Lead generation is a simple process once you understand your marketplace and how your product adds value or solves a problem for your customers. Your company’s web site, for example, can be a tremendous vehicle to generating leads quickly. Everyone can create a form to post on the web site to collect all the information you could want from your prospects: names, titles, phone numbers, budgets, buying habits, and customer needs.
Before you begin any of your lead generation programs you need to understand and leverage your organizations distinct competency. If you don’t know or understand this, than you need to ask by utilizing market research. Market research should be an ongoing process in which the organization evaluates the business proposition it delivers to the customer. This includes defining distinct competency, market research, technology assessment, customer surveys, prospect evaluation, and competitive review.
How well do you really know your distinctive competency? To find out, ask your customers these questions:
1. What do you think of our product?
2. What do you think of our company?
3. Have you seen any “good” products lately?
The answers will tell you what your marketplace believes are your distinctive competency. Then make sure it matches your corporate message.
Now that you know your core competency, you can start just by placing a direct self-gratifying “reward” to the prospect for providing the information (like $100 for everyone who fills out the form), you will get more names that you know what to do with. If $100 seems like too much, analyze what a new lead is currently costing you to capture!
Organizations must find unique approaches to managing the customer enterprise and utilize the Internet to share and manage leads and corporate information with their marketplace.
Lead qualification is critical to managing resources and meeting business objectives. Too many organizations do too little qualifying of leads and consequently pollute the sales funnel. Understand the 8-4-2-1 rule: 8 qualified leads turn into 4 sales presentations, which turn into 2 sales quotes that result in 1 sale.
Take the time to evaluate your last quarter’s leads to sold reports to determine exactly if sales are getting lost. “If you understand the 8-4-2-1 rule, you won’t have to wonder where sales are being lost.”
Otherwise, execute a quantitative analysis report. This is the ability to evaluate sales wins and sales losses to determine to whom you are selling and to whom you are not selling. Build questionnaires for your salespeople to fill out after each sales presentation. Interview your customers and all prospective customers who did not buy from you. Look at product profitability, trend analysis, and market analysis. “Interview prospects who did not buy — you will be surprised why you lost the sale.”
