There are no unimportant leads. You need to stay attentive to your leads regardless of what stage of the sales funnel they are currently in. But it’s difficult to argue with the fact that the bottom-funnel conversions are the key to your bottom line.
Indeed, unless you manage to nudge your leads towards making the final purchasing decision, it doesn’t matter how well you’ve been converting them before.
Why is it so Hard to Get Bottom-Funnel Conversions?
The ones who’ve already signed up for your product — hand-raisers, your trial-period users, your last-stage leads — all of them comprise the bottom of your sales funnel, BOFU. These conversions should be a piece of cake. They’ve already travelled from the top of the sales funnel, which means they’ve shortlisted you. It shouldn’t be difficult to make the last final step towards a commitment, should it? Unfortunately, it’s the commitment that is the problem.
Customers are always afraid of making a wrong choice, specially when they’re B2B customers with more than just their money at stake. They’ll keep looking for the best option available for them, fearing to settle for anything less than that. That’s why they’re such a challenge to deal with. Sales reps need to convince their BOFU leads that the search is over and the solution in front of them is the right one.
The Best Practices to Increase Your Bottom-Funnel Conversions
1. Don’t Dive Straight Into the Selling Process
We get it. You’ve already been waiting for long enough for your leads to reach the bottom of the funnel, and you want them to make a purchase as soon as possible. But put yourself into their shoes. They’re on the verge of making an extremely responsible decision that will have an immense impact on their business. Hesitation is natural. They need to be 100% sure that the product they’re about to invest in is worthy before they wire the money.
Fear of commitment is exactly the reason why it’s so challenging to get the BOFU leads to convert. As a B2B sales rep, it’s your job to do your homework and conduct thorough research on the leads at the funnel’s bottom. You need to know exactly who you’re trying to convert to succeed at doing it. The secret to selling isn’t so secret after all. You just need to be able to address your customer’s pain points and challenges. Find insights and context on needs and challenges they face at the moment to personalize your nurturing emails and demo call at max.
Certain pre-sales activities can drastically increase your chances of winning the deal. After a lead pops into your CRM system, qualify and inspect them to find out the things that can help you build your further communication around the potential buyer. Even before the first interaction with your BOFU lead, you need to learn as much about them as you can. Find out everything about their business workflows, current tech stack, team composition and other relevant details.
Based on your findings, you can map out your customer success strategy and better prepare for the demo call. Knowing their current situation, problems they are dealing with and which other options they’re considering, helps you show them how your product can fit right into their processes and help to accelerate their growth.
2. Start Small, Be Specific and Don’t Overwhelm Your Leads
Once you’re done with your research, you should know exactly what your BOFU leads are after. Make sure you put that knowledge to good use. Instead of trying to sell your product A to Z, focus on the features that fit your leads’ needs the most.
Of course, it can be extremely tempting to present your product in all its glory straightaway. You want to brag about it to your potential customer because it will surely convince them to make an instant purchase. The problem is – it probably won’t.
The difference between you and your lead is that you’ve spent ages working on your product. Thus, it’s easy for you to navigate through the endless list of its marvelous features. On the other hand, your lead is only now getting to know your product. Too much information can be overwhelming. When you talk too much, nothing stands out. Which is why you should only briefly mention your product’s main features, and focus on describing the functionality that is particularly relevant to the lead.
Talk about how they can benefit from adopting your solution, explain its advantages, and save the rest for later.
3. Understand Your Prospect’s Real Concerns
I don’t know if we can afford your solution at the moment, sorry.
No matter how affordable your product is, you must have heard this phrase from your bottom of the funnel leads at least once. The product’s price is never an issue. The real issue is it not matching the product’s value.
When your leads are 100% confident that your product will solve their problems and help their business prosper, they won’t care how much they have to pay for that. However, if they’re not, they’ll keep looking for excuses to postpone the purchase.
It’s essential to identify your potential customers’ real concerns regarding the offer and work through them, if you want to prompt bottom-funnel conversions. Instead of ignoring the concerns your leads voice, try to uncover the underlying problem and the reasons behind it. This way, you could negotiate more effectively.
Let’s go back to the initial example. Whenever a lead says they aren’t ready to make a purchase because the price is ‘too high’, they just don’t see the value in your product. Therefore, you need to find out what would help them to justify paying more and show them you can deliver on that.
To convey your value proposition, you can try out the following tactics:
- Showing side-to-side comparisons of how using your product brings positive results (before and afters);
- Discussing implementation plans;
- Providing social proof from clients with similar use-cases.
4. Make Sales Enablement Your Kingpin
If you want those bottom of the funnel leads to finally make a purchase, it’s absolutely essential for you to marry your marketing and sales departments. Creating proper sales enablements to support your selling points that will appeal to the potential buyers’ pain points and challenges will help you close the deal.
There are lots of different types of content that you can create and promote to your potential customers. Just make sure that you personalize it well and target the right segments of BOFU leads. For instance, you could produce a unique and helpful blog post, presentation, or a YouTube video. Include some elements of pre-boarding to reflect on the issues your lead is dealing with at the moment. Alternatively, you could create an in-depth comparison of your product and your competitors’ products to highlight the value you offer to your customers.
Finally, you could create and disseminate a case-study with a current client. The one that runs a business in the same industry, faced the same challenges and had the same pain points. In order to do that, though, you need to make sure that you use a CRM tool to track your interactions with different customers and effectively segment them into relevant categories.
Just remember! When it comes to sales enablement materials, consistency of communication throughout the whole customer journey is your best friend. You need to eliminate the human factor out of the equation and make sure you don’t miss a single follow-up! The best way to do this is to automate the sales process by setting up a drip campaign.
BOFU is only challenging when you don’t know how to approach it. Increasing the bottom-funnel conversions is easy when you have a clear plan of action:
- Learn everything there is to know about your lead’s pain points
- Identify and address their concerns
- Create added value to justify the price
- Strengthen your value proposition with social proof
- Convert through using sales enablements.
