Question

Topic: E-Marketing

Converting Internet Leads To Sales

Posted by Anonymous on 9/2/2004 at 3:18 PM ET 125 Points
Hello everyone! I am currently a marketing coordinator for a Washington, DC regional homebuilder. We have a great product and are looking to create an E-Leads sales consultant position to increase our prospect relations. Right now about 90% of our leads come via the web and so we really want to improve on the relationship with these people. Right now we are lucky to turn 1 in every 50 leads into sales.

I am in the process of doing research to create this new position and was wondering if you all had any insight as to how to make this position a successful one. We have already brainstormed the ideas of newsletters and such but I'm looking for some really good ideas and person experience as to how this program can work toward our advantage.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Cindy

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RESPONSES

  • Posted by Inbox_Interactive on 9/2/2004 at 3:56 PM Accepted
    One of my points is self-serving, so I'll take my lumps in advance, but are you really sure that you want to hire someone full-time for this? There are just so many facets of online lead-generation and conversion that I wonder if any one person is the solution that you need. It seems to me that you should be able to find a services company that can handle all of these aspects, and probably for less than the cost of a new full-time hire.

    Having said that, and without any hard data on which to fall back, I don't know that a 2% conversion ratio is all that bad with respect to the homebuilding business. We're talking about the largest purchase that most people will make, and the sales cycle is anything but short.

    I'd be curious to know what your customer acquisition cost is, even at a 2% conversion rate, and compare that to traditional means such as direct mail, radio, and print advertising. I've got a funny feeling it's lower--a LOT lower.

    Personally, and while thinking that making use of online communications techniques such as e-mail newsletters is an excellent idea to maintain contact with your prospects, I still think selling homes is going to be done the old-fashioned way for quite some time. Someone's going to have to pick up the phone, rate the prospect in terms of timing, financial ability, needs, etc., and then a face-to-face meeting (several, probably) will need to take place.

    If your sales consultants are so busy that they really need to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of their prospects, there are probably a few questions you can implement in your prospect generation process to weed out those who have a good chance of buying sooner as opposed to later (or never). These are the same kinds of questions on every guest registration card, items such as own/rent, price range, desired location, and urgency/timeframe.

    At the very least, you might consider something like a focus group of people (maybe even like mystery shoppers) to go through the process of becoming prospects online, then get their feedback about the whole process, what they liked, didn't like, etc., then see how your sales department handles them. It's amazing what an unbiased set of eyes can uncover as far as problems with navigabilty and ease of use.

    Hope some of this helps, even a little!

    Paul
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