3 ways to diagnose and solve common marketing and sales conversion issues
It’s a common occurrence, it’s coming up to quarter end and you’re looking at the latest dashboard, funnel reports, and sales figures, pleased with the almost herculean effort the team had put in. But it’s not enough, there’s something wrong and no one can quite understand why nothing seems to be converting or moving forward.
You’re now wondering where all of the momentum going into the next quarter is going to come from and what it’s going to take to restore order to your pipeline.
It’s something I see a lot in early stage business, especially when there’s no full-time marketing function in place, and the founder is wearing both sales and marketing hats.
How can I solve marketing and sales conversion issues to generate more leads?
If your leads are drying up and your funnel isn't converting as it should, it's usually a combination of audience/messaging/timing.
Here's a breakdown of the usual suspects causing these marketing conversion issues and how you can start to fix your pipeline ready for the next buying cycle:
Problem 1. You’re not clear on who the leads should actually be coming from or who to target
If your ICP is vague or keeps shifting, then it doesn’t matter how many people visit your website or fill in a form, they won’t convert. You’ll be wasting time on conversations that go nowhere and assume the leads are low quality when actually the initial targeting was off.
Solution: Spend some time narrowing in your customer focus before you add more to your funnel. Make it ‘less anyone in tech’, and more ‘x, y or z leaders at Series A SaaS with 10–50 employees and [massive pain point]’. Go over your ICP and match it against what has been converting in your pipeline - is it matching up or is it completely different? Spend some time in conversation with your prospects, it could be that your ICP is off.
Blog: How to effectively define your ICP
Problem 2. Your message isn’t landing
Even with the right audience, if your positioning is unclear, inconsistent, or trying to say too much, leads won’t convert. Prospects and customers don’t respond to vague value props, long intros, or generic offers if it’s not abundantly clear it’s for them.
Solution: Simplify your landing pages and ensure your emails all say one clear thing about how you solve one real problem for your ICP. Don’t lead with how you’re AI-powered, have game-changing software, are the UK’s best as your client just doesn’t care. Lead with what problem you solve for your customers and how and put your messaging into framework that's shared inside the business.
Blog: The ultimate guide to creating a messaging framework for your business
Problem 3. There’s a conversion problem hiding in the funnel
Sometimes the demand is there, but it’s not converting because somewhere the customer journey is broken. There might be leads but there’s a slow follow-up. It could be that there’s no immediate call to action. Or your product/offering is too early, too generic, or just irrelevant to where the buyer is. Sometimes you just have to solve marketing conversion issues in the CRM itself.
Solution: Look at the whole funnel. Leads not converting could also be about those friction points in the funnel and some of those are very easy to fix. Slow follow up could be solved by new processes and an SLA for example. If there’s no immediate call to action, create the urgency - if someone doesn’t need to tool because they do it in Excel, create a narrative about how you save £x in resource.
Obviously, some of these are harder to diagnose, but with improved processes, SLAs, and reporting correctly in your CRM, you’ll be able to spot and fix them a lot more quickly.
Final thoughts on marketing and sales conversion issues
I’m aware that sometimes you really do need more pipeline. However, chasing more leads before fixing these three things just makes it so much harder than it needs to be. You’ll just burn through budget and waste your time going around in circles without ever solving the underlying issue.
So, if you get the foundations right, the leads become a lot easier to generate and a lot more valuable when they arrive.
If you need marketing help to help diagnose and fix these early stage issues in the pipeline, get in touch for a chat. Or reach out to me on LinkedIn.
