How to convert leads into sales appointments & clients

With the right messaging and targeting, generating leads for your business, can be relatively easy. But generating leads does not equal sales – at least not yet!

So what is the best way to convert leads into paying clients?

After helping lots of clients get leads, sales appointments and clients (see results) here are our best tips to convert leads into sales.

Here are some of our best tips to convert leads into sales.

Best strategy to convert leads into sales (summary)

If you’re short on time, here are the top ways to convert leads into sales:

• Use email marketing
• Create free educational content
• Build trust with social media
• Host events
• Use a video sales letter

In short, the top strategy to convert leads into sales and clients involves regularly following up with leads in ways that build trust. This is the best way to get leads to convert into sales.

If you’d like to learn how to do this in more detail, watch my free training video here.

This video explains in detail how to get leads (using free, automated & profitable strategies) and how to convert leads into sales appointments and clients (on autopilot!)

What are the best strategies to convert leads into clients?

1. Use email marketing to follow up with leads

Email marketing is still, without a doubt, one of the most powerful ways to convert your leads into clients. However, a lot of people use email marketing the wrong way.

How NOT to use email marketing

• Only email your leads once
• Email your leads once a quarter or (even worse) a few times a year
• Only using email to sell to your leads all the time
• Creating emails that look like boring company newsletters

How to use email marketing the RIGHT way

• Follow up with your leads via email at least once a month (preferably more) with your latest and best content
• Sell to your leads regularly, but only after you’ve provided a lot more free value and educational content first. A good rule of thumb is for every 3 or 4 emails you send out with free educational content you can send 1 email out to sell to them.
• Send an email from a personal work email address rather than a generic info@example.com email address (for example, ashley@skylinesocial.com is what we use at Skyline Social!)
• Avoid emails with fancy templates. Keep your email simple (make it look like an email that you would send to a friend)
• Use email software to track results and automate as much as you can (we use and highly recommend Kartra)

The important part to remember with email marketing is that it’s all about following up, and not just following up to say “hey, do you remember me? This is what I do….”, it’s about following up with your leads to help them and provide value first, then sell to them later.

Here’s an example of an email broadcast template you could send to leads:

2. Create free educational content

By creating free educational content that provides value to your target audience, you now have a reason to follow up with your leads through email marketing without being annoying.

The great thing about creating content is that you can use it to sell to your leads without selling to them.

Creating content that’s incredibly useful and helpful also positions you as an expert in what you do, and it proves to your prospects that you know what you’re talking about.

Here are some examples of free educational content you can create:

• Articles
• Videos
• Webinars
• Events
• Podcasts
• Social media posts

However, it’s important not to overwork yourself. Pick only 1 or 2 channels to start creating educational content on.

At Skyline Social, we focus on video and article content. We’ve found that type of content converts best (for us and our clients).

Top tip: The content you create not only helps you with building trust, but it also helps you rank higher on Google. There are so many benefits to creating content, so it’s crucial that this is an ongoing part of your marketing strategy.

3. Build trust with social media

By now, you probably know that social media is a gold mine for generating leads. But did you know you can also use social media to convert leads into sales?

Some ways you can use social media to build trust and convert more leads into sales include:

• Connecting to potential clients on social media (e.g. LinkedIn or Twitter)
• Messaging and having real human conversations with prospects on social media
• Posting social media updates every so often to stay top of mind
• Retargeting users on social media

When using social media, focusing on the activities that get the best results is essential.

In our experience, we’ve found posting social media updates can help a little bit, but the results are painfully slow.

Organic social media reach is very low on most social media channels (excluding YouTube and TikTok, which are still great for organic reach).

Instead, we’ve found the best way to use social media to convert leads into clients would be to focus on social media retargeting ads.

You can retarget your existing leads by uploading a list of your leads into Facebook, LinkedIn, etc., with helpful educational content that builds trust.

4. Host online or in-person events

This strategy requires a lot of work, but it is a powerful way to build trust with your leads.

When I was living in London, I would speak at a live event every month, talking about lead generation. It was an excellent way to build authority, trust, and likability and convert leads into sales.

Now that I live in the USA and work with clients all over the world, instead of speaking at live in-person events locally, I started to host online webinars – which got similar results but requires much less time to run.

Later I split-tested webinars with automated video sales letters and discovered a video sales letter can get even better results! (see below why)

5. Create a video sales letter

A video sales letter (VSL) is like having a sales team working for you 24/7. It can build trust with leads and convert them into sales appointments.

