Ways to increase conversion in B2B sales
Analytics and its metrics allow you to objectively judge the performance of a business. One of the most obvious metrics is conversion. If you increase conversion by at least one tenth at each stage of the sales funnel, you can increase your income by one and a half times. In this article we will show how it works.
In this article:Table of Contents
What is sales conversion in simple words?
Conversion is a metric that shows what percentage of potential customers become actual customers. Denoted as CR - Conversion Rate. It is calculated using the following formula:
We consider leads to be potential clients. That is, everyone who interacted with the business or expressed interest in it. For example, I went to a store or website, answered calls from managers, left my contact information for communication, etc. Real customers are those who completed the target action. For example, I made a deal. Depending on what we want to know, the target action will change.
If you work closely with conversion, you can greatly increase your profits.
Every month the store's website receives 1,000 unique visitors. Of these, 20 people make a purchase. That is, a potential client is a site visitor, and a real client is the one who placed an order. The conversion is 2%.
Let’s assume that the store’s average bill is 700 Rupees, and each customer places an order on average once a month.
We count the profit. To do this, multiply the number of visitors by the conversion rate, the average check and the average number of purchases per user.
It turns out:
1000 * 2% * 700 * 1 = 14,000 rupees.
If you increase the conversion by at least two tenths, achieving an indicator of 2.2%, then the profit will be 15,400. And if you can increase it to 14%, the revenue will be approximately 100,000 per month. And this despite the fact that the number of visitors, average bill and frequency of purchases remain the same.
It turns out that you can work on only one stage of the funnel and already increase your income.
What conversion to measure and why?
Conversion doesn't just impact revenue. It allows you to monitor the status at different stages of the sales funnel and see how your actions affect it. The sales funnel will become manageable, and it will be easier for the manager to find strategic solutions.
Example
Oleg and his team promote websites for businesses. Their goal is to grow from revenue of 500,000 Rupees per month to one million Rupees.
Now Oleg spends 100,000 Rupees monthly on attracting clients. The most obvious thing Oleg can do is double the advertising budget. More investments in well-functioning acquisition channels means a greater influx of customers.
But you can increase your income without additional expenses: if you analyze conversions at different stages of the sales funnel. Then Oleg will see that it will be more effective to refine the script for managers and the presentation of the product, and the increase in conversion at only one stage of sales will already increase profits in total.
Essentially, a sales funnel is a chain of conversions that is measured and managed. Conversion can be tracked at each stage of the funnel, these stages can be improved, and thus revenue can grow.
| Type of conversion | Information you will receive |
|---|---|
For each stage of the sales funnel |
Monitoring at each stage of the funnel will show where its weak points are: at what stages customers are lost and what measures need to be taken. Potential clients can be considered everyone who clicked on an advertisement, or all website visitors, or visitors who filled out a lead form, answered a manager’s call, and so on. And choose the target action depending on the stage of the funnel. |
For each sales channel |
What percentage of customers does this or that channel bring in: which channel can you invest more in, which one needs to be improved, and which one should be abandoned altogether. You can find out this from the CRM system or using statistics services such as Google Analytics. We divide the number of transactions by the number of leads coming from the channel. |
For marketing investments |
How effective is advertising? Conversion for advertisements is usually counted by the services through which you place the advertisement. This is the CR metric inside the advertising account. |
For every manager |
Which employees are good at selling, and which ones need additional training or motivation. In this case, we can calculate the ratio of transactions to the number of calls. |
For each product or service |
Which product sells better and which sells worse. For example, let’s divide the number of sales in an online store by the number of views of the product card. |
For each location |
Where the product is in great demand, and where less. Let's calculate the ratio of sales in each location to the total number of sales at all points. |
What conversion is considered good?
Our marketer Yulia Ismailova will tell you what kind of conversion is considered good and whether there is a conversion rate. Yulia has worked in marketing for more than 10 years, both in the B2B and B2C segments, and now works with Kontur products.
The key thing to understand is that there is no good or bad conversion. Conversion is just a metric that needs to be regularly monitored and improved, and used as a tool.
Let's consider two companies that sell, configure and service ACS (Access Control and Management System).
The first offers expensive imported brands, the second - mid-priced brands that are affordable to most. The first company is focused on a narrower audience with high security requirements; there are fewer competitors in this segment and the conversion rate is 10%. The second focuses on the mass market, it has more competitors and lower conversion rates - 2%.
