Lead Generation

More. New. Customers.

Let’s be honest, if your business had a system in place that produced a steady and reliable stream of new customers, life would be a lot less stressful. But the truth is that most businesses have very little to no control over the volume of quality new customer leads they generate on a month-to-month basis. Basically, they get by on leads that trickle in from a combination of sporadic advertising, referrals, and whatever the salespeople can dig up. Can you get by this way? Sure. Is it ideal? No. Is it scalable? No. Will it allow you to grow your business exponentially? No.

Lead generation is the process by which a business attracts new customer inquiries. Whenever a salesperson sets an appointment with a new prospect, that’s a lead. When someone calls after seeing your ad, that’s a lead. And when one of your customer’s refers a friend or associate to you, that’s a lead as well. But the cost and quality of leads varies dramatically and many can end up costing you more than they are worth. All leads are not created equal.

Any business that fails to keep the sales pipeline full will inevitably end up losing time and money chasing poor-quality leads.

Show me a salesperson with no appointments scheduled and I’ll show you a salesperson that’s willing to go waste an hour talking to anyone that will listen to a pitch. Show me a business owner with excess capacity and I’ll show you a business owner that’s willing to accept lower prices, lower margins, and high-maintenance, low-return clients. It doesn’t matter what product or service you provide, if there are not enough new customers coming in to generate the revenue you need, you must take whatever business you can get, regardless of quality. Over time, this can strangle your business.

Winning businesses keep their sales pipeline full. Plain and simple. They don’t just settle for enough leads to survive, they generate enough leads to be selective. You do not want to be in a position where you have to take every piece of business that walks through the door. You want to be in a position to cherry-pick the very best clients based on their profitability and overall value to your business.

Keeping the pipeline full will not happen without a clearly defined lead generation system built on strong marketing principles. It is very important to understand the following:

Just because you advertise does not mean you have a lead generation system.

Just because you have salespeople does not mean you have a lead generation system.

A true lead generation system captures the attention of prospects and takes them through a multi-step relationship-building process. There’s a lot more to it than just coming up with an offer and running an ad. The days of convincing large numbers of people to pick up the phone and call you based on a :30 second TV commercial or full-page print ad are long gone. Today’s consumers do their homework. They research on the Internet. They talk to their friends. They shop around. If you want to win in this environment and avoid competing solely on price, you need to become a part of their buying process.

We position our clients as the obvious experts in their category. We create marketing materials that draw intertested prospects in like a magnet and then we give them all of the information they need to make the best buying decision. All of this happens automatically and it’s all measurable. We test, implement, revise, and re-test until every last drop of efficiency and profitability has been extracted. Then we scale the whole thing up. In the end, our clients have an automated lead generation machine that:

  • Produces a predictable flow of quality new business leads.
  • Costs much less than traditional “brute force” ad campaigns that rely on outspending your competitors.
  • Pre-screens prospects to reduce time wasted chasing unqualified buyers.
  • Operates 24/7 with no human intervention.
  • Positions your business as the most credible and obvious choice.
  • Reduces or eliminates horribly inefficient cold call-based prospecting.

And while we are on the subject of cold calling. Let’s get something out of the way:

Cold Calling Doesn’t Work.

C’mon now. You can say it. Cold Calling Doesn’t work. Feels good doesn’t it? Whether you are in a business-to-business or business-to-consumer based industry, if cold calling is your primary lead generation strategy you are in trouble. The reason is simple – the return on investment is abysmal.

The simple truth is that decision makers do not answer the phone and agree to meetings with salespeople they do not know. It doesn’t matter if you are calling on businesses or customers directly, people hate being interrupted. It’s rude, and it shows ignorance of the basic truth that customers buy on their own terms, not yours.

When your business has a steady stream of leads flowing in, your salespeople are free to do what they do best – present to interested prospects. This is a much more profitable use of their time than dialing the phone all day and begging people to talk to them.

In a perfect world, businesses that provide true value would easily rise to the top. But we live in a world that is absolutely saturated with noise and clutter. Competiton is everywhere and your customers are being bombarded with thousands of marketing messages each day. You can’t just rely on luck and chance to attract new customers, you need a strategy. We can help.

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