An effective VSL will:

• Explain a problem your potential clients have (to show you understand them)
• Show possible solutions to that problem (which is what your prospect has tried in the past)
• Educate leads on why your solution is MUCH better than those other solutions (so they want to work with you)
• A call to action to learn more and go to the next step in your sales process

Creating a high-converting VSL is one of the most important steps in building a successful appointment funnel.

To learn more about creating a VSL, see ‘Step 2’ of my free training here.

Tip: For best results, it’s a good idea to host your video sales letter on an all-in-one funnel building tool.

6. Create video content for YouTube & follow-up emails

One of the biggest reasons a lead will buy from you is because they trust and like you. So if you want to increase how quickly someone trusts and likes you dramatically, there’s nothing quite like creating video content.

I recommend creating video content that answers questions your potential clients are asking and then uploading it on YouTube to generate YouTube leads.

Then, email your leads the new educational video content in your follow-up emails to leads.

The more questions you answer from your potential clients, the more likely they will be to book a sales appointment with your sales team and become a new client.

7. Find your “hot leads” and reach out to them

As you start to generate leads, follow up with them through email marketing, webinars, events and so on – you’ll notice some are a lot more engaged than others.

The leads that are very engaged with you (they open every email, click on every link, sign up to all your webinars, etc.) are the ones we call your “hot leads”.

Your email marketing software will usually be able to tell you who these people are.

However, for one reason or another (usually because they’re too busy), your “hot leads” might not have decided to reach out to you to work with you yet.

All you then need to do is pick up the phone and contact them.

Or, if you want to really stand out, record a quick personalized video (using Descript) explaining how you can help them and send it to them via email.

8. Use call to actions

This one might sound obvious, but many people miss it. It’s important to have a call to action for the next step of your sales process if you want leads to convert into clients.

Here are some places you can use a call to action:

• Website
• Follow up emails
• Social media
• Videos
• Content

Make the call to action VERY clear and explain to potential customers what happens next when they click on it.

For example, if the next step in your sales process is to buy something, then ask for the sale!

Or, if the next step in your sales process is to book a call with a sales team member, then have a big button telling leads to schedule a phone call.

9. Have a sense of urgency

If leads are on the fence about working with you, a special offer combined with urgency (expiring soon or limited time only) will almost always get leads to convert into sales.

However, it’s important that you don’t use “Fake scarcity.” These are made-up special offers that say something is expiring soon but never really do.

If you do this, it can cause more harm than good.

But real and honest special offers every so often with some kind of countdown timer can definitely increase your conversion rates and help more leads convert into customers.

10. Track your results

To improve your lead conversion rates, it’s important you track your conversions at every point in your marketing and sales process. That way, you can see what’s working and what isn’t.

Top-level tracking

The first thing you want to track is your top-level marketing performance.

In general, this is:

• The total amount of people you reach
• The total amount of leads you generate
• The total amount of inquiries you get
• The total amount of sales you win

This may change from business to business, but the above should give you a guideline for your own business’s lead generation and lead conversion.

Overall, you want to look at these stats and see how you can improve them. If you make changes to your website, your branding, your text, images, etc. – how does this affect your stats? Will it be higher or lower?

By tracking your results at different stages, you’ll see ways to improve and then focus your attention on those.

11. Be patient and reap the rewards

In your business, you need to follow up with your leads until they are ready, willing and able to buy.

Ready = This is the right time for them in their business and life
Willing = They trust you enough to buy from you
Able = They have the money necessary to make a purchase

With the right targeting on social media, you can increase the chances of finding people who are ready (it’s the right time) and able (they have the money) to work with you. But you can’t force them to be willing (trust and like you enough).

Social media lead generation isn’t easy, otherwise everyone would be doing it. But if you do the work and you’re patient, you can reap the rewards sooner than later.

Conclusion

By following up with your leads through multiple touch points (email, content, social media, video, etc.), you can increase the chances that your leads will trust you and want to work with you now rather than later.

As a quick example, for us, we get clients who have been on our email list for a few weeks, some months and some even years before they convert into clients. Why? Some trust us quicker than others.

For our clients, it’s the same thing.

So be patient. And in the meantime, focus on ways to build more trust by following the advice, strategies, tips and tactics in the methods above.

To learn how to get 10, 15, 30 or more predictable sales appointments each month in your business, check out our free training here.