Getting Your Conversion Program Off The Ground

Generating demand is now table stakes. The real skill set that makes the marketers of tomorrow indispensable is the ability to convert that demand into revenue.

$19 of every $20 spent on marketing is wasted because the demand being generated never turns into revenue.

Revenue is the lifeblood of any business and the biggest problem every company is constantly trying to solve. If your marketing efforts don’t tie directly to generating revenue, then you’re perpetually at risk of being let go when times get tough.

Mastering conversion marketing helps you draw a direct line from revenue to your role. And as a result, it also acts as a catalyst for your professional growth. The closer you are to working on the biggest problem in the company (revenue), the more you’ll get to be involved in strategic initiatives and promotions.

Conversion makes everything you’re already doing more efficient in two ways:

1. Lowers the cost of acquiring a customer: Customer acquisition cost (CAC) is calculated by dividing the total amount spent on marketing by the number of new customers over that time period. An increase in conversion rates means the total cost remains the same, but the number of new customers increases, thus decreasing CAC. Grow the same, spend less.

2. Increases yield from existing CAC: With a decreased CAC, it now means that you can go out and spend the same amount as before, but yield more new customers than before. Grow more, spend the same. 

Here’s how this looks as we extrapolate it through the whole marketing funnel:

Same demand, 2x more revenue. 

Simply, conversion is the growth unlock that allows you to decouple your growth from your demand. It’s how you can get much, much larger without needing a massive budget. 

Now that we know why having a conversion program is so important, let’s get started by building your conversion strategy.

Build your buyer personas

The first component of a strong conversion strategy is a solid understanding of who your buyers are. In this section, we’ll go over how to create buyer personas with purpose. This will become the foundation of your conversion program. 

A well-made buyer persona gives you an understanding of:

• Who you’re talking to

• How you want to talk to them

• Where and what are the channels you want to engage with them.

Where do you start? By talking to your existing customers or prospective customers. Go on your own interview tour to get insights from 3-5 customers, focusing on questions like:

• How are you currently solving this problem?

• What are your main pain points in solving this problem?

• What are some blockers you experience on a day-to-day basis?

• What was your reason for purchasing our solution?

• What were some alternatives you were considering?

We've put together a Buyer Persona Template that will help you keep track of all your answers so they can be distilled quickly and easily.

Note: this template is only available to members of M2, our private community of revenue-focused marketers. Login to get access.

Not a member of M2 yet? Join today to get access to all our templates, plus detailed workshops led by practitioners, a private Slack channel, curated job board, and exclusive events.

Questions to ask your ideal customer personas

Day in the life: Can you walk me through your calendar last week?

KPIs and motivators: What do people expect of you here? How do you know you are doing a good job?

Emotional needs (hopes and fears): Do you feel like you're doing a good job? Tell me about a time you felt really proud of your work. How about a day that made you feel shameful or defensive?

Functional needs: What's top of mind? What's your biggest priority right now? What will it take to make that happen? What's in your way?

Job to be done: Why did you start looking for [product] (your product or a similar one)?

Alternatives: How would you accomplish that without [product]? What are you doing today?

Blockers: Was this the first time you looked for a solution to this problem? If not, what got in the way of implementing something before?

Differentiators: Why did you choose [product]?

Discovery/channels: What other tools do you use today? How did you discover each of them?

Buying process and stakeholders: Walk me through when you bought [product] (or the last time you bought a similar product). Who was involved? How long did it take?

🏆 End goal: 

Get a better understanding of who your buyers are. Build a library of buyer personas to refer to as you adjust and perfect your conversion strategy.

🔥 Hot Tip: 

Build a process for interviewing customers on a regular basis. A quick 15-minute call to go over these “why did you buy” questions baked into the onboarding process is a great way to ensure you’re speaking with all customers and keeping your personas up-to-date.

Set your conversion targets

Now that we’ve locked down who our buyers are, let’s get to work on converting them. We all have revenue goals we want to hit, but reaching that goal only works if you’re hitting smaller conversion targets along the way. Working backwards from your revenue goal you can break it down into more attainable conversion targets.

Your conversion targets depend on your business model:

• Sales-led growth: Meetings booked

• Product-led growth (PLG): Trial signups

Let’s break down how it works with some napkin math…

(For this example we’ll focus on a sales-led growth model)

Your revenue goal is $1M ARR.

With an Annual Contract Value (ACV) of $50K, you’ll need to close 20 new customers to hit your revenue goal ($1M ÷ $50K).

That means you’ll need at least 60 qualified opportunities (20 ÷ average win rate of 33%).

And to do that, you’ll need to source 300 meetings booked (60 ÷ average qualification rate of 20%). 

$1M ARR = 300 meetings booked

Break down your targets into weekly goals

An annual conversion target is a good start, but breaking your targets into weekly goals can help your team to be more agile in your decision-making. Similar to the work we did in the section prior, we’re going to work backward from our annual goal to find quarterly, monthly, weekly, and even daily targets. 

Napkin math for even smaller conversion targets…

Annual conversion target: 300 meetings

Quarterly conversion target: 75 meetings

Monthly target: 25 meetings

Weekly target: ~6 meetings

Daily target: ~1 meeting 

Converting one prospect a day feels a lot more doable, right?

No need to go find a napkin for this math, we created a Conversion Target Calculator template to help you set your conversion targets.

This template is only available to M2 Community members. Apply to join.

🏆 End goal

Setting smaller conversion targets not only makes hitting your goals feel more attainable, but it allows your team to closely monitor progress and pivot before you get too far off track.

🔥 Hot Tip

When you set up an experiment in Mutiny conversions are tracked by default. You can get more granular with your conversion tracking by adjusting the conversion type, setting secondary conversions, tracking engagement metrics, and more. Discover how to customize your conversion tracking here.

Need more inspiration?

Looking for more resources to help you get your conversion program off the ground? Here are some additional posts for more inspiration:

• How conversion marketing powers efficient growth

• How To Improve Conversion Rate During A Website Redesign

• Conversion Secret: How Snowflake runs ABM at Scale

Your personas are defined and your conversion targets are set, nice work! 🙌

Now it’s time to segment your audiences and hone your messaging. 

Continue to the next chapter to use this customer information to create audience segments for your marketing. This will allows you to present the right message to the right person, at the right time.

Ready to put these concepts into action? Book a time with a Conversion Specialist to see how high-performing B2B companies like 6sense, Snowflake, and Autodesk are applying these concepts to hit their growth goals by converting more website visitors into pipeline by focusing on conversion.