Five Principles to Build Better Pipelines of Business Leads
October 09, 2008
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| Photo from StockXchng by duchessa |
By Mark Sneider
Amidst budget cuts and the impending recession, executives and sales managers are feeling the heat to generate sales more than ever before. Use these top tactics to generate more productive leads in these trying times.
1. Be Marketing-centric. Before you hand over the reigns to anybody, you need to first establish a clear, concise, and well differentiated message for your brand. Without it, what is someone going to say when asked, "Why should I consider you?" Once you create this communications strategy, carry it throughout every touch-point: letter copy, your key talking/selling points, Web copy. If you have trouble doing this yourself, a good lead generation firm or consultant should be able to see the big picture and guide you through the changes needed to ensure consistency in your marketing communication.
2. Be Consistent. If you put a program together to generate leads, you need to make certain that there are no breaks in the action. Asking sales people to sell, and manage accounts, and generate leads will not prove of success to the organization. And having the principal or the president act as part-time lead generator will only lead to less than part-time success. Since the lead generation "game" is as much an aperture marketing game, as it is a positioning and process and skill set game, maintaining consistency of reach-out is key. Today your prospect may be fine, tomorrow they have an issue or a problem that their current supplier or vendor isn’t doing a good job of fixing—you need to be there.
3. Be Relevant. The last thing you want to do is simply pound on doors in the hopes of one opening up. Do that and you don't look very strategic—you won't look like a good potential partner, and you won't look like you know a lot about your prospect's business. Being relevant takes time and focus, the kind of focus only a well-organized internal or external lead generation effort can bring you. Before any call is made to any prospect, conduct news searches on the prospect, check the Web site for releases, and scour the category's e-publications for a nugget of an insight you can bring to the table. This way, you exhibit empathy and understanding when you connect and are better able to "bridge" the prospect's situation back to challenges you yourself have solved for your own clients. Prospects appreciate this—they like to be heard, not told.
4. Be Particular. The problem with many prospecting efforts is they are more about numbers and not about the quality of the engagement. When you create your internal program (or if you use an outside firm), you need to establish clear and measurable qualifying criteria upfront. There are different points at which qualification can occur: when the list is built; when the list is cleaned; and when the prospecting begins. The key is making sure your person or your firm has a clear handle the qualifiers and delivers them.
And, in the spirit of constant improvement and value-add, conduct an open assessment after the first couple of meetings to ensure that what's being delivered is on par with expectations. If it isn't, clearly define the deficiencies and put the plan in place to correct it so you maximize the productivity of the program.
5. Be Value-added. The best long-term partner is one who goes beyond the task at hand and brings new thinking, new processes and new ways of doing things to the table for your client. In the end, if you can be a real value-added partner, your clients will be more forgiving when things aren't going just right and will be more likely to keep you on board, longer.
The same holds true when you reach out to your prospects. Not only is it important to reach out with relevancy and show you understand your prospect's situation, but it is also important to show that you want to help the prospect by sharing news, ideas, suggestions with them to help their business. Continually reach out to prospects with interesting industry news, updates on trends or insights about competitors—all with the goal of suggesting we're there to make their life better.
Mark opened RSW's U.S. office in 2005. Prior to RSW, Mark spent ten years working for two top tier packaged goods companies, and ten years on the marketing services side of the business. He started his career at DDB Needham in Chicago. Mark is a graduate of Northwestern's Kellogg Graduate School of Business with a major in Marketing and Economics.
Sales & Marketing Management Magazine
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