How To Generate Sales Leads Online

How often do you think you about lead generation, your brand awareness, your sales process, what stages your buyers are in, and what customers could be closing soon? If you’re anything like 98% of my friends, colleagues, and customers chances are often. If you’re focused at this level and committed to consistent activities there’s no doubt you’re working hard, but are the results speaking for themselves? If not, the reason you’re not seeing results you’d like could be “who” your marketing and sales efforts are focused on.

The above terminology and metrics are commonly found in companies focused on their sales process, and selling customers. Their marketing consists of tradeshows, print advertising, shot gun email lists, radio and broadcast commercials. Their sales efforts consist of cold calling lists, reaching out to older customers, networking, and referrals. Although these efforts are conducive and paired with other activities can generate leads, this approach isn’t the best for you or your prospects and customers. Buyers today are well informed and more powerful than ever before. They can find information quicker than ever before and are dodging ineffective conversations and time wasters (not consultative sales people). The sales person cold calling and spending time qualifying the customer isn’t what the customer wants to do, or invest their time. Buyer 2.0 if far more sensitive of their time, and knows the tools they have access to prior to talking with anyone. In fact, 78% of the sales process on average is complete before a buyer ever calls a sales person. Here’s the good news: this is a great opportunity for you to improve your sales!!!!

1. Develop a buyer persona. Stop spending time on uninterested or unqualified leads. Instead, focus all of your energy on your current customers, and learn how they think. Some questions you want to ask now:

1. What are they working to achieve?
2. What challenges are preventing them from achieving their goals?
3. What triggers bring challenges to your customer’s attention?
4. What objections do they face?
5. What are their biggest challenges associated with their role?
6. How do they evaluate/measure the solution you provide them?
7. What factors helped determine your solution versus the competitors?
8. How do they access information when seeking to improve their current situations?
9. Where do they go to access information?

2. Once you identify your buyer persona(s) (You might find you have multiple personas) now you want to identify what they might have in common.

1. What social platforms do they spend time on?
2. What groups, industry leaders, national associations, industry associations, influencers do they follow?
3. What content are they publishing? What webinars are they hosting? What posts are they liking or engaging with?

3. What is their buyer journey? Now that you know their challenges, what triggers helped them identify their challenge, how they access information, now you want to build a funnel, or hub of information that helps them better understand their challenge, identify what solutions are present, and why your solution is the best fit. At this stage, you want to produce content that speaks to customer’s challenges and questions throughout the journey. Think about your product, and how it brings value to your customers. Why did they have a need? How did they determine they needed a solution like yours? What factors played a role in which product they chose? What was important about those factors? What questions did they have when understanding the magnitude of their challenge, and the potential solutions? This is where you want to have solid information explaining your product, and most importantly the team behind that will support your client throughout.

4. With the information above, it’s time to get to work building content and information that supports your clients buying journey. It’s imperative you:

1. Confirm your website is qualified to bring high-quality prospects to you.
2. Is your site keyword optimized for the challenges your customers’ are facing?
3. Is your site built for the customer’s journey? Do you highlight their frequently asked questions with strong powerful content readily present?
4. Is the content in the right order as the buyer will be researching and seeking information?
5. Do you have properly placed calls to action with next steps that ensure you can help the client in a meaningful unique way? (Not the same case study you hand out to everyone? Are you able to collect what the buyer wants to know, and place relative content in front of them?)
6. Are you leveraging Video which will increase your traffic to leads, and leads to customers by 25% or greater? If not, it’s imperative you are budgeting video production into your campaign. The return on video is greater that the cost guaranteed.
7. Are you building inbound links, and asking influencers and industry associations to endorse your information?
8. Is your site optimized for search engines resulting in high-quality prospects asking you directly for more information and support?

5. After your site is ready, next begin engaging with them on their choice of platforms. Share consistent messaging in the form of content, videos, infographics, posts, that helps them achieve their goals and overcome their challenges on all vehicles/platforms they come into contact with your brand. Some examples are:

1. a. Google, Bing, Yahoo, YouTube
2. LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat….
3. Email, Mobile, Direct Mail, Tradeshows, Sales Meetings, Cold Calls, etc.

If you invest the time to learn who your ideal customers are, begin building your strategy around their perspective, and provide content that truly helps them accomplish their goals, you’ll stop worrying about generating leads, proving ROI, securing enough budget, and identifying the right technologies for your needs.

CTA Button- Identify where your website can be improved.

Landing Page: Thank you for interest in our article focused on improving the buyer’s experience! 1 vital method to improve your buyer’s experience, and dramatically improve your lead generation, quality of sales meetings, and the closing percentage is providing the right content to your buyer before they ask, and providing valuable content that empowers them to learn more. Your website often times is the first or second interaction they have with your company, and it’s more important than ever! If you schedule an appointment with us, my team will analyze your site, keywords, search engine optimization, search engine marketing, and content to identify specific areas you can improve your results right away. This call doesn’t obligate you to spend a penny with our firm, but if you’d like us to help beyond the audit we would love to be a part of your future success.