Why Are Your Outbound Conversion Rates So Low? What to Do to Improve Your Sales Conversions

Leads that don’t convert are leads that don’t grow your business. They’re a costly investment without any return.

Falling conversion rates should set off alarm bells for any lead gen or sales team. But to drive the results you need and acquire more customers, you need to know how to address the most common causes of low lead conversion rates.

Use this guide to improving outbound conversions to better understand why your conversion rates might not be looking so good. Then, explore the best tactics and technologies for turning your outbound sales performance around.

The Biggest Causes of Low Lead Conversion Rates

Can’t get your leads over the finish line? There’s a good chance that one (or a few) of these issues is the culprit.

Low Contact Rates

One of the biggest roadblocks today’s outbound sales teams run into is startlingly low contact rates. Simply put: if you’re not getting in touch with your most valuable leads, you’re not going to drive conversions.

Getting to the bottom of your low contact rates—as we’ll cover below—is crucial to moving the needle on conversions and driving business growth.

Low-Quality Leads

When leads aren’t converting there’s often a temptation to blame the leads first. With that mindset, sales leaders often look to one solution to right the ship: they simply buy more leads.

However, if you’re working with low-quality leads, adding more of them to the hopper isn’t going to fix your outbound conversion rates. Instead, this can actually lead to a vicious cycle of poor performance that’s tough to turn around.

With more and more data to contact—and potentially without sufficient predictive dialer power to do so—it only gets harder and harder to penetrate your lists. As a result, you just wind up with more leads going uncontacted. Costs go up, performance stays down, and your sales team stagnates.

The Wrong Scripts + Ineffective Call to Action

If you’re getting leads on the phone and still not converting them, you probably lack the right sales pitch. This can be the result of poor phone sales training or failure to use call scripts all together.

Crafting effective call scripts is essential to success in lead generation and outbound sales. The best scripts are designed to:

• Quickly hook prospects
• Qualify leads and match them to a product/service
• Clearly deliver value propositions and address pain points
• Respond to and overcome sales objections
• Efficiently close the sale

The Wrong Outreach Channels

No two customers are alike. And today, more than ever, each customer expects a personalized experience that caters to their preferences.

While this fact applies to the entire sales process, it’s especially important to utilize an array of communication channels. Because, as we dig into below, if you’re not employing a lead’s preferred method (and doing so conveniently) you’re simply leaving conversions on the table.

The Top Ways to Improve Sales Conversion Rates

Now that you know what may be behind your falling conversions, here are some of the best ways to give them a boost.

Target Higher-Quality Leads

Getting stuck in the cycle of high-volume, low-quality, and low-intent leads can be something of a death spiral for outbound sales teams.

While sticking to leads of lesser quality is usually driven by concerns over costs, it can wind up costing much more in the long run.

Instead, building an efficient sales process that’s set up to convert higher-quality leads at a higher rate can offer a path to greater contact center ROI. Using the strategies and solutions in this guide to improving sales conversion rates can help you do just that.

Focus on the Right Lists

Even when you’re dealing with high-quality sales lead lists, performance is bound to vary. With in-depth contact center reporting tools, you can adjust on the fly and focus your efforts on the lists that are responsible for the most conversions.

With an option like Convoso’s List Conversion Report, you can monitor KPIs on a list-by-list basis (and in real time, at that). When one list’s performance drops, you can turn it off and investigate while agents continue to work on a list that’s driving a greater ROI.

Opt for an Omnichannel Approach

As we’ve already stated, offering multiple channels of engagement is crucial to converting today’s customers. However, just offering several distinct channel

As we’ve already stated, offering multiple channels of engagement is crucial to converting today’s customers. However, just offering several distinct channels won’t cut it either. What you need is an omnichannel approach to outbound sales.

Omnichannel takes things beyond multichannel. With an omnichannel sales strategy, each of your channels is built to work in concert with the other offerings.How does this look exactly? Take Convoso’s Voso.ai as a leading example. Our conversational AI solution for SMS and voice doesn’t just engage customers in fluent conversation on its own. Importantly, it also unites your voice- and text-based channels. With the ability to automate routine but important and time-sensitive tasks like setting appointments, scheduling callbacks, and delivering reminders as well as follow-ups, you can use text and voice in tandem to make sure more leads get on the line—and more sales get over the line.

Get to Your Leads Faster

No matter how you’re contacting your leads, timing and speed are of the utmost importance.

Ideally, your lead response time—or speed to lead—should average about 5 minutes or less. And the faster, the better.

According to study after study, the sooner you’re able to attempt contact, the more likely you are to not only successfully get in touch but convert. Adopting this “last in, first out” strategy of prioritizing your freshest, warmest leads is often a matter of having the right software. Look for a dialer or contact center solution that’s able to automate your lead prioritization and dial through your lists at the speed required for success.

Overcome ‘Spam Likely’ Labels

One of the biggest sales obstacles faced by teams right now is the result of rampant call flagging and blocking by major carriers. If you’re unable to monitor your caller IDs, understand which are being blocked or labeled “Scam” or “Spam Likely,” and quickly take action, your conversion rates are going to suffer.

Once again, this is ultimately a question of technology. Equip your salesforce with a comprehensive caller ID reputation management solution that offers those capabilities and the results will follow.

Craft Better Messaging—and Stick to It

After fine-tuning your dialing and outreach strategies, be sure that your agents are delivering a winning pitch over the phone.

Using input from agents themselves, develop scripts for them to follow and incorporate useful rebuttals to keep customers on the line. While agents don’t need to stick to sales scripts word-for-word, supporting their conversations with dynamic scripting software can go a long way toward improving your overall conversion rates.

Dynamic scripts will automatically populate personalized customer info as well as update in real time as the conversation progresses, giving your sales reps a guide throughout their call.

Help doesn’t need to be limited to during the call, of course. Add AI-driven QA software to your tech stack and automate post-call analysis to drive even greater improvements. 

Upgrade Your Dialer Software

At the end of the day, each of the strategies covered above comes with a technological component. That’s why, if you’re suffering from low outbound sales conversion rates, you might not only need to upgrade your sales process—you may need to upgrade your dialer software, too.

As the engine that powers many high-volume outbound sales operations, you need a dialer that can reach and convert your leads at scale and with the greatest ROI. 

Learn more today about how Convoso’s predictive dialer software delivers predictive dialing power along with a full suite of intelligent features.