Thursday, August 21, 2008

Generate Sales Leads By Harnessing the Power Online

By David B. Ascot


The lifeblood of any business, really, is that you have loyal clients who come to you again and again; they also send you referrals because they're so happy with what you do. Of course, this isn't to say that it's not a problem when customers are demanding and never satisfied, so that you simply waste your time and resources on them instead of on more positive things that will have a better effect for your business. Therefore, let's take a look at lead generation concepts and strategies that really work on the Internet to drive business to companies of every size and shape.

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.

How Important Is Lead Generation?
Lead generation is of course important. However, it's not necessarily the most important aspect of growing your business and sales volume. At some point, we'll talk about that, too. However, in most situations, having qualified leads is absolutely essential. If you can do so at lower cost, with much less human effort and intervention, all the better, and you can likely exponentially grow sales.

In most companies, truly, sales people really do very little selling. For example, consulting firm Ballistix actually has found that many salespeople spend as little as 8% of their time actually selling to prospects. The rest of the time is spent on customer service, clerical tasks, opportunity management and technical tasks, social activities and prospecting.

The actual numbers from the graph are typical of a business-to-business sales situation. But I'm sure most business owners, managers, and sales people will immediately recognize that too much sales time is spent on non-sales related activities.

High Performance Lead Generation Process
So you need a high performance lead generation process. Let's look at what that means.
A high performance lead generation process allows you to do the following:

1.You'd be able to attract more prospects more efficiently, at lower cost

2.Educate prospects about how and why you're different from all you 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.It's scalable, so you can manage many times more leads with only incremental additional effort and resources, and

6.It generates more sales for less cost with less effort.

You have to start with a strategic framework so that the tactical stuff is actually worth something. Simply put, the Marketing Results lead generation methodology uses Internet analytics so that you can precisely decipher why and how visitors are spending time on your website. At the same time, you can leverage proven conversion and traffic strategies so that you cut down marketing waste, expand your effectiveness and reach, and boost lead generation results exponentially.

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