One marketing guru explained the situation of lead generation by telling me I can't give you 1 marketing route that can get you 30 new leads, but i can give you 30 new marketing routs that can get you 1 new lead.
This is the great secret of sales process. The process once established will keep churning the market potential for you. It will enable you to run your sales team whilst the generation of new leads from your marketing efforts continues in the background
Let me give you an example. Most companies have a web site, but they do not use the marketing effectiveness of this web site to generate leads. Most companies also have some sort of database, it might be inflexible and you may have requirements that it does not fulfil, but it captures data. How can you use this resource to become some of the 30 new channels that will generate you 1 new lead.
The answer not surprisingly is by developing several processes within your daily work.
Process 1.You need to qualify all the prospects on your database with email addresses. This is the cheapest way of keeping in touch with your customers. It is none threatening and none invasive, if they do not want to see your information they can simply delete your email. In a further white paper we will discuss how to generate quality strap lines, the element that your customer will see in their in box, but for now lets assume you have one.
Process 2. You need to make an area of your web site that is of interest to your customers. By this I do not mean telling them everything they ever wanted to know about you. It may come as a surprise but your customers or prospects are not really interested in you, they want information on a problem they have. How to build web sites that give a customer or prospect what they want will be discussed in another white paper , but for now lets assume you have an area of your web site that that is easy for your customer to navigate, gives them free information, and collects contact details.
Process 3. You need to get hold of contact management software, this is fairly cheap and completely automates your management of inbound enquiries from either customers or prospects until they are at the stage of needing sales visits or to place orders. It also stores the details of the people who have visited your site and shown interest in your products. There is, of course a white paper dealing with this. You may now be thinking how much expertise do we get for free here.
Process 4. By combining the 3 steps above you generate marketing channels that encourage your customers or prospects to contact you WHEN they have a requirement. You can now
Find out what opportunities exist within your existing database when you clean it up to add the email addresses. This gives you access to all your accounts, how long ago was it that you did this.
Utilise your website to generate traffic. You can either refer traffic to your site by sending an outbound email to your customers with a link to a specific web page with some special information free. You should not at this stage try to sell them something, people will only buy from the internet if they have gone onto it in the first place to purchase something. See white paper on internet web site rules.
Have your web site optimised to get you in the top 3 against your relevant search terms. (the terms your customers would use to find your products) or generate a pay per click advertising campaign on search engines. See the write up on Google advertising within the news and views section of the members area of the ISS web site.
Remember you are now receiving contacts from people who WANT something. This process change has opened the door to setting up at least 6 of your 30 continuous marketing campaigns that develop qualified leads. This whole process can be targeted, measured and initiated at the click of a button. It costs a fraction of the normal costs associated with the marketing effort of most companies and it delivers instant results.
You could add to the list above with:
Newsletters
Free White Papers
Members area within your web site
Auto responder software
Industry Forum to exchange views
Standards & legislation information
RSS feeds
And many more. By developing sales process you are in effect running 30 different marketing campaigns simultaneously that are seen by your customer or prospect as a real benefit to them. Simply by following this white paper you have developed 13 new channels for little cost. Channels that work for you, only delivering qualified prospects who want something.
Alan Gray Sales Consultant Intelligent Sales Solutions http://www.issmarketing.com
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