The best kept secret to successfully converting contacts into customers is simple: keep everything simple. The more complicated you make your processes and systems, the greater the chance that you or your team won’t use them. When that happens, opportunities get missed and sales are lost.

Here are my 5 (and a bit) steps for converting Contacts into Customers, quickly and simply.

Engaging With Your Contacts

Now that you’ve segmented your Contacts and picked off the really Hot prospects, it’s time to start nurturing the others through your sales pipeline.

There are a couple of ways our Users do this. The most popular is either to manually progress Contacts or create workflow automation based on their engagement, moving them to the next stage of your sales process. Either way, it’s easy to drag and drop a Contact along the pipeline and see all their details with a single click. You can also use your segmented Contacts to send targeted Emails that support your sales process by driving more engagement and enquiries.

When you’re at this stage of the sales cycle, it’s often best to pick up the phone. Typically, this will only be a handful of Contacts, but they’ll be well qualified and already know about you. When starting the conversation, use the intelligence that popcorn has generated to guide your questions. Don’t tell them you’ve been watching what they’ve been doing online, as that will probably send them running! Instead, ask relevant questions based on what you already know and you’ll usually have a much more meaningful conversation, allowing you to qualify them in or out.

Typically, once our Users have been doing this for a while, they’ll find that they’re either generating too many or not enough Hot prospects. This is where you can adjust your scoring to refine what is flagged as a Hot, Warm or Cool Prospect. These can then be automatically added into your New Prospects sales pipeline.

Sales Pipelines are a simple and visual way of managing your sales process and, thanks to the flexibility of drag and drop, they can easily evolve as you refine and improve your process.