Increase conversions by phone in a post-covid world

Looking for a way to convert more of your best customers? Your most powerful tool is still the phone.  This is especially true for all industries that are selling more complex or high value items – such as a home or auto loan. Of course, you should make this process easy for the customer and reduce friction. Steps in the process can and should be automated; to reduce the number of calls, to accelerate early identification of interest and information sharing, and to weed out the window shoppers and less qualified buyers before they reach a sales person.  But for these types of products and services, the vast majority of buyers ultimately still want to talk to a human being at the close.

For sellers, these live conversations are valuable. They increase close rates and the information gained from the lost sale provides valuable, hard-to-get-elsewhere 1^st-party data on what customers think about your company, products and services, why they won’t buy, the competitors they are considering instead and more.  That market intelligence is valuable and really hard to get anywhere else.

LQ Digital has processed over 30M leads over our work with leading, national B2C product and service providers to qualify those leads before transfer to a sales rep and / or to gather crucial market intelligence.  In June 2020 we published data on the 15-20 point increase we were seeing across all verticals in Decision-Maker Contact Rates immediately following the broad COVID outbreak. When stay at home orders were in place across most states, people were largely quarantined and were adapting to dramatic changes in lifestyle. As a result, companies were wisely adapting sales processes to cater to their customers’ needs.   However, recent data (below) now shows that as the pandemic has progressed, with restrictions loosening, some citizens either returning to work or becoming more adjusted to their new normal, Decision-Maker Contact Rates have steadily lowered and are now nearly back to their normal band of 39-42 percent.

So what does this mean for Marketing and Sales organizations?

• Lower contact rates will generate fewer qualified leads for Sales, lowering close rates, reducing sales volumes and revenue.
• Marketing costs will increase as the return on media and lead investments drop. As a result, lead costs will increase as demand will rise, requiring added Marketing expense to maintain sales revenues.

Combating this will require companies to find new ways to re-increase Decision Maker Contact Rates and Lead Conversion Rates.

• The most successful solution we have found is through orchestrating customized, coordinated and synchronized use of outbound calls with SMS and email outreach.
• The goal is not to replace the call given its proven importance in many markets for both driving sales conversions but also gathering vital, hard-to-get-elsewhere customer or market intelligence.
• The goal is to enhance the effectiveness of the 1^st call you make in reaching the decision maker, by alerting your customers to your outreach, and confirming the best time and method to communicate with them.  By orchestrating these different communication methods in a single platform around the team making the call, companies are able to consistently measure the right combination and frequency of outreach methods that predict the best possible economic outcome (and your customer’s experience). Then they are able to execute rapidly tailored combinations of outreach methods to generate the highest number of qualified leads from each customer segment.
• Combining this type of solution and real-time execution capability with a dedicated lead qualification team, has proven to maximize the sales capacity of Sales team resources by avoiding wasted sales time on unqualified leads.
• Our work to date proves that optimal orchestration of call + SMS alone raised Decision Maker Contact Rates by 10% and Lead Qualification Rates by 30%.

If you would like to learn more about how our solution and our work incorporating a coordinated, orchestrated call + SMS + email contact strategy from a single provider to help grow our clients revenues, please contact us today.