How To Convert More Prospects

The best sale is a no-brainer, when what you are offering perfectly fits what your ideal customer needs.

How many times have you come across a product or service which at first sight didn't seem right for you? 
And how often have you shrugged and kept your money in your pocket?

The truth is that most businesses talk about what they do as if potential customers understand the product or service as deeply as they do.

More often than not they don't understand it enough to put their hands in their pockets, and this is why it is vital to do some market research to understand what potential customers need from a product like yours, why would they buy from your category? Why would they buy from you?

The most important thing is to consider the benefits that buying you will bring them rather than the features of your product or service. What will buying from you do for them?

Will it bring peace of mind? 
Allow them to focus on what they do best? 
Take a way a common pain point? 
Get their boss off their back?
Impress their boss and get them a promotion?
Maybe just make their job easier?

These are all benefits, and even in the most technical B2B markets people buy benefits first and cross-check the features second.

So how to get that understanding?

Depending upon time and budget, there are four things you can do here:

1. Across your team, across any functions or personnel who have any contact with your customers, consider how you think your customers and detractors see you. Don't be precious, allow the truth to flow. This will give you a great starting point. If you want an outline of how to structure this see my Quick & Dirty Research Session article here.
2. Ask your existing and lapsed customers. Create an interview script and/or an online survey to find out precisely why they buy you, what they see as your strengths and weaknesses, who they consider your competition and what they think you need to be seen as to be bought by more people. Ultimately you want to unlock and compare how they see you and what drives their purchase decisions, and work to close the gap if any.
3. Employ a panel survey company to run a survey with a statistically significant sample of people on their database who meet your ideal customer profile. More than just how you are seen by people who know you, this will give you invaluable insights into how you are seen, and if you are seen, by the entire targetable market typically with over 90% accuracy across the market from the sample set. It will pretty much tell you precisely what you need to be in order to be bought by more people, as told to you by people who buy o will buy what you sell.
4. See how your competition are presenting themselves, what problems they are claiming to solve and more to the point what they aren't saying or being that you, enabled by your research, can lay claim to be. 

A good marketer can take this and make sure that your brand proposition hits all the right notes, and that your messaging and communications shows you to be the ideal choice for your ideal customers.

Right. The Obvious Questions Answered.

Why are people visiting our website but not buying or enquiring?

Almost certainly because your messaging is focused on what you do rather than what buyers get.

Most businesses communicate in features: what the product or service is, how it works, what's included. Buyers process in benefits: what problem it solves, what changes in their world once they buy, what risk it removes or opportunity it creates.

The gap between those two conversations is where conversions die. Visitors arrive, see a description of a product or service, can't immediately connect it to their specific situation, and leave. Not because they weren't interested. Because nothing made the connection obvious enough.

How do we find out what our customers actually care about?

Ask them. Properly.

Talk to your best existing customers. Not a quick "did you enjoy working with us?" survey, but a real conversation about why they bought, what alternatives they considered, what almost stopped them, and what they'd tell someone in the same position as they were.

Done consistently, those conversations surface the buying triggers, the objections, the language buyers actually use, and the benefits that drove the decision. That's your messaging, handed to you by the people you're trying to reach. It's sitting right there and most businesses never bother to go and get it.

What's the difference between features and benefits, and why does it matter?

A feature is what something is or does. A benefit is what it means for the buyer.

"24/7 technical support" is a feature. "You'll never be left scrambling when something breaks at 11pm" is a benefit. "Modular pricing" is a feature. "You only pay for what you actually use" is a benefit.

In most B2B markets, people buy benefits first and verify features second. The feature list reassures them after they've already decided. The benefit is what made them decide. Lead with the thing that makes the decision, then back it up with the thing that validates it.

How do we work out what we need to be in order to win more business?

Start by mapping the gap between how you see yourself and how the market actually sees you.

That gap is almost always wider than businesses expect, and it's rarely flattering. Your perception of your own strengths is shaped by what you're proud of. The market's perception is shaped by what they've directly experienced or heard about. Those two things are often miles apart.

Research closes the gap. Customer interviews, buyer surveys, competitive analysis, all of these tell you what you need to be, what you need to say, and where the real opportunity for differentiation sits. Without that, your proposition is built on internal assumption. And internal assumption rarely persuades anyone, no matter how confidently it's held.

We've improved the website. Why haven't conversion rates improved?

Because conversions are driven by proposition and relevance, not by design or user experience alone.

A better designed website with weak messaging converts less than a worse designed one with messaging that genuinely resonates. The website is the wrapper. The proposition is what's inside. If the underlying message isn't landing, if people can't immediately understand why they should choose you over the alternatives, no amount of UX work or CRO testing will fix it. It'll just produce a prettier version of the same problem.

Fix the proposition first. Then optimise the delivery of it.