8 Tips for Generating Sales Leads
New leads are the lifeblood of every business. While every lead doesn’t always become a sale, every sale starts off as a lead. Knowing how to generate a good lead is critical to maintaining and growing your business. But when your well of leads starts to run dry, how will your agency adapt? Here’s our advice for agencies looking to grow their business by boosting their lead flow and closing more deals.
Focus on Lead Capture – Ease of contact, make sure that your website is a lead capture machine. The site should be easy to use and filled with simple forms and calls to action. Develop forms that ask for the right information from potential leads in order to get them into your pipeline. There should little barrier to entry for any prospective lead, how you work with them later will determine their viability.
Search Optimization – Use Google’s recommended formatting and tagging so your website can be easily found. Become a thought leader in your space, using blogs and other SEO tools. Social media can be helpful here too, as the more clicks you can generate about your product, the more likely you are to be found.
Segmenting your Contacts – Using tracking, you can ensure that the content you design gets to the right person at the right time. Monitor who visits your website and when. See what forms they use, what emails they open and what they click on. Utilize progressive profiling in order to fully qualify your leads. Bring them in to the funnel with introductory information, but pepper them along the way in order to gather more and more information.
Become an Expert – Get certified in your field. Many platforms such as Hubspot, Salesforce, Google AdWords and Analytics, provide certification programs. Certifications can add value and reputability to your business especially when you’re listed as a recommended expert by the various programs. Brett Farmiloe, Founder of Markitors, saw his business take off after he became a listed as an expert in Mailchimp, the popular email marketing service