How to generate new sales leads
One of the most common requests we get is to help generate leads. Here are the 5 steps to ensuring you get the greatest return on your lead generation investment:
- Set your team goals –Clients know their businesses and how to turn leads into clients. Agencies know marketing and how to bring leads to clients. Use these 2 skill sets to maximum advantage; working together to define your goals and grow your business.
- Analyze the market – Get excited. Dig into the data. Ask questions. It’s not just looking at what your competitors are doing. It’s about the economy, trends, and your target audience. You also need to put your company under the microscope. What can you deliver on? No wishful thinking here. Analysis is about getting at the truth. And the truth allows you to generate communications that motivate prospects and create leads.
- Make your target audience real – Businesses know who they seek. Agencies can augment with audience research and insights. Then a persona is created to humanize your target audience; name them, define how they think, what they wear, what they do professionally and personally. If you can see them in your mind’s eye and describe them in detail you are far more likely to locate and connect with them.
- Develop powerful creative – According to CBS News the average person is bombarded with 5,000 ads a day. If you bore your target audience with uninspired information or don’t connect with them at a personal level, they will move on until they find something that does. Make your creative memorable to the persona you assiduously created.
- Make sure sales is prepared to convert – Get excited again. You need an amped-up sales force who is ready with plans in place to convert those leads. Failure to execute here makes all your prior efforts for naught. Remember marketing can bring you leads, but sales needs to convert them to clients.
This all sounds simple, right? We’re amazed how often this process is not followed. If the agency and business aren’t working together, critical knowledge & insights are missed and the marketing investment is not leveraged. If you don’t analyze the market you’ll underestimate or miss important factors that can sink the entire effort. And demographics will only take you so far. To reach your target audience you need to be able to define them like they are your neighbor. If you can’t do that you’ll lose sight of who they are. As for creative, we’re amazed how this is overlooked at the outset. Clients and agency execs are planners and see the plan as being the key to success. Yes, planning is important, but what’s forgotten is that all efforts are compromised if the creative and messaging don’t connect with the target audience. And lastly, have you tied in sales? Handing leads to your sales force on a silver platter can be frustrating if the sales team isn’t ready and able to convert those beautiful leads.
If you follow these 5 steps, you too can generate the leads you seek. Following these steps we recently brought in 138 leads to a company who had generated next to none the prior 11 months.
