For any business small to large, every sales lead has the potential to become a happy customer that will represent a stream of repeat revenue year after year. How and where do you begin? Don’t stress; let the LISTGIANT marketing experts walk you through one process of how to generate the perfect prospects for your business: starting a Sales Leads campaign, and following up with your prospects to ensure that they convert into sales revenue.
Generating Your Leads
One of the most important things a business will want to equip themselves with is a hygienic, high-quality list of sales prospects. A sales list is a list or database of emails, names, phone numbers and other contact information that businesses can use to reach potential prospects. Using industry-leading prospect profiling services to generate your sales list, such as those provided by LISTGIANT, allows you to precision-target your ideal client no matter who they are. The following are among the categories of attributes that Sales Leads profiling services can provide business owners and marketers:
Demographic Information
This information allows you to target people that fall under categories such as: homeowners, presence of children, occupation, education levels and income. These attributes will help you refine your ideal prospect profile.
Customer Portrait
Customer Portrait filtering allows you to target your ideal prospect by their demographic, zip code, and various psychographic behaviors like interests and beliefs to successfully identify your ideal prospect.
Now, that you know who your prospects are, you are able develop a email marketing campaign tailored for your prospects. There are many different tools and campaign options that are available to reach your prospective target audience. This may be how you introduce your business or it may remind older clients that you still offer quality products or services.
Each business is different and not every marketing campaign should be treated equally. While some campaigns will work better for some businesses, the important thing to remember is that you pick the campaign that works best and delivers an effective 'call-to-action' message to your prospects. Direct mail campaigns drop letters or postcards to the home and/or business address of your identified prospects. You can also opt for a telemarketing campaign, which allows you to contact your prospects via phone calls or text messaging. Email marketing reaches each of your prospects' email inbox with your marketing message. 'Leads' are defined as people that have responded or otherwise shown interest in your offer and business. Interest can be demonstrated in ways including: a conversation to inquire, an opt-in or form submission, or 'opens' and 'click-throughs' on an email blast.
Following Up on your Leads
After you have spending substantial amounts of time and energy generating qualified leads, keeping the momentum going is an important next step. Yes, this may seem very obvious but there are many variables that are involved in the process that will determine if the lead will convert or slip beyond your marketing grasp. If you implement the following steps into your follow-up process, your business should be able to maximize your conversion rate and overall sales volume.
Tip: Have a Game Plan
Regardless of which campaign style you picked that resulted in leads, you need to have a game plan on following-up on or reconnecting with those leads who demonstrated interest in your offering. There are several effective methods LISTGIANT suggests to reconnect with leads that have shown interest.
At this stage of the sales cycle, you already know that your prospects have heard about your product or service - A quick phone call to reconnect with the lead is an excellent way to answer any questions, preemptively overcome objections, and get the lead to close the sale faster. An email is another effective option to place a call-to-action with a special promotion or discount on purchase.
Tip: Keep in mind, it’s a Calculated Risk
If your leads are generated from inbound sales, you can treat it like a round at the slot machine because you never know what you have won yet. How many people put money in the slot machine and walk away to have lunch? No one – ever. So why would you treat your leads this way? And just because the machine may seem old and run down does not mean it will give you the worst payout – sometimes those leads will result in the biggest sales down the line, while sometimes a seemingly exciting sales lead can disappear without a word. This is why you should treat every lead as if you are meeting a new longtime, loyal customer – so the key is to follow-up with EVERY LEAD. Truth is, following up on leads is a numbers game and the more effort you put in consistently results in higher sales figures.
Tip: Don’t Waste Time on Unimportant Issues
You want to reconnect with your lead while either A) they still want or need your service/product, or B) before they have moved on to a competiting offer. Optimizing your conversion rates needs to involve responding to every sales lead as rapidly as professionally possible. Letting too much time pass between reconnecting with a potential client drops the conversion rate drastically. Try to contact your lead within 24 hours.
Tip: Trust is Everything
After making contact with your leads, your prerogative should be to win over each one. Many will be skeptical, and you need to be able to efficiently earn their trust. Nothing will turn a lead into a dud quicker than sales or marketing representatives being rude or unprofessional in any way. Take your prospect's specific needs and questions into consideration, and be as helpful as possible to facilitate gaining their trust. Trust and confidence in your product or service is what will ultimately keep a customer loyal. This necessitates fulfilling your end of all business arrangement when following up on leads – whether you offered a freebie or discount, ALWAYS HONOR IT. Failing to keep your promises will be damaging to your entire campaign and give your business a bad reputation - a circumstance that businesses tend to find nearly impossible to reverse. You should always strive to exceed expectations.
Setting goals for your business campaigns and converting leads into sales is critical for all businesses to grow and succeed. For example, you might set incrementally more aggressive goals and fine-tune each element of your lead follow-up process to achieve your expanding sales goals. If you aren't achieving your goals, consider examining each element of your process in detail, and implement steps to improve those elements. Then repeat the process on a frequent basis, such as each month.
At LISTGIANT, we strive to make sure you are equipped with every possible tool to achieve your sales objectives. Our mission is to help you achieve your marketing goals and help you reach your intended audience economically and, most importantly, effectively. Contact LISTGIANT marketing specialists today to lay the foundation of your marketing and business success!