How does a stranger turn into a customer? If it happens instantly, without much, or any, intervention from you or your sales team, consider yourself lucky. If sales appeared out of nowhere, there wouldn’t be much of a need for salespeople or all the work your sales and marketing teams do to learn about your ideal customer, map out the customer journey, and write emails, blog posts, and case studies to guide them in that journey.

It’s a long, hard road from stranger to customer. Along the way, there’s a lot of follow-up and a lot of communication that sometimes feels like begging and pleading. A lot of work goes into creating a sales sequence that turns strangers into leads, cold leads into warm leads, and warm leads into a sale, and “a sale” into a loyal customer that you get to know on a personal level. Doing the work to create a sales sequence is hard. Make sure that effort isn’t wasted by measuring the effectiveness of your sales sequences.

What Is a Sales Sequence?

 “Sequence” simply describes a series of communications to a lead, typically in the form of a series of emails covering a single topic, each one taking a different approach or addressing a different pain point. Sales sequences serve the purpose of moving leads through the stages of the customer journey. They keep your business top-of-mind, reminding a lead of something they may have forgotten or providing them with the education and incentive they need to finally request a quote or place an order.

Sales sequences help your customers, and they help your sales team, too. Your communications with leads will be more organized. Since sequences are written and scheduled ahead of time and delivered automatically, no one will forget to follow up with a lead. All of your salespeople will also be working from the same playbook, ensuring that all of your leads are receiving consistent, on-brand messaging.

Sales Sequence Automation

It can be difficult and time-consuming to manage a dozen different leads at different levels of interest and at different stages of the customer journey. With a smart CRM, you can segment your email lists into categories like marketing qualified leads and sales qualified leads, sending different sales sequences to each. You can also create automations to send out a sequence when a certain trigger is activated, such as a lead visiting a certain landing page or requesting a quote.

Measuring Sales Sequence Effectiveness

An automated sales sequence is a powerful tool for converting leads. Simply setting and forgetting a sequence might bring you some value, but the only way to maximize value is to measure effectiveness. The first step to measurement is setting goals. Without goals, metrics have no context. Your goals should be SMART goals aligned with your strategy.

Choose metrics that align with your goals and research the average open and click-through rates in your industry. If your goal is to close a certain number of sales or convert a percentage of leads in a given timeframe, you’ll need to measure more than email open rates. Open rates are important, but they don’t tell the whole story.

Should you measure click-through rates instead? When taken in conjunction with open rates, they can help you diagnose problems with your copy. Emails not getting opened? A/B test different subject lines. Not getting clicks? Experiment with different body content: more conversational, less transactional. Getting clicks but clicks aren’t translating into meetings? Try different landing pages with different designs and CTAs. Measuring the effectiveness of your sales sequences this way will help you troubleshoot and fix what’s not working and do more of the things that are.

Great Sales Sequences Convert Leads into Sales

The most effective sales sequences will combine well-crafted copy with high-tech automation. Good copy demonstrates an understanding of your ideal customer and addresses their needs at all stages of the customer journey. Automation lets you segment lists and get the right message in front of the right lead. It’s always a work in progress, but aligning campaigns with strategy, setting the right goals, choosing the right metrics, and constantly working to improve will help ensure that your sales sequences consistently convert leads into sales.