If you focus only on the conversion rate, the first business seems to be more effective. But if you calculate their income for the last month, it turns out that the first company’s average bill is 30,000 Rupees, they have 1,000 website visitors per month, and their income is three million Rupees. The second has an average bill of 10,000 Rupees, 20,000 visitors and an income of four million Rupees.
The second business has more income, so it cannot be said that it has poor conversion. It is generally incorrect to compare it with the conversion of the first.
It is worth comparing conversion rates only under absolutely identical conditions or phenomena. For example:
For one specific business at different points in time. This way you will understand how your actions affect sales. For example, you will see that the new source of databases helps create more targeted portraits.
For managers who work with databases from a single source. This way you can evaluate the effectiveness of employees. For example, find out that one of the managers does not adhere to the sales methodology and therefore his performance is worse.
For advertising campaigns with different messages in one advertising channel. This will help you choose catchy ads. For example, a banner with the offer “The best craftsmen” performed worse than a banner with the offer “We replace the roof, carry out electrical work.”
How to increase conversion in the B2B segment
The sales chain is a chain of conversions at all stages of the funnel, from acquaintance with the product to the transaction. This is a game in which the client can leave at every stage. And the metric is a tool that will highlight those places where the client leaves and tell you how to help him stay.
Your key task is to make sure that at each stage there are as few “bottlenecks” as possible: that is, places where the client can fall off (for example: the landing page gave little information about the product, the registration form is hidden somewhere, the manager took up the application late , and the client has already “cooled down”, the client’s main objections are not spelled out in the script, etc.).
The good news is that all of this can be managed! If at each stage you increase the conversion by at least one tenth of a percent, make it not 3%, but 3.3%, as a result of the chain, revenue will increase by... 46% (1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1 * 1.1)! One and a half times!
Agree, a lot! But we didn’t even work with the marketing budget, didn’t touch sales channels, didn’t work with turning a client into a regular one, didn’t build a sales model, etc.
Let's look at the whole chain using the example of an online school of educational programs for business and see how to play this game: how to increase conversion and retain more clients at each stage.
Example
The school launches an advertisement. The advertising banner is seen by 3,000 people. 900 people go to the site. Conversion at this stage is 30%.
250 people register for the trial lesson. At the registration stage, the conversion rate is 28%. The school passes these leads on to managers.
It turns out that only 170 people have a real need for training. Conversion 68%.
They are given a presentation, after which 90 people agree to be billed. Conversion 53%.
Only 30 companies reach the point of purchasing and concluding a contract. Conversion 33%.
Let's see what we can do to increase purchase conversion:
Banner. The school understood what values and offers work for a specific target audience, and modified the banner taking into account this knowledge. And she received not 900, but 1034 site visitors.
Website. Let’s say the school worked closely with the landing page: added reviews, cases, worked out objections, made the design more clear, highlighted the USP and the registration form. And now not 30, but 50% of those who clicked on the advertisement reach registration: not 250, but 500 leads.
Trial lesson. You can refine the selling script, highlight the benefits and a special approach. And now not 30, but 50% of participants ask for an invoice.
Work with applications. The school is finalizing the script. The script becomes more flexible, changes depending on the objections of the client and the target audience subgroup, and becomes more humane. And it leads not 30, but 50% of transactions.
If you find the bottlenecks in the funnel and work on them, if you increase the conversion by at least a couple of tenths of units at each step, you can get a one and a half times increase in revenue.
Additional Tips
But there are general principles that help you see possible growth points and increase conversion:
Try to track the customer's journey from the first touch to the purchase. This way you can compare the conversion of different sales stages and different channels and see the full picture. To track customer interaction on the Internet, there are end-to-end analytics services. For example, Google Analytics, Roistat, Callibri.
Conduct a/b tests and test hypotheses. In the usual sense, an a/b test refers to website pages. Two identical pages are created, small changes are made to one of them, and client traffic goes to both. And then the results are compared. The same can be done in offline work. For example, change the script for some managers and see if the sales conversion changes.
Compare metrics only when interacting with similar audiences. For example, conversion rates when working with warm customers are usually higher than when working with cold ones. It would be incorrect to compare them with each other.
Don't forget about the technical side of the issue. Check whether all sales channels are working properly, whether there are any failures, and whether it is convenient for the client to interact with the product.
Remember that conversion is not the only metric to evaluate the performance of business processes. Evaluate it together with other business metrics: ROI, ROMI, CPO, CAC, etc.