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I have the honor of talking to about 30 small business owners every week who have expressed an interest in learning about how HubSpot can help them generate more qualified sales leads through their website.

It may sound repetitive to you. And you’d be right. It is. 

But, I get satisfaction when I can help someone make the right decision for their business, whether that involves buying a subscription to HubSpot or not. About 3 out of those 30 people end up hiring us to help them.

Over time, I’ll probably get better at helping more people and can probably improve that ratio to 5 out of 30 . But, 3 out of 30 is what it is.  

And for most small business, that’s a pretty good number. No matter how the conversation started between salesperson and prospect, turning 10% of prospecting calls into deals is a good percentage.

It differs, of course, for every business and every salesperson. 

The problem is that this number is really hard to change. You could do it by improving your sales skills. And I’d certainly recommend that you investigate how you can increase your sales by getting better at helping people diagnose their problems and getting better at presenting appropriate solutions.  (Or hiring better salespeople.) 

But, an equally important thing, no matter what % close rate you have, is to figure out how to generate more sales ready leads. For example, if you need to sign up 3 new clients every month, you need to figure out how many leads you need to generate to have enough prospecting calls, in order to close 3 new deals. That might be 30 calls. It might be 100. It might be 10. (If it’s 10, I’m jealous. If it’s 100, see links above about improving your sales skills.) 

There are many ways to generate more leads, especially if you’re a small business that sells to other businesses. You can attend more networking events, do more 1 on 1 networking coffees with referral sources, make more cold calls, do direct mail, etc. 

These days, however, everyone is looking to the web. “How can we use the web to generate more leads?” is the question everyone is asking.  

For some reason, the conversation always starts with “How do I get more qualified visitors to my website?”

That’s a good conversation to have. There’s SEO, blogging for business, online press release marketing, social media marketing, online business networking, pay per click, etc.

We cover all of these topics pretty well on our blog and in our free online marketing resources. And you can google all of these topics and find great resources. 

However, the question that every small business owner forgets to ask is, “How can I convert more of my site visitors to qualified leads?”

Whenever I’m talking to a small business owner or marketing professional, I ask them, “How are you capturing leads on your website now?”

80% of the time, the answer is “Did you see our contact form?”

For some reason, people are really proud of their contact form. Unfortunately for them, that’s not usually working and that’s why we’re talking. 

The low hanging fruit for improving the performance of any small business website is to have 1) great free educational offers like white papers, ebooks and webinars 2) better calls to action and 3) optimized landing pages.  You need to create lots of ways that site visitors will be encouraged to share their contact information long before they’re ready to buy (or even talk to you). 

I’ll follow up with another blog post that highlights some great examples of websites that convert visitors into leads at a high rate. In the meanwhile, you should watch our pre-recorded webinar on landing page optimization and read David Meerman’s Scott’s article on ebooks. 

Please share your experiences with different approaches to capturing leads on your site. If they’re good, I’ll highlight them in my follow up post.