Surprising 2009 Lead Conversion Results
Ask business executives about 2009 and many will answer that it was a rough ride. Finding new customers with active projects, much less with budgets, was tough.
However, some actually increased revenues by seeking new approaches to finding customers. Many realized that what potential customers need in a tight market is a way to determine budget fit. Using the psychology of self-service pricing, many B2B companies were able to boost their lead conversion rates by 250-300% and win new business.
Federal Appliance, a Dell EqualLogic reseller, uses a blog www.4equalllogic.com for technical users to drive traffic and then a self-service pricing offer to convert prospects. For the year ended December 31, 2009, Federal Appliance converted 3,219 website visitors with 2,323 being “sales ready”; that’s a 72% ratio.
Another emerging technology company, GreenBytes, specializes in inline deduplication appliances. Primary dedupe products are the next generation of products following on the heals of the already successful backup deduplication vendors like Exagrid, and DataDomain. In the 60 days that GreenBytes has been testing the effectiveness of self-service pricing they have seen a 71% ratio of sales ready leads.
As more and more technology vendors chase fewer customers we may see a rocky first half of 2010. For some that think beyond the traditional “whitepaper” and “free trial” offers and finally give self-service pricing a try, 2010 could be a stellar year.
