No matter how optimized your campaign is, you’re going to end up dealing with a blockage point. This is when conversion rates from one stage of the funnel to the next are unsatisfactory.
It’s an inevitability in the lead generation process and happens regardless of our company’s size or years of operation. It’s frustrating and can seem like a roadblock to getting leads across the funnel, but it doesn’t have to be.
In our process, the focus isn’t on the blockage point itself – it’s about how to get past it. To make the most of your optimized campaign, you’ll need to think fast and adapt. Solving blockage points requires quick and early identification and solving issues early. Here’s how:
Identify
Your first step is to take a step back in your lead generation process. To identify blockage points in your campaign, you’ll need to critically evaluate your funnel against the following questions:
- “What’s stopping people from signing up for our product/service?”
- “What’s stopping potential investors from scheduling an initial meeting?”
- “What’s topping potential investors from setting up a second meeting?”
Potential answers could include:
- We don’t have enough leads coming in the top of the funnel.
- We have plenty of visitors to our web site, but not enough are converting to registered users.
- We can’t get meetings with the key decision-makers.
This is your birds-eye view and that’s how you’ll start to develop a solution. But to do this efficiently and effectively, you’ll need to look at each of these questions and answers and identify which of these is the most likely problem and work towards solving that.
Solution
The best way to solve blockage points is through a deep empathy dive. It’s uncomfortable for some and hard to actually start, but it’s what’s needed at this point. Get inside the heads of your potential investors and customers and identify their potential concerns. For example:
This could include:
- This is not immediately valuable or directly relevant to me.
- I don’t appreciate being advertised to/sold to.
- You are asking me to put my valuable time and effort into trying out your product. I have concerns about whether it will be worth my time.
Your next step? Turn these concerns into motivations to really grab their attention in your follow-ups. In this case:
Potential motivations:
- I do have a problem to solve and would love to find a solution.
- If a friend recommended this to me, I would be favorably predisposed to it.
- This site seems to have enough positive feedback in comments from users, and reviews from the press that I feel it is likely a good product, and worth my time to try.
In this case, you’ll have to step into an investor’s shoes, just momentarily to understand why they might not respond. What value have you given them and how can you improve to get them moving across the funnel? Think about your current context and what the most likely motivator could be. Now think about your product/service. How can you tap into their motivation, and improve their experience?
Blockage points are inevitable, but they don’t need to be a major concern if identified quickly. Remember that relationships need to be built and some require more work than others. But if you’re willing to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and tap into their concerns, you’re already ahead of the problem. Provide a solution that taps into intrinsic motivations connected to those concerns, you’ll see that blockage points clear up pretty quickly, leading to an efficient funnel once again.
