Convert Leads to Sales at the Middle of the Funnel

In our last post, we discussed how mastering the top of the funnel (TOFU) is crucial to attracting your prospects to your website and generating leads. Once you’ve generated some leads, you need to nurture, qualify and convert marketing leads into sales qualified opportunities. That’s where the middle of the funnel (MOFU) comes in.
MOFU activities help you nurture, qualify and convert marketing leads into sales qualified opportunities.  I talk to prospects all the time who think that because they’re getting a lot of traffic that their website is doing just fine. Yet, ask them how many of those clicks turn into high quality leads or how many of those leads turn into closed-won opportunities (i.e. revenue) and either the answer is not many or they don’t know.
Getting traffic to your website is only the first step. The sweet spot comes in converting that traffic into leads, and those leads into customers. Ignoring the middle of the funnel means missed opportunities.

So, how can you make the most of MOFU marketing in order to convert more leads into customers? Here are a few important steps:

• Create automatically-triggered lead nurturing campaigns for content offers. Lead nurturing helps your move leads through your sales funnel. This is your opportunity to help them, educate them and move them through the buying process. Lead nurturing campaigns help you further educate and build relationships with non-sales ready leads in a scalable, effective way. Lead nurturing helps you drive higher quality leads to your inside or outside sales team that they can close faster.
• Provide content for each stage of the buying cycle. The key is to map the content you provide to where your prospect is in the buying cycle (awareness, research, comparison, etc.). For example, if they are in the research stage, the prospect has identified that they have a problem and is researching potential solutions. As they move through the buying process, their content needs change and you want to make sure you have the content they need at each stage. So, for comparison and validation stage, you want to provide more detailed product and service information, comparison charts, case studies, testimonials, etc.
• Build trusted-advisor status. Make sure you have content that will educate your prospects on your products and services, sure, but also provide them with tips and information on how to make the best vendor selection. Anything you can do to help them through the process itself – not just promote your own products and services – makes a powerful impact.

Sure, you can put your product and services information on your website and hope they find it, but if you really want to accelerate your growth in 2013, you’ll proactively provide it to your prospect to stay on top of their mind so that when they are ready to buy. You’ll also help them by making the process easier for them and easier to choose you. Next, we discuss how to interview your clients and prospects to improve your sales and marketing programs.