Thursday, August 21, 2008

4 Fundamental Components of a High Impact Lead Generation System

By David B. Ascot


Oftentimes, one of the constraints many businesses face is that they have to attract the right kind of prospective customers who will become lifelong clients; these lifelong clients can be your lifeblood, because they can refer others to you and make repeat purchases themselves. Because of this, it's important to understand how you should attract these clients. Here is a brief discussion and overview of how you, too, can set up your high-performance lead generation process on the Internet for your success.

We'll look at the following points:

1. Define Your Selling Philosophy

2. Your Lead Definition

3. How Do You Generate Leads?

4. How Do You Test and Track?

Selling Philosophy
Why are you in business? How do you engage with prospects and clients? How do you convince them of your value? What do you see as your role, as it relates to your customers? These can be rather existential questions, but what I'm getting at is that your corporate philosophy about why you do what you do, and how you do it, is the driving force behind how you execute your lead generation strategy.

What's a Lead?
Let's talk for a minute about exactly what a lead is and what it isn't. If you're involved in a small business, it might seem quite obvious to you what a lead is. Let's take some time and actually define in detail what a qualified lead is, though. If you do this, you'll be able to attract more of them.

One of the more common shortfalls of not having a specific definition is that you spend too much time on prospective customers who just aren't ready to become true customers, thus wasting valuable time that could be spent on those prospective customers who truly are ready for a sale.

Set up Your Lead Generation Map
Have a visual "map" that's going to describe everything in your sales process from time you first meet a prospective client to the time you actually make the sale. Dr. Marc Dussault defines this as your "pathway to profits."

Developing an effective lead generation map is one of the key strategic goals of designing an enhanced lead generation process and the more complex the sales process and lead definition the more nodes you need on the map to convert raw "just-looking" visitors into new business.

For example, your lead generation map might begin with your process to traffic generation, followed by tracking an opt in with a white paper or special report. Then, you could move on to automated messages, which can be designed to inform and educate prospects even as you overcome any objections for prospective clients and weed out those who are not likely to complete a sale. This is quite a simple example, of course, and many other situations can apply.

Testing and Tracking
On the internet you have unprecedented ability to see into the minds of your website visitors as they advance through your lead generation process. As a minimum, you need the ability to track in detail your website visitors using web analytics. Google Analytics is a great choice because it's powerful and it's free.

Secondly, being able to track your marketing efforts and expenditures, whether it's online advertising, email marketing, or off-line methods like print or mass media advertising. If you're not tracking everything on your website, you're throwing away a huge source of leverage and leaving cash on the table.

If you remember our brief discussion about the lead generation process map, take note that analytics is going to help you turn this into a true business tool. With analytics correctly installed on your site, you can set goals for yourself for all major areas on your map, such as inquiry or opt in rates. Once you have actual numbers for all the key points on your map, next you'll need to be able to put into play optimisation strategies in the right areas at the right times, so as to gain the results you want.

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