How IT Services Companies Can Transform More Leads Into Clients

Most IT services companies want, and need, more clients. The trouble however is that very few consistently transform their leads into clients. In this post, we’ll look at three relatively simple solutions.

1. Invest in Creating Persona-Centric Remarkable Content

With 57% of the typical sales cycle over before most B2B decision makers talk to any IT services companies, it’s critical for your company to get found early on while prospects are researching board-based problems.

However having a blog or some thought leadership content is no longer a novelty. It’s simply the price of entry. In other words, without a blog and thought leadership content, your company doesn’t get to enter the conversation until the prospect has already made up nearly 60% of their mind.

With so much content saturation out there, billions and billions of web pages, you can’t afford to put up lousy content on your website. If you do, your ideal buyers will back button out of your website faster than you can hit Ctrl + Alt + Delete.

What’s the solution? Create remarkable content that your ideal buyers will actually want to read. And make that content so remarkable that your readers feel compelled to share that content with their friends.

When you have a crisp definition of who your two or three most important ideal buyers are, you’ll want to formalize a buyer persona for each. A persona is simply a semi-fictional representation of one of your ideal buyers.

2. Understand the Buyer’s Journey

Part of persona research involves uncovering the buyer’s journey (the path taken from lead to client). It’s kind of like “follow the yellow brick road” from the Wizard of Oz.

Understanding the buyer’s journey helps you decide the kinds of premium content assets that are likely to move leads down the funnel, basically accelerate the sales process.

Without this research, you’ll waste a ton of time and resources and end up really frustrated.

3. Customize Your Lead Generation Offers, Including Late Stage Offers

Each buyer persona requires its own set of highly-customized lead generation offers. However for most small companies, when you really look at behaviors, goals, and pain points, there usually are only a handful of personas -- often just two or three.

Each stage of the sales cycle requires its own set of lead generation offers.

Early on, in the awareness stage, use lead generation offers that help prospects get up to speed on solving broad problems.

In the middle of the sales cycle, when prospects are comparing different options, make it easy for your prospects to download buyer’s guides, comparison matrices, and ROI calculators.

Then, finally in the late stage of the sales cycle, when prospects are ready for a sales conversation, present offers for one-on-one demos, consultations, IT audits, or technology assessments.

To get the best lead generation results and transform more leads into clients, you need content for (a) each buyer persona and (b) each of the three sales cycle stages.

What does your IT services company do to get more of your leads to convert to paying clients? Please share your thoughts in the Comments below.

And to make sure that your sales funnel is consistently generating enough high-quality leads, watch the "Inbound Revenue Acceleration Webinar for Managed Services & IT Consulting."