5 Easy Steps To Boost Your Sales Conversion Rates

What is one of the most important things you can do before starting an outbound marketing campaign? If you said, “Have a plan and get organized,” you’re right! Details like system setup, scrubbing data, etc., are often overlooked before starting sales campaigns. To get the best results, take the time to work through these five administrative sales tasks before you start outreach to maximize your conversion rates.

Step 1: Goal-Setting

The first thing on your to-do list should be goal-setting. Setting goals first will allow you to decide how to manage the rest of your sales process. It will also help you establish a good strategy.

Your goals will shed light on how you should approach your campaign from a systems perspective. For example, if your lead count is low or you’re doing account-based marketing, you’ll likely choose a tool that will allow you to dial your leads manually. Whereas if you’re planning high-volume outreach, you may need to set up dialer software to speed up your progress.

As you assess the desired end result, you’ll gain clarity as to what resources you’ll need to hit your desired conversion rates. Think of it like this – when you go on a road trip where there’s a final destination and desired arrival time, you plan your route carefully. You wouldn’t start your journey without mapping your trip or using GPS, right?

Your outbound campaign is no different!

Step 2: Technical Setup

After completing the goal-setting step, you’ll have the foundation you need to determine what your technical process should be. So, technical setup is the next task you’ll tackle.

Here is where you’ll ensure you have the tools ready to attain your sales conversion rates. You’ll implement your CRM, scheduling technology, phones, analytics tools, etc.

As you set up your systems, you may want to document what your workflow will be for each one. Then, you can activate and test all the working parts before you press “play” on your outreach. This final check will prevent glitches and slowdowns during outreach.

Step 3: Creating Data Collection Fields

At a granular level, the technical set up includes setting up your database for data entry and extraction. While it’s technical, the field setup is important enough to be considered a separate step. The extraction piece relates to reporting, and we’ll dig deeper into that shortly.

From a data entry standpoint, think about what information you want to collect from prospects. Make sure you have fields to gather that information in your CRM or database. If not, create them, and ensure that you can filter on them for continued outreach and analysis purposes.

Finally, if you plan to bulk upload data into your CRM, ensure that your data source format aligns with your system’s fields.

Step 4: Formalize Reporting Processes

We’ve all heard the sayings. How do they go? If you want to control results, you must be able to measure them!

Your goals are in place, and so is the format to track your data and results. It’s time to build your report. Your report should be easy to read, allow you to manipulate the data, and be scheduled to run on regular intervals. Doing all of the above will allow you to make timely adjustments with your business development team.

Step 5: Scrubbing Leads

Unscrubbed data is one of the worst culprits of low sales conversion rates. How can this be, you ask?

To paint the picture for you, business owners can be super excited at the beginning of a campaign because they have a massive list of leads. But, when the results don’t meet expectations upon investigation, it’s often because of low-quality data.

Data issues include wrong phone numbers or email addresses, duplicates, outdated decision-maker information, and more.

Consequently, the business owner provides their hugely promising list to the sales team, thinking a ton of biz dev is about to happen. With unscrubbed leads, what actually happens is a lot of starting and stopping. The sales time has to spend time gathering new information, disqualifying leads, and other inefficiencies that severely cut into outbound activity ROI.

Now we’ve talked about why you shouldn’t skip the data-scrubbing step, let’s address how to scrub your data. You can use tools to validate phone numbers and email addresses; these are steps a computer can handle to speed up data cleaning. A human can also run quality checks by spot-checking various fields of the data, or other methods.

Now, It’s Go Time!

You’ve now taken the administrative steps you need to get your sales underway. We know, for sales people these task aren’t always the “fun” part but they are easy with the right amount of forethought. Plus, you’ll love how much easier it is to achieve the sales conversation rates and goals you’ve been dreaming of!

Boost Your Sales Conversion Rates: Five Easy Steps