Internet Lead Generation: An Introductory Lesson
Happy, loyal clients who make repeat purchases and send you referrals over many years are the holy grail when it comes to running a successful business. Conversely, there are some customers who are never satisfied and will do nothing but waste your time and distract you from allocating your resources where they can have the greatest positive effect on growing your business. It makes sense, therefore, to explain more about some of the lead generation concepts and strategies that are really working on the internet right now to drive new business and companies of all shapes and sizes.
But first: Why focus on lead generation? Well, it’s very simple. In many industries, lead generation is one of the key constraints that dictate how effectively you drive revenue. Many complex sales scenarios are highly dependent on a steady supply of qualified leads.
Is Lead Generation Important?
Lead generation is important, even though it’s not always the most important constraint on your sales volume and increase in business. Nevertheless, let’s talk about that some other time. For our purposes, of course, generating qualified leads at lower cost is going to help you exponentially grow sales, as will using less human intervention and effort, which is time consuming and not particularly efficient.
In reality, most companies have a sales force that actually does relatively little selling. As an example, consulting firm Ballistix found that many sales people, especially those in complex situations, spend as little as 8% of their time selling to prospects. The rest of the time, they were oriented to opportunity management, customer service, clerical tasks, technical tasks, prospecting and social activities.
The actual numbers may be typical of a business-to-business sales situation, but for most business owners, salespeople and managers, if there’s too much time spent on activities not related to sales, performance suffers.
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.Build trust with potential clients so they feel comfortable engaging with you to discuss what you offer
4.You nurture prospective customers at all stages of the game, so that you give them the right message depending on the stage of decision-making they are in
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.The process gives you more sales with less cost and 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.
