The ultimate parameter to judge how successful a business is, is always the same, no matter what the business is or aspires to be.
Sales.
A business could provide a product or a service that is the best in the world but if it falls short in sales?
Numbers always speak volumes about a business’ success. And lead generation is a proven technique that can help business owners to get their cash counters ringing in no time.
What is Lead Generation?
Lead generation refers to the process of identifying potential customers for your product or service and building on that to generate sales. Often misunderstood and undervalued by businesses, lead production is not cold calling or just sending out a couple of emails. It is a complicated process that requires a diverse spectrum of strategies to work properly.
Studies have shown that companies that generate 60% leads online are twice as profitable as those who generate 20%.
What is the Purpose of Lead Generation?
A good lead generation strategy can drastically increase the traffic to a business’s website, which in turn inevitably leads to higher generation of sales and increased conversions. Having a good lead production process ensures a business service or product reaches all the customers that can benefit from it. To create a sustainable and healthy sales rate beyond this point time, producing leads is the only way forward.
Types of Leads:
- Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL): These consists of the people that have interacted with embedded forms or portals but still cannot be targeted as a genuine customer
- Sales Qualified Lead (SQL): These consist of the people who have repeatedly shown interest in a brand’s products or services and hence can be considered a genuine potential customer
- Product Qualified Lead (PQL): These are the people who have previously used a brand’s product(s) and have implied that they would be interested in becoming a potential paying customer.
- Service Qualified Lead: These are people that have taken particular actions that express and indicate their genuine interest in becoming a paying customer for a brand.
Identifying and segregating customer pools according to the provided data and strategizing individually for each of them can prove to be crucial in lead production and sales generation.
How to Generate Leads in Sales?
Create a Tool for Interaction:
It is no surprise that most new brands have invested time and effort in creating a free to use interactive tools, ebooks and incentives on their portal. This method of marketing based on tools works and also is popular among businesses and the consumer base because it sparks interest in a consumer and starts generating a huge amount of leads.
Embed Lead Generation forms into Social Media Interactions:
Business owners often in a dilemma when it comes to giving away free content:
Do I give the whole thing for free in order to attract traffic?
Or do I gate it, forcing users to sign up in order to view the full content?
Our answer? Take the middle ground.
A sustainable middle ground is embedding lead generation forms into the content that is to be shared. In taking this hybrid route in lead generation, a business will be tapping into genuinely interested customers who will fill in the embedded form as well as reach new users making it a good opportunity to spread brand awareness.
Direct Mails:
Although an old school method, direct mails can still significantly contribute to lead generation and generate sales. But it has to be carried out in a strategic fashion. Rather than sending out a mail to every possible lead, a business or marketing team has to come up with a carefully curated, designed and written mail. When this is sent to a group of potential leads, each potential customer from that group will be tempted to follow up on that mail. Curious visitors will visit the brand website, check out the business, its products and services and eventually start convert
Share Customer Experience to kindle brand intrigue:
Most of us are quite aware of this form of marketing, it mostly consists of a collage of still images with greatly positive comments from satisfied customers, or is a video featuring these customers talking candidly about how good their experience was. It is to be noted that in order for this technique to spark interest, the execution must be done in an exceptionally creative and engaging manner.
Connecting with Communities:
Targeting individuals can be profitable. But it is definitely not scalable. What a business needs to achieve moving forward is connecting with the right communities that might have a large number of potential leads for them. To identify such communities, one must first look at their brand, the product or service and figure out what communities in particular would be interested in their product or service. Once this is identified, the business must then run a marketing campaign and offer exclusive incentives targeted towards those particular communities. And if done well, this can generate a much higher number of leads over a period of time
Taking Advantage of Cross–promotional Opportunities:
This is an often-overlooked technique while planning lead generation strategies but it can prove to be a vital source of lead production if executed correctly. Firstly, one has to identify the perfect business or brand to partner with. An example of a good brand to partner with is someone with a largely overlapping consumer pool selling products or services which might correlate but do not coincide with the brand. If not done correctly, this might lead to either brand losing customers or the product/service losing relevancy. But, if done right, this might even lead to merging of two entire consumer pools, where each brand enjoys both pools of their customers.
Creating and Innovating Interesting Side Projects:
The best leads can often come from a consumer pool that you thought had little or nothing to do with your actual product or service provided (Think Coke Studio). Creating an innovative and interesting side project can help a brand tap into an ocean of leads that were previously untapped by any brand in the field due to lack of exposure. Side projects invite consumer interaction. And any good interaction will undeniably lead to increased traffic and lead generation and eventually sales generation.
Repetition:
There are a multitude of other things similar to those stated above that one can do to produce leads and generate sales but the most important step in the process has to be consistency. Consistent repetition of the correct methods will definitely lead to higher lead production and sales generation. Huge chunks of potential customers are lost when this consistency is absent. Prime examples of these are Amazon’s Great Indian Sale and Flipkart’s Big Billion Sale that crop up annually albeit with a different theme each year.
Need a Helping Hand?
All these techniques and tips sounding too overwhelming? You can always opt to outsource lead generation services. Outsourcing is in no way, taking the easy way out of a problem. It is in fact a smart and efficient way to handle the complicated process of sales generation through lead production.
When a brand or business feels that it cannot market efficiently or in the best way possible or in fact doesn’t have the staff required to undertake the difficult task, outsourcing is the most viable choice. It is also worth noting that outsourcing is cheaper than hiring an entire new team just for lead generation. If you are a brand or business is looking to cut costs and increase sales, lead generation outsourcing is the most logical thing to do. ExpertCallers is hugely experienced in providing inbound and outbound call center services to brands across several verticals around the world. Talk to us to know more about how you can outsource to lead generation services.
