Why is Having Leads Conversation with Your Client Important? 

It is important to talk about leads with your clients to compare the analytics you have with the business. Otherwise, you may be wasting opportunities for your client.

Video transcript:

Youssef: I think, David, as long as you’re getting them leads, I think you’re doing your job. It’s their end if they can close them or not.

David: That’s true.

Tim: A lot of times, right?

David: Yeah. I’ve had some conversations. There was one conversation I had recently where the client… I wish all my clients did this. They showed how many leads we got this month and how many became customers. And they showed me the numbers for the last year and three months ago, the number of leads didn’t change in number, but the number of closed deals changed. They were freaking out like, suddenly, we’re not making any money from this. And I looked at the number and said, why did this number drop in this month? They said their head of sales resigned. Okay, I can’t control that.

Tim: Yeah.

David: And I’m like, you guys need to hire a new head of sales.  

Tim: Yeah.

David: Because clearly, if we can bring in the leads, you can close them. And then suddenly, your close rate dropped. It has nothing to do with SEO.

Tim: Right.

David: And you’re exactly right, Youssef. There’s one client we have where two things happened recently with them. One, they didn’t realize how many people were calling them that were prospective leads, and the receptionist did not know what to do with the lead. And so, we simply started phone call tracking, and we figured out that the receptionist was punting on all these prospective clients calling in. And these were large deals. And it was as simplest as telling the receptionist, if this person calls, call that person, this person goes in there. And instantly, they started making money. And then then, God forbid, this is a nightmare scenario. Something happened on the website, and they stopped getting copies of all the leads. And oh boy, they were so busy, they didn’t notice.

Tim: Yep.

David: For three months. And wow. Once they know, they’re something like, “Hey, I haven’t gotten leads in a couple…a while.” And we look and…

Tim: Yeah, you have.

David: Yeah, you have. Look at the analytics. You’re getting consistent leads. Like you’re up 40% from this time last year. And he’s like, “Yeah, I haven’t gotten any of them.” Okay. Well, we fixed the problem. Instantly they made money because… And because we’re focused on the leads, Youssef, we were able to have that conversation. If I was only thinking about rank as a metric for SEO, I’d be like, “That’s your problem, not mine.”

Tim: Yep.  

David: But now they’re making money, and now because of the instant value we provided, boy, you know, we’re kind of in forever. Why would you stop paying us? Because of getting his leads. Right?

Tim: Yeah. That’s part of going the extra mile in a way, you know? Like, delivering over the top that you’re not just doing SEO, but you’re helping them identify potential leaks that could turn into hazardous situations without them even knowing sometimes.

David: Yeah. That’s why in the Game Plan, steps one through four are setting up analytics. And I think step five is something like set up the monthly reports. But in the month, if you use the standard month report that I provide, which is not a requirement, it’s just what I do; in that lead report, it says did you get these leads? And what is the quality of those leads? Because I really want clients to be able to go back into that number. And then I think that one of the next steps is, like, I put conversion rate optimization pretty early in the process. Sometimes people will think about it late in the process. Because they’ll do all the SEO, get everything optimized, and then try to optimize conversion rates. What I find is a lot of the websites I inherit aren’t built for conversion. And that’s not always because the designers are bad. Sometimes the clients just don’t think like that. Like this one client, they thought nobody was going to contact us from the website, so they didn’t even give them the option.

Tim: Yeah.

David: So, one of the first things we did was take the phone number, which is on top of every page, and simply made it bigger. And suddenly, they started getting phone calls. Unfortunately, this client didn’t know what to do when they got the phone calls. So even before we started seeing SEO success, they started getting more business. At my old agency, we’d say, “Add a form to it.” It was kind of the old mantra. Well, the first thing you do for every client is adding a form to every page.

Tim: Yeah.

David: That just makes it easy to contact. Why are we making it hard to contact you? I don’t think it has to be as simple as just adding a form on every page, but you’ll be amazed how well that helps conversion rates. And frankly, you’re so early in the campaign you don’t even have to do an A/B test. You could do what we call a poor man’s A/B test. It’s just to add the new form and see if you get more leads. And more often than not, you’re going to get more leads just because you’ve made it easier for customers to contact you.

Tim: Right.

David: It’s kind of like a lot of us small business owners have problems with closing the deal, asking for the deal. Yeah. Why don’t you just sign up today? I know I have a hard time with the hard sell.  

Tim: Yeah.

David: And a lot of people do. And so, they build websites that reflect that. The good thing is, it’s a lot easier to be a hard sale on the website because you don’t have the psychology of losing out. We don’t take it personally when a visitor comes to our page and doesn’t fill out the form.

Tim: Right.

David: Right. We don’t have to worry about rejection.

Tim: Yeah.

David: And so, we can be really terrible salespeople and increase our… just by the law of large numbers and having an accessible form.

Tim: Right.

David: Yep.

Tim: I like to think of websites in relation to retail experiences. Right? Like, not having a form on a website would be like not having a register to check out at the store, you know? It would just be the store, and I’m just browsing, and okay, that’s it, I’m done now.

David: Or like, some websites are designed where the checkout is way in the back.

Tim: Yeah, right?

David: You have to route through. Right? You have to find the checkout person. People don’t build stores like that. Well, that’s for a reason, right? They want to make it easier to leave. Why would you make it hard for someone to find the cash register in the store?

Tim: Yeah. Exactly. And then to optimize that situation, all the stores now are putting in an aisle that you have to walk through with all of the little, you know, under ten dollars items or just those last-ditch upsells like candy and all those enticing things. A lot of things that call out to the kids. They’re all at kids’ eye level. That’s all retail optimization.

David: Yep. Oh, you think about it, you enter Walmart, and the first thing you see are the cash registers. Well, obviously, there’s a reason for that security-wise. They don’t want you to exit and bypass the registers. Right? But the good part is you’ve established oh, here is where I can check out when you walk in. Okay, the same thing should be said about building websites. The first time someone sees your website, they should be able to instantly see what you can do in order to do business with this company. And they might not be ready to check out yet. They might just be browsing and come back later and check out. But at the very least, you want them to know what they could do if they wanted to check out.

Tim: Right.

David: And so again, sometimes we build websites that are like, “Alright, we’re going to be really subtle about the contact button because we don’t want to be obnoxious.”

Tim: Right. Right.

David: In reality, your customers want to do business with you. So, let’s make it easy for them to know how. If they don’t want to, they’re not going to hit the button. That’s okay. If they want to check you out and a couple of competitors, that’s okay.

Tim: Right.

David: We just don’t want it to be hard for you to figure out how to contact us. Right. So, yeah, doing that early in the campaign is always easy, a big win.

Tim: Sure. Yeah. It should be the first analysis of this situation. Right? Like, you’re always going to do some sort of audit in a way or whatever you want to call it, an assessment or something. Right, but we have to identify what the low-hanging fruit is at least and start fixing it. I think it’s what you’re saying. Right?

David: Yeah.