How to get more B2B sales leads from every lead generation dollar you spend.

Let’s imagine you learned of a mechanic who could double your gas mileage. You could take your car in and, after paying for a few modifications (which are legal, moral, and ethical), your gas mileage would be forever doubled. You would get to enjoy the savings and efficiency for as long as you own your car. Would you do it?

While I know of no such mileage-doubling opportunity, I am aware of a sales-doubling opportunity that many executives seem comfortable to ignore.
If your website generates sales leads today, it’s entirely possible that, with a few modifications, you could enjoy a 2X (or even 5X) increase in leads.

The common term for this is “Conversion Rate”. We know mileage rate means that for every gallon of gas we burn we can expect to travel a fixed number of miles. Conversion Rate means that for each thousand visitors that come to our website we can expect to generate a fixed number of sales leads.

Attacking your conversion rate can have huge upside for you. In this case, huge might only be 1%, and there are few times in business where you can get truly excited about 1% of anything. Here’s where the excitement comes from…
If your website generates 10 leads for every thousand visitors, you would have a 1% Conversion Rate. By moving from a 1% to a 2% Conversion Rate, you double your sales leads. The net change is only 1 percentage point, but doubling your sales leads is pretty exciting!

Another nice thing about Conversion Rate is you can treat it like a project instead of a long-term campaign. Yes, you will have to dedicate some resources to this project, resources you hadn’t budget before you started reading this article. Yet you only have to pay for the improvement one time. After you’ve modified your website to improve your Conversion Rate, the leads keep rolling in at the higher rate with no more energy or investment on your part. And your investment is far less than what you would spend on long-term lead generation campaigns.

Most of my clients get hooked on the Conversion Rate Game. After they see how easy it is to boost Conversion Rate, we continue to test changes and make tweaks to drive the Conversion Rate even higher.

It’s best if you tackle Conversion Rate before your competitors choose not to ignore it any longer. Let’s imagine you are in the delivery business, and your competitors UPS and FedEx figured out how to double the mileage rates for their trucks. Your business would get really scary, and your future might be uncertain.

Instead, you have a chance to put fear into the hearts of your competition. By choosing to devote some time and attention to your Conversion Rate now, you’ll be among the few who actually do something positive about it. It doesn’t matter whether your competitors get it or not; the reality is you’ll be spending less time and money at the lead generation “pump”, and that will give you a competitive advantage. You’ll get business that might otherwise power your competition.

Attack your conversion rate now, and you’ll see more plentiful leads from your website, lower cost of sales, and a better return on all of lead generation investments. Even when times are tough, you can make your business go farther and faster when you spend some time under the hood and upgrade your Conversion Rate.