Tuesday, November 4, 2008

The Size of Your Paycheck Starts With The Quality of Your Leads

By David B. Ascot

You can improve the quality of your customers as well as improve your bank balance by concentrating on your lead generation level. You can successfully prepare your prospective targets when your ads, website and fee-based or free informational product look and feel good to them. It is the same for your company logo. You can make quick efficient sales this way.

Highly-qualified, ready-to-buy leads are:

- Quick and easy to close

- Less price-focused and more value-focused

- More motivated towards success

- Understand what it is you do and why you are different therefore taking less time to educate


Understand that what happens in the lead generation level will influence results further down the sales processing line. You can use the 5 strategies to encourage better leads:

1) Correctly targeting clients

Unfortunately, there are a lot of entrepreneurs and business people who are insecure when it comes to focusing on a particular group of prospects that can be assisted the most. One example of this is an expert mechanic that restores old BMW's. He may mistakenly try appealing to all sorts of car owners rather than concentrating on his specific niche market prospects.

You can also target clients by a psychographic profile which is a psychographic aspect that features the basis of some type of trait such as lifestyle, character or psychological characteristic. This can be very effective as it offers you more than the simple demographics of gender and age which can sometimes fall short of your expectations.

How do you target a particular group? Start with your headlines. e.g. "Does Not Having Enough Money to Retire On Keep You Up at Night?" A headline like the one above (for, say, a financial planner) would tend to bring motivated prospects into the marketing funnel.

2) Pre-Educate

Especially if your products / services are higher priced, intangible, complex or in a highly competitive industry, it's critical that you educate prospects about your offering and value.
There are many ways to do this including downloadable Special Reports; White Papers; Questionnaires, Surveys and Audits; Seminars and Events.

You can also monetize the education process by charging for materials. This not only generates a revenue streams but also forces motivated prospects to "self-select". Self-selection is a critical component of the most successful lead generation programs.

3) Pre-Qualify

Pre-qualification is a form of self selection. Other forms may include describing who your service or product is intended for. For instance, you can target your qualified buyers into your sales field by using such phrases as: "With at least 2 years employment and a $60K+ per annum income our no-deposit first home loans are perfect for you!"

4) Pre-Sell

You can actually make 95 percent of the sale before ever speaking to a prospective client, when your sales letters, ads and other relevant material are persuasively compelling. Simply answer one or two questions before finalising your paperwork. The eventual result of a successful lead generation program is a pre-sold lead.

You are not doing enough pre-selling at the lead generation level when you have to struggle with every prospective client to make a sale.

5) Future Pace

Future Pacing is "showing" the prospect what their life will be like in the future once they have your solution. It's a technique that can be used in print as well as in a sales setting, and makes the benefits you offer much more immediate.

Social proof is an intriguing and successful aspect of lead generation efforts. For instance, future backing is backed up well by including case studies and testimonials.

Sure this article may deal more with lead quality than lead quantity, however by putting these concepts to work for you, you can increase your long term results.

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