lead generation source, lead flow, leads generating

Recently I wrote about sales growth in the economic recession. I described how market share consolidates in downturns and how astute business leaders increase rather than decrease marketing efforts to grow sales and share of market. Well, I clearly struck a nerve because I was deluged with suggestions about how to grow in tough times. some of the suggestions were not really good. And, some of the ideas were questionable. But some of them were so good that I decided to share best ones here.

1. Leverage your past successes. That is, use your own database of past clients and contacts to propel you forward. There are three ways that readers suggested doing this.

Get referrals - In his new book, The Referral Engine, John Jantsch describes how most companies fail to take advantage of their past by failing to ask for and use referrals. Advertising by personal referral and testimonial has always been effective and is even more so in today’s interconnected world.

Reach out more, not less - While it is tempting to reduce communications efforts during downturns, it’s not smart. In fact, it’s the best time to increase them. Why? Because about 33% of your competitors have done exactly that. They are virtually non-existant in the marketplace right now. About 33% of others are so dazed by the financial stress that they are doing the same old/same old. The top 33% (of which you should be a member) are grabbing market share by promoting their company more than ever. And, promoting in unique and inexpensive ways.

Improve your Data - This has a double benefit. First, you get an opportunity to “tough” past customers. That’s always good for business. Secondly, you can improve your customer relationship management (CRM)database. Have your sales team greet your past clients and offer a new eBook, article, newsletter, describe a new service., etc. Then, have them gather additional important information like mailing address, alternate phone numbers, social media contacts, etc. They can gather demographics like family size and purchase signal-type stuff.

2. Intense initial follow-up on trade show, promotion or seminar leads. All of us fall into the same trap - not doing a very good job of follow-up when we attend a large trade show or run a big promotion or attend a seminar and make tons of contacts. Often we let these opportunities slip away.

You are in a recession, my friend, so that’s not good enough. Leads are precious now and you should use them effectively. One of our repeat customers recently hired us to make the initial follow-up call to hundreds of leads from his presence at a big trade show. We entered all of the leads into his database in just a few days and called/culled the list into 100 great warm leads for his sales team within a week!

3. Stop squandering your sales resources! This reader is a regular customer of ours. He figured that almost 50% of his sales team time was spent on super-simple, routine tasks like verifying shipping information. Not only was this discouraging to the sales team but it was an incredible waste of their expertise.

In order to free them up to do more profitable work…like outbound calls and key account focus, he outsourced the first level customer service function. Now, callers are directed to an outsourced call center for questions about shipping dates, tracking numbers, price changes, returns and etc.

4. Generate warm leads by cold calling a targeted list for prospects. We call this “suspects-to-prospects” and “prospects-to-appointments” calling. This is the type of effort I wrote about recently. This is a no-brainer. You and your team already know your best customers. Identifying these top customers and targeting lists of similar demographics can yield a boatload of real warm leads.

Growth requires leads. That’s true in any economy. The best growth strategy begins with an abundance of leads. That way your sales team can focus on top opportunities and deal with them confidently. Cold calling (or cold contacting) is an effective way to generate good leads. It’s a critical first step in the sales funnel.

Keep the lead pipeline full. Keep your top salespeople focused on the best real opportunities for success. That’s a growth strategy for ANY economy! Try some, or all of these ideas to gain market share and grow NOW.

Visit MultiMedia Spectrum for Appointment Setting Services and Business to Business Telemarketing.

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Do you know the number of leads you need to generate to reach your income goals? While this may seem like an easy question, not a lot of people can come up with the number.

There are two things to consider regarding this question. First, there are your expenses. You should make sure to have an accounting program advanced enough to help you analyze your costs and how they relate to your profitability.

The second factor is your ability to convert leads to sales (conversion rate). The better you can convert your leads, the more profitability you are capable of achieving.

Let’s take a look at the process more closely:

First you need to settle on a sales goal for each month. For our purposes, let’s use $100,000 as your monthly sales goal.

The next step is to work out what your conversion rates are. In order to keep this example easy, suppose that all of your leads come from your website.

Suppose you convert 2 and a half out of 1000 visitors into paying customers. You have a .25% conversion rate.

Use this formula to figure out how many visitors you would need to your website to acquire enough leads to get the sales you want. To keep this example simple, we will assume every “conversion” described above will ultimately purchase from you.

(Desired Sales / Sale Price / Conversion Rate) X 100

The formula would look like this, if you want to achieve $100,000 a month in sales, you have a conversion rate of .25% and your average sales price is $20:

($100,000 / $20 / .25) X 100 = 2,000,000 visitors needed per month to achieve your sales goal.

Wow! That is a lot of visitation!

Luckily, there are a few adjustments you can make. You can increase the average sales price. Or, you can increase your visitors or the conversion rate.

Most find the easiest fix is to improve conversion rate. By testing various options and changes, it is possible to improve a .25% conversion to about 2%.

Look at how that will affect the calculation:

($100,000 / $20 / 2) X 100 = 250,000 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.

I could live with that change!

If you want to decrease the number of visitors you need even more, try increasing average sales to $47:

($100,000 / $47 / 2) X 100 = 106,383 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.

Everyone would rather work smarter than harder. Hopefully these examples drive home the importance of planning the leads you will need to reach your sales goals, and testing the factors you can change to become more efficient.

Marty Dickinson has been an entrepreneur and owner of HereNextYear.com for fifteen years, and loves to share small business success strategies with other business owners. Claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year” and learn about an online accounting program that makes it easy to track your conversion rates.

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