There’s a great article in the January 18 issue of The New Yorker on how entrepreneurs like Ted Turner, John Paulson, and others made their fortunes. Instead of being the risk takers, successful entrepreneurs are risk adverse. Instead of throwing stuff to the wall to see what sticks, they see a problem, do their homework, solve the problem, and make a boatload of money in the process. (Note: A free, online version of the article is unavailable. You can read a summary of it here.)

Paulson, for example, made a fortune in the housing bubble collapse by buying credit-default swaps. But he didn’t just run out there and blindly buy credit-default swaps. Instead, he had someone do research that showed that a bubble was about to burst and made his investments accordingly. The result? His company made $15 billion in profits.

So what does this have to do with filling your sales pipeline with high quality leads?

To get the most from your marketing efforts, you need the right information about your visitors and an easy way on your website for them to enter your sales pipeline. The more you know about their behavior and the more ways you have of turning them into leads, you can better target your online marketing efforts.

Instead of wasting your marketing dollars throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks, learn everything you can about your current marketing efforts and what kind of people their bringing to your website. A good conversion analytics program can give you this insight.

You may not earn $15 billion in profits, but you will see more results from your marketing efforts and a fatter bottom line.

In the latest issue of Website magazine, Peter Prestipino has a great article on the role of analytics and increasing your bottom line-something Sapha’s preached for years. Prestipino writes:

It might be the least sex of all Web Responsibilities, but analysis is arguable the most important to an online business’ success. Unfortunately, it is an area where most enterprises fail to focus their attention.

Let’s face it. If you can’t measure it, you have no way to improve what you’re doing or see if your wasting your time and money. There’s a reason Sapha packages our site-wide Fusion analytics with each HookTour we sell. Yes, we want to show you how they turn visitor into leads at an average rate of 15%, but we also want you to learn more about visitors’ behavior on your entire website. We want your sales team to have the prospect’s behavioral information (How did they arrive at your site? What did they do once there? How did they enter your sales pipeline?) before they even contact a client.

But don’t take my word for it. If you want to understand the importance of web analytics along with video analytics, social analytics, and CRM analytics read Prestipino’s article here and see for yourself how having the right information can increase your online conversion rates.

If done right, online forms are an effective way to turn a website visitor into a lead. However, most companies don’t put much thought into the information they ask for or how many fields they require a person to fill out.

As a rule of thumb, the more fields you have prospects fill out, the lower the lead generation rate. However, the quality of the leads tends to be higher. So if you ask for a name, email address, and phone number you may get more leads but the quality of leads will be lower than if you also ask for information like their title, number of employees, industry, annual revenue, etc.

Which approach is best? That depends on your audience, the product or service you’re trying to sell, and your sales cycle. If you don’t know what works, experiment with different forms and landing pages and find out. The one thing about conversion is that that a good analytics tool will give you an unbiased report of what worked and what didn’t. (And if you don’t have one, you’ll want to check out our conversion-centric analytics tool.) The more you know about your audience and their behavior, the easier it is to optimize your website and increase your overall conversion rates.

Analytics has always focused on basic reporting such as number of visitors, page views, and referring URLs. While that’s information’s important, they don’t show how effective your website is in turning visitors into leads. By understanding your site’s conversion metrics, you can make better decisions regarding marketing efforts and find ways to better tweak your conversion rates – allowing you to get the most bang for your marketing and website dollars.

Fusion provides you with all the standard data that other analytics tools provide but does it from a conversion-centric view. One of its many features is a dashboard where you can see at a glance not only how Sapha lead generation tools are converting, but also the conversion rate of your entire website.

Read more about Fusion here.

As mentioned in Tuesday’s post, it’s difficult to guage the effectiveness of PPC and other online adverting and marketing efforts if you have no idea whether or not visitors from these campaigns are entering your sales pipeline.

One of the new features of our HookTour is the ability to integrate with Google AdWords and other ad sever systems (MSN, Yahoo!, etc.) for closed-loop marketing conversion tracking. Instead of pointing your campaigns to a static, text-based landing page, you can now send prospects straight to a page energized by your HookTour, tracking them from impression to conversion.

But why stop at ad campaign integration? All leads from your HookTour can be sent in real time to any CRM system, including Salesforce, Sugar CRM, Eloqua, and others. We’ve also enhanced client-side and server-side data pass-through options so that you can integrate the tour with your website, affiliate systems, and other custom data-collection engines for more robust call-to-action handling and tracking.

Installing the HookTour and Sapha tracking code on your website is as simple as copy and paste.  Embedding the tour right in  one of your webpages, or creating a link that will open the tour in a modal, stylized window is as easy as designating which HTML tag you want affected — the Sapha system does the rest!

Just think. Prospects will go from an ad, to your HookTour to your sales pipeline all in one smooth process. And, you’ll have the data to see  how effective your marketing efforts really are.

Marketing and sales professionals are realizing that PPC ads, SEO, and other methods of online advertising and promotion are worthless unless you’re able to calculate the ROI from your investment. Though it’s easy to track how many visitors came to your site from different marketing campaigns, it’s difficult to know whether or not these visitors enter your sales pipeline and what factors contributed to their conversion.

