-Castro, Hawthorne LLC
3. Define The Path To Purchase
Before inviting prospects to a campaign, it’s a good idea to lay out the path to purchase for your prospect. We use call-to-action campaigns on our website and set them up as goals in analytics tracking. Use contact forms, e-books or site audits. Then define how to close the loop. Our sales team then follows up with timed client touch points until the leads are vetted and closed using our customer relationship management (CRM) tool. – Michael Fox, Corberry Digital
4. Build Sincere Personal Relationships
For customers, what matters most is establishing sincere personal relationships. Beyond closing the sales loop, customers must feel that your organization truly understands them and their business. Establishing this connection from the first touch point to purchase to customer support will not only help close the sale, but create powerful advocates for your brand and potential upsell opportunities. – Michaela Dempsey, Scout RFP
5. Create A Journey For Each Prospect
As marketers, we tend to look at things in the way that they apply to us, so all that matters may be those sales results. But the customer on the other side is a human too, with their own viewpoint, and they don’t want your sale forced on them. Instead, make it their choice by inviting them into a conversation and taking them on a personalized journey through marketing and sales. – Dmitrii Kustov, Regex SEO
6. Understand The Customer’s True Need
Depending on your business, you might use different approaches to close the sale but ultimately, what it comes down to is whether you’ve identified the customer’s true need and motivation and whether your product or service offers the right solution. If you can demonstrate to the customer that your solution is the best way to address their need, the customer will be ready to make the decision. – Inna Semenyuk, InnavationLabs
7. Integrate Sales And Marketing
In our own experience, we have seen more often than not that marketing campaigns are run and leads are generated. And then no one knows what happened to the leads or how much got converted. This is typically because of corporate silos that modern-day businesses operate. It is important to integrate the sales process into the marketing process and insist on a regular feedback loop. – Hareesh Tibrewala, Mirum India
8. Use Short-Form Content To Convert
Your content strategy needs to follow customers’ path to purchase and create both long- and short-form content. Think “help” content to drive traffic from search, “how-to” videos to get into the set of consideration of potential customers. Then provide social media users with a short piece of content that will ultimately help them make a decision: a link to a press article, an influencer post, etc. – Aurelie Sauthier, Made in
9. Tell Customers What You Want Them To Do
In short, tell customers what you want them to do and give them a reason to do it. Too often, brands try to simultaneously “build their brand” and get consumers to take immediate action, which can lead to confusion. Say one thing and say it (very) well by giving customers a strong and clear call to action that inspires them to make the purchase. Dial up authentic and confident language. – Edward Hoffman
10. Keep A Record
Use analytical tools to extract your lead source information and export it to a CRM system or lead-capture software. A great record helps keep your leads in the loop, replicates buyer personas and provides insight regarding your customer base. – Ashar Jamil, Digitally Up
11. Think Beyond The Lead Funnel
To close the sales loop you need the customer to see not just why they need to buy what you have to offer, but also why now. To help customers justify a decision and move to a purchase, marketers should align with sales as another channel to the customer and design campaigns, both the content and touch points, to work hard beyond the first response. – Alisha Lyndon, MomentumABM
12. Leverage Emotional Resonance
Your value proposition is the balance of the perceived costs and benefits of buying your products. The most overlooked word there is “perceived,” since the only thing that matters is how your customers “interpret” what you say. People buy based on their emotional reactions, not logic. You need to understand which emotional cues your customers interpret and how to resonate with their expectations. – Chris Goward, Widerfunnel
13. Use An Integrated CRM
It’s critical to have a system in place that delivers leads to sales agents who can follow up on them. As a Hubspot-certified agency, we love the way Hubspot allows us to design inbound campaigns and set up lead flows that integrate right into our clients’ CRM systems. It creates a closed-loop process that shows the effectiveness of the campaign and holds people accountable for closing on leads. – Mary Ann O’Brien, OBI Creative
