Generating More Quality Sales Leads

Many companies consistently face the challenge of generating more quality sales leads ( by quality I mean those who have the potential for conversion and not tyre kickers)

We have seen the following 3 lead generation scenarios regularly occur and these are best explained by a customer tap and pipe scenario

1. The company has no control of the tap and end up with peak and trough situations neither of which is suitable
   • when too many leads come in they cant be dealt with correctly or efficiently and as a result sales conversion is reduced
   • when insufficient leads are coming in there is potentially insufficient “new” work coming through
2. The company has a limited pipeline and therefore the number of leads is automatically restricted  for example perhaps you only have one source of generating enquiries i.e. networking
3. With a wide variety of promotional activities taking place the flow of leads is significant but the management and filtration of them is poor
   • With leads coming from
     • Networking
     • Email Marketing
     • Direct Mail
     • Telemarketing
     • Advertising in specialist trade publications
     • Google Ads ( Google Adwords, Google Shopping, Remarketing)
     • Social Media

Generating More Quality Sales Leads

Tips and Techniques

• Identify what makes you different ( what is your unique selling proposition?)
• Make sure any marketing that you perform is measurable (you need to know what is or isn’t working)
• If you perform any marketing – do it , improve it in order to maximise return on investment
• Your website is core to business development processes so we need to ensure the website is designed to maximise conversion
• What’s your currently monthly marketing budget and how many leads do you generate per month
• What is the current cost per lead and how many leads do you need per sale
• Where do your leads come from website, Facebook, Google ads, Referrals, Email marketing, Linked in , networking etc
• What are the keywords that customers use to find your products / services

If you are looking at generating more quality sales leads then contact Andrew Goode an experienced marketing and sales professional or for more information on marketing and business development approaches click here

Using Soft Insights to Gain Superior Customer Understanding & Generate More Sales Leads

Two approaches to gaining customer understanding

Option 1 – Conduct traditional robust market research

• Send out surveys in both print and electronic formats
• Organise focus groups
• One to One structured interviews
• etc

Option 2 – Consider looking for softer insights

Soft Insights as opposed to data. Essentially this could be classified as immersing yourself in your customers world. Remembering that you may have many segmentation customer profiles.

How to establish soft insights

• Immerse yourself in your customer’s world
• Identify the language they use – you will have greatest chance of engaging with them if you use the language they are familiar and comfortable with
• Establish the problems that they face now
• What is the future they face – if your lucky a sector enjoying massive growth, or is the industry facing difficult times
• Conduct your soft insights with an open mind and remove any pre determined expectations. This can be particularly challenging as many companies have a product / service that they have created and now want to sell. This is about identifying what your customers need.

How to get this information

• Go into the customer world. Now I know that’s scary. Leaving the office / factory but believe me it will provide you with a massive insight
• Survey without an agenda. I’m not saying don’t have a structure, but certainly don’t go in there armed with pre determined tick box questions, through discussion focussed on the customers issues you will identify what they are looking for. Warning – You might find that what you are offering isn’t on your customers radar
• All staff need to help in customer insights. Everyone who has a dealing with a customer should be able to gather soft insight

Customer Understanding – How To Gain Superior Insights

• If you want a breakthrough in understanding what makes your customers tick look outside your current environment
• Don’t start with the knowledge and constraints before you start the process

Remember the famous quote from Henry Ford after developing the Model T. If I had relied on asking customers what they wanted they would have said “Faster horses”

Struggling To Get A Sales Meeting Try These Tips

Is The Customer Worthwhile

How much is am meeting or call worth to you ?

In striving to get the meeting does the customer match your ideal client profile

• Do they have budgetary control
• Is their budget sizeable
• Can they become a customer for life
• Customer Value = Sales Price – Cost of Goods
• What % of conversations / meetings do you close

Once you have identified a profile

• Build a dream list
• Send them weird shit – that gets noticed
• Follow up

Approach 1 – The illegal phone box

• The aim of this is to get the prospect to call us
• We send them a mobile phone with a pre configured number
• The prospect has to sign for the box
• In the box are the instructions to press the green button twice – so they can call us
  • We can see the number so know who is calling

The difficulties with this approach

• buying multiple sim cards can be a challenge
• loading with credit
• sourcing 10 phones at a time can be difficult ( might have to do second hand

Approach 2 – The Hamster Box

• Send the prospect a live hamster in a box (difficult to ignore)
• Note there is potential for this to go horribly wrong

Approach 3 – The Sweet Box

• Send a box of sweets or sweet dispenser that is padlocked
• They can only get the key or the code if they call

Approach 4 – The Out Of Date Sandwich

• An old pre packaged sandwich with a note that says we would never sell out of date ….

If any of these work for you then a sales meeting should be scheduled and importantly the meeting should take place.