All B2B companies fight to get the best leads into the top of the funnel (TOFU), spending tons of money on PPC, SEO, social media, video marketing, and attending industry events.
Unfortunately, even the most expensive lead isn’t worth much if it doesn’t convert and leaks out in the middle of the funnel (MOFU). As B2B conversion funnels are getting longer and more complex, they also create more opportunities for leads to leave.
The solution is to focus on those sales funnel leaks and optimize your conversion process in a way that minimizes them without rebuilding the structure of the funnel itself. Here are five steps you should consider.
Tip: Use a machine-learning solution like Lift AI that integrates right into your marketing stack and accurately measures the buyer intent of every single website visitor to pick out the most promising leads in real time.
1. Review intent throughout the funnel
It’s likely that your conversion funnel was designed years ago and, since then, your team has only added stuff to it, without rethinking how the resulting structure works as a whole.
Go back to the original buyer’s journey and assess every stage of the sales cycle, from awareness to consideration and decision.
At the awareness stage, ask why are they searching for a solution at all? What’s the problem they are trying to solve? How do they find out about you?
At the consideration stage, make sure you understand the circumstances under which your potential customers are looking for a new solution. What’s their state of mind? What criteria do they apply to their perfect vendor of choice?
At the decision stage, review all the successful conversions in the past quarter and find similarities (as well as differences). The goal here is to adjust the process in a way that remains open for as many leads as possible while being definitive in its drive for purchase.
We’ve written before about how live sales chat powered by AI can be a great option to instantly increase funnel conversions, just to give one example.
2. Follow the numbers
While most companies have analytics tools installed on their website, few actually turn it into actionable data — a clear miss.
Even with a free Google Analytics account, you can follow a typical visitor flow throughout your website, identifying the exact moments where most visitors leave.
In particular, pay attention to pages with high bounce rates, or those that bring a lot of traffic but with lower-than-average conversion numbers.
3. Improve your SEO keywords
A properly optimized website that frequently posts new content can get a lot of SEO traffic — for free! The problem is that for most companies their SEO traffic doesn’t represent a good fit and, as a result, is not monetizable.
The solution is to add more long-tail keywords to your content. If you know your customers well, you can get pretty specific in terms of keywords they might be searching for. Adjusting your content to rank for such keywords will in turn be both less competitive and more accurate for attracting better leads.
4. A/B test key messaging
When you inspect the visitor flow on your website with analytics tools, you’ll see the exact spots where more people drop off than you’ve expected.
The most common reason for that is unclear messaging. If visitors can’t find the right way forward in their buyer’s journey within a few seconds, they are very likely to leave and try again somewhere else.
That’s why identifying low-performing pages and reviewing them for clarity is so important. More often than not, changing the wording (or the look) of a single key CTA can make all the difference in fixing your funnel. Make sure to create at least a few options, however, and A/B test any changes.
5. Find real-time buyer intent with AI
In addition to making the changes above, you can leverage the power of AI to automatically find the best leads for you.
AI tools aggregate vast amounts of data and can make informed decisions on a level that’s simply not accessible in any other way, such as picking out leads that have a very high probability of buying your product or service based on their behavioral patterns.
As a result, AI tools can save time, improve accuracy, and increase lead quality — instantly. One of the best examples of what AI tools can do is Lift AI.
Lift AI is a real-time buyer intent solution that analyzes every single visitor on your websites and identifies which ones have the highest probability to buy.
The Lift AI machine-learning model has been trained on billions of data points and more than 14 million live sales interactions — and it keeps improving. That’s why Lift AI works even on completely anonymous visitors — it can probabilistically determine buyer intent even in visitors who’ve never been to your website before, and haven’t been recorded in any of your marketing tools.
You can integrate Lift AI into any part of your marketing stack to get accurate buyer intent scores. One of the most recommended solutions, however, is live chat.
Live chat supercharged by Lift AI expertly segments all your website traffic into different cohorts based on buyer intent. High buyer intent visitors can then be connected directly to your BDRs, while others might be shown your nurturing funnel as usual.
This is how Lift AI can increase the quality of your leads as soon as they land on your website.
Within 90 days, Lift AI improves sales conversations to pipeline by 9x on average. Formstack’s conversions improved by 88%, for example, while PointClickCare grew its funnel by up 400%.
Try Lift AI for 30 days — free. No credit card is required, and you only need to add a small Lift AI script to your website to start.
As you can see, with just a few adjustments and some new AI-powered tools, you can not only fix sales funnel leaks but also dramatically improve all chat conversions at the same time.