On January 26 Sapha is launching a conversion-centric analytics platform. One of its many features is a dashboard where you can see at a glance not only how Sapha tools are converting, but also the conversion rate of your entire website. By understanding your site’s conversion metrics, you can make better decisions regarding marketing efforts and see how website updates affect conversion rates – allowing you to get the most bang for your marketing and website dollars.

More than just a conversion overview, our conversion-centric analytics provides granular reporting so you can learn from the behavior of each visitor that comes to your site. What path did they take before becoming a lead? What information and documents have they gathered from your site? How did they interact with your HookTour? The answers to these questions will soon be available!

If you think it sounds cool, just wait until you see it reporting data from your website.

In 13 days, you can.

If you were to ask the head of your organization’s marketing department what your company’s website lead generation rate was for 2008, would he or she be able to answer you? 

More than likely you’d get a roundabout response or maybe an “I’ll have to get back to you” answer.

Let’s face it. Most organizations don’t know how many of their site visitors are converting into leads or sales. Even with sophisticated analytics tools, making sense out of the data to track conversion rates is extremely difficult and time consuming, if not impossible to perform.

Thankfully in just a few weeks a new tool will be available to Sapha clients that can give then the conversion reporting that most marketers only dream about.

January 26, Sapha will launch a new conversion-centric application platform and reporting system, the Sapha Conversion Suite. This new conversion suite allows Sapha clients to see online lead generation results from our tools and their website’s overall conversion rates at a glance. Additionally, clients will be able to get granular reporting that can track the behavior of individual visitors and advertising campaigns from the time the visitor enters the site to when they leave.

Check back often as we’ll be discussing some of these features in more detail and how these reports will help you increase your overall website lead conversion rates so that you will know if you’re getting the most from your online marketing dollars.

Until our next update, go ask someone in your marketing department if they can tell you your organization’s website lead generation rate.

A slow economy is no excuse for an empty sales pipeline. There are plenty of qualified prospects out there. You just need to use more creative and effective ways to find them.

If you’re looking to fill your sales pipeline with quality leads during these difficult economic times, you can’t afford to miss Sapha’s upcoming webinar: 5 Cost-Effective Lead Generation Tools.

Our main speaker, Jake Atwood, is the president of Ovation Sales Group & BuzzBuilder Pro.  He’ll show you five proven sales and marketing tools with a proven track record of generating high quality leads. Best of all, most of these tools are free.

Imagine what more qualified leads could mean to the sales and marketing efforts of your organization.

Seating is limited. Register here to ensure your seat.

After listening to Jake you’ll learn: 

• How to quickly identify people who are ready to buy your product or service
• The best way to use social networking sites to connect with high quality prospects
• Automated lead generation tools that can fill your inbox with high quality, inbound leads
• How to use these 5 tools efficiently and effectively so you’ll see immediate results

Whether your focus is B2B or B2C, you won’t want to miss a webinar that can fill your sales pipeline and boost your organization’s bottom line.

Sign up before it’s too late.

REGISTER NOW

Sapha Presents: 21 Secrets of Successful Landing Pages
Tuesday October 21, 1:00 p.m. EDT
Seating is limited. Register Now! 

Learn the secrets of creating successful landing pages from a landing page expert, Brock Felt, who’s successfully created landing pages that have generated as much as $3 million in revenue in just six hours.

Brock will show real world examples of landing pages he’s used to create landing pages that convert as high as 60%!

If you’re looking to fill your sales pipeline during these difficult economic times, this is a webinar you won’t want to miss.

Imagine what that kind of conversion rate would mean to your organization’s bottom line.

Seats are filling quickly. Register now.

From Brock you’ll learn:

• What offers work best
• Creating an effective landing page persona
• How to create a sense of urgency
• Writing an irresistible call to action
• Layout/design techniques
• And more!

As a result, you’ll be able to create pages that will fill your sales pipeline with new customers.

Whether your focus is B2B or B2C, you won’t want to miss the secrets that can turn your landing page into a lead and sales conversion machine.

Sign up before it’s too late. Register Now!

About Brock Felt

Brock Felt is a business visionary, entrepreneur, master marketer and co-founder of Emillionaire, Inc. He has single handedly leveraged several companies into the top 1% of their perspective industries. Ranging from software, sports and recreation, home based business, SOHO and large Fortune-sized companies to his work with high profile celebrities, Brock Felt delivers systems to achieve consistently measurable, positive results that transcend industries and personalities to maximize success for any business.

P.S. Take advantage of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to dramatically increase the conversion rate of your landing pages! Register Now!

Update: This webinar has been canceled!

Not to beat the importance on following up on leads  to a pulp, but I did come across a interesting research study that shows just how important these are.

Something you can do to dramatically increase the odds of qualifying a prospect is to get back to them as soon as possible. The longer it takes to respond, the harder it becomes to qualify them. In fact, the chances of qualifying a web-generated lead over the phone decrease by over 6x in the first hour! Even in that first hour, there’s a 21x better chance of qualifying a lead within five minutes of its arrival than 30 minutes later. You also increase the odds of contacting the prospect by 100x if you call back in five minutes instead of waiting a half hour.

The source of this information is the research paper “How Much Time Do You Have Before Web-Generated Leads Go Cold” by InsideSales.com. It contains results for a survey by Kellogg School of Management at northwestern University, a study by Dr. James Oldroyd of MIT, and a study by InsideSales.com and FranklinCovey on the topic of lead response management.

You have to register to access the document but the information is well worth it. You can do that here.