Turn Internet leads into paying customers

It’s always baffling to me when I see a pitch on the Internet, fill in a response form and then wait hours – or days – for someone to get back to me.

That never made sense to me. I thought the whole purpose of pitching sales and service on the Internet was to generate leads. When people research products and services they’d like to buy, they want a quick response when a site interests them enough to compel them to ask for more information. The thing about the Internet is that we have come to expect a response to a request for information as quickly as possible. If we don’t get a response in a hurry, we tend to move on to another site.

Let’s say I want to buy a new Ford Mustang. I take a look at the sites of two local dealerships that both have cars in inventory that interest me. I fill out response forms to Dealership A and Dealership B. Within five minutes, Dealership B has responded with the information I wanted. At that point, do you think I care whether I hear from Dealership A? Absolutely not. In that scenario, then, Dealership A lost a customer to a competitor simply because it failed to get back to me quickly.

Intuitively, that makes a lot of sense. In fact, there’s a Kellogg study proving that the odds of connecting with a lead increases 100 times if contact is made within five minutes rather than within 30 minutes. Here’s something else – leads contacted within five minutes are 21times more likely to become customers than leads contacted within 30 minutes.

In other words, you can spend a lot of time an effort putting together Internet sites that make visitors notice and take an interest in your business, but it’s all meaningless if you can’t turn leads into customers.

It’s probably a good idea, then, to concentrate as much on turning leads into customers as it is to make a site appealing enough to get people to take the next step by clicking a call to action button. If you need some help in that area, you’re in luck – there’s a company called Speak2Leads that specializes into helping you turn those leads into paying customers.

That’s why your company started an Internet site to begin with, isn’t it? The whole point of putting your company on the Web is to find people interested enough to pay you money. If your company isn’t responding quickly enough to inquiries from potential customers, then what’s the point of its Internet site?