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With the right kind of lead nurture, sales will eventually follow suit.

But the point where someone is on the brink of buying is where you really want to up the wow factor.

There’s a lot you can do leading up to a sale to really impress your soon-to-be customers.

In this article, we’ll take you through some of the things you can do to impress prospective customers before a purchase.

Let’s get started.

Wowing Your Prospects to Get Them to Convert

Simply put:

The better a prospect’s experience with your brand before making a purchase, the more likely they’ll actually make said purchase.

Case in point:

  • According to data collected by The Whole Brain Group, 95% of consumers choose to do business with the company that provides relevant content throughout the sales process
  • According to Demand Gen, more than half of organizations that focus on lead nurture see at least a 10% increase in sales opportunities
  • The Annuitas Group reports that nurtured leads spend 47% more than their non-nurtured counterparts

Not only does lead nurture up to the point of sale make prospects more likely to actually convert, they’ll likely spend more.

The question is, then:

How do you ensure that the prospect’s experience with your brand before a purchase is the best?

A Quick Note On “Wow” Factors

It’s important to note that you don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel in order to “wow” potential customers. Most often, it’s a matter of providing what they need more effectively and efficiently than your competitors.

As we go through this article, we’ll provide examples of companies that have nailed the “wow” factor and explain how they could have missed the mark.

Have Fun, and Entertain Your Prospects

For business owners, spending money can be stressful — especially if they don’t know for sure whether the product in question will actually help. If this stress becomes too intense, potential customers may simply turn tail and run.

So rather than hammering them with sales pitches and guarantees from the get-go, first take a step back and work on alleviating their stress.

Take a look at this introductory video by ClickFunnels:

Ridiculous, right?

The people at ClickFunnels understand that commitment to a SaaS subscription isn’t a decision to be taken lightly. But rather than open with a series of charts or pricing options, ClickFunnels lightens the mood through a tongue-in-cheek explainer video.

In the video, some of the more technical aspects of ClickFunnels are explained along the way. But by the time that happens, there’s certainly nothing stressful about it.

For the sake of argument, imagine ClickFunnels created a video that didn’t aim to entertain its prospective customers, and simply tried to sell them on the software. It might still appeal to the “strictly business” CEOs of the world but it probably wouldn’t do as well with their target startup entrepreneur crowd.

The takeaway here is:

Don’t take your business too seriously — especially when trying to get prospects to convert. While you do want to be professional, don’t forget to have some fun with your soon-to-be customers. Not only will it set the stage (and tone) for your new customers’ expectations, but it’ll solidify your overall branding as a company.

Inform & Educate Your Prospects

Up to now, you’ve empathized with your prospects to learn about their problems, listened to their concerns, and assured them they can overcome their issues.

You’ve (hopefully) provided these individuals with info about ways your company can solve their problems, and explained why that’s essential to success.

Now, you need to get them to understand exactly why your solution is the best.

Consultations

Consider offering a free consultation to get a handle on what obstacles and problems they currently face.

(Source)

In the example above, Bills.com asks prospects to provide some basic information about current debt and contact details. This allows service reps to hit the ground running when they call a prospect for a consultation.

Now, this example definitely isn’t that exciting per se (unless paying bills is your thing). The “wow” factor here, though, is that potential clients won’t need to repeat themselves ad nauseam during the onboarding process. All the necessary info has already been collected.

If Bills.com didn’t do this, prospects would be wasting more of their own precious time getting a rep up to speed. And as we all know, time is money!

Not only does a free consultation build on the empathy you’ve been cultivating, it allows you to strengthen your offer (which we’ll talk about in a moment).

Live Demos & Free Trials

You may want to give a live demo of your product or service. This can transform your offer from an abstract idea in your prospect’s mind to an actual solution.

You can also provide your prospects with a free trial of your product or service. This allows them to truly engage instead of leaving the experience to the imagination.

(Source)

If you go this route, you can restrict access to certain features or access based on the amount of time a prospect is able to use the product. In Shopify’s case, prospects can get acclimated with the drop shipping platform — and potentially start making money — without spending a dime.

In either case, you want potential customers to get just enough value from the trial that they are compelled to learn more.

Once your prospects understand what you have to offer, provide them with a number of tailored options. Which brings us to…

Provide a Tailored Offer

We mentioned earlier that you want to keep gathering as much information about your prospective customer as possible.

This way you can provide an offer that’s tailored to their needs and budget.

You probably can’t tailor offers to every single prospect. But you can vary your offerings and prices to fit the needs several customer segments.

While tiered pricing may seem rather commonplace by today’s standards, it needs to be done well to be effective.

Take a look at Crazy Egg’s tiered options:

(Source)

It’s clear Crazy Egg’s tiers are very intentional. They’re tailored to the specific needs of a given segment and nothing is wasted in the process.

For example, it’s highly unlikely that the owner of a website with fewer than 10,000 visits per month would need hourly visitor metric reports. So the genius here isn’t that certain advanced features are “hidden” from lower-tiered users. It’s that these features would simply be superfluous to their overall experience, so there’s no need to include them.

For examples of what not to do when implementing tiered pricing, check out this article by Patrick Campbell of Price Intelligently.

According to Bryan Harris of Videofruit, building tiered offers starts with trial-and-error. This process can validate your product offering and generate some major revenue.

Personalized Incentives

Of course, you can also provide incentives (think coupons, two-for-one deals, etc.) to get prospects to convert. But these offers should also be tailored.

In 2011, coffee retailer Boca Java decided to test the effectiveness of personalized discounts by sending the same offer to three different customer segments. The offer resonated with one of the three groups. As a result, Boca Java was able to successfully target this segment with related upsells and cross-sells later on (and go back to the drawing board with the other two).

While this example refers to a previously-existing customer base, the takeaway is the same:

Create tailored offers with actual prospects in mind. Don’t brainstorm arbitrary ideas that you think prospects will like — use what you know about them to determine specifically what they want.

If you can hit your prospects with a surprise offer that’s seemingly tailor-made just for them, they’re much more likely to purchase.

Next Steps

In the next part of this series, we’ll talk about what you can do to wow your soon-to-be customers throughout what is typically the most blasé part of the sales process: checkout.

Stay tuned!

Matt Duczeminski is a professional writer specializing in helping entrepreneurs improve relationships with their customers. You can reach him on Twitter @mattducz. Matt lives in Philadelphia with his wife, Sarah, and he’d probably get a lot more work done if his cat would stop bothering him.

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