After a lead has been qualified, how many times do your sales people reach out to connect with them?  Kissmetrics reports that it takes between 8 to 12 contact attempts to get a 90% contact rate; if you’re trying to contact only half of your leads, your sales team still needs to make at least 6 tries.  Internet leads, including those from social media, are ignored completely nearly three out of four times – an eye opening number when you consider the resources and energy that goes into generating those online leads.

Every business needs to have a clearly identified process to transition qualified leads into satisfied customers. It’s no secret that marketing and sales often operate in separate spheres: for the purposes of increasing your conversion rate, you need to bring the two together and hammer out what happens once leads are gathered. If your sales team isn’t acting on online leads because they believe those leads to be of low-quality, that’s an issue that needs to be addressed.

That being said, increased contact rates are necessary for better conversion rates: figuring out what your team needs to do to make that happen is essential. Kissmetrics adds that if your sales team’s contact-to-close rate remains constant, contacting 3.6 times more leads would result in 3.6 times more sales. Before you can push that point, it’s important to know what your current situation is: how many leads are coming in, how many are contacted, and how many times are they reached? Use those numbers as your beginning benchmarks, and determine a plan to grow performance from there.

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You know I can’t finish a piece like this without mentioning the tech tools that can be used to make this process easier for your team. CRM programs including Salesforce, Oracle and Podio provide powerful tools to track engagement and results: training your team to use these tools can help boost productivity levels and will definitely help you identify areas where your sales force requires additional support.