You have a business, and you want to keep it firmly established and growing. How do you do that?
Of course, clients who are loyal and offer you repeat business as well as sending you referrals are
the lifeblood of most successful businesses. However, there may be a few customers who are never
satisfied and will simply distract you and waste your time instead of letting you get on with things
and continue to grow your business in a positive fashion. Therefore, it's worth taking some time to
explain some lead generation techniques and strategies that really work on the Internet to drive new
business to you, no matter how big you are or what you do.
First, though, let's take a moment to look at lead generation. Why is this so important? In many
industries, lead generation often will dictate how effectively you drive revenue. There are many
complex sales scenarios that highly depend on having a consistent supply of qualified leads.
Importance of Lead Generation
So you know that lead generation is important; it's not always the most important constraint on your
ability to increase the throughput of your sales process, and we'll talk about the times when that's
the case. But in most situations, if you can elevate your ability to generate qualified leads at
lower cost, and with dramatically less human intervention and effort, then, the likelihood is, you
can exponentially grow your sales.
The reality is that in most companies the sales people do actually very little selling. Consulting
Firm Ballistix has found that many sales people, especially in complex sales situations, spend as
little as 8% of their time actually selling to prospects. The rest of the time is spent on technical
tasks, customer service, opportunity management and clerical tasks, social activities, and
prospecting.
This is quite typical of a business-to-business sales situation, but of course most business
managers and owners, as well as sales people would recognize that this type of non-sales activity is
not an efficient use of sales time.
Lead Generation Process, High-Performance
Of course, then, what you need is a high performance lead generation process. What does that
mean?
If your lead generation process is high performing, it's going to allow you to do several things:
1.You'll attract more qualified prospects more efficiently and at less cost
2.You'd educate prospects as to why you're better and different than your competitors
3.You'll teach your potential clients to trust you, so that they'll be comfortable talking with you
about what you offer
4.You'll nurture prospects appropriately depending on the stage they are in in the decision-making
process, giving them the right message at the right time
5.The process is scalable, so that you can manage a lot more leads with only a small amount of extra
resources and effort, and
6.It generates more sales for less cost with less effort.
Unless we start with a strategic framework, the tactical stuff won't be nearly as valuable. In a
nutshell, the Marketing Results lead generation methodology uses web analytics to precisely
understand how and why visitors are engaging with your website, while leveraging proven traffic and
conversion strategies to cut marketing waste, expand reach and effectiveness and boost your lead
generation results by orders of magnitude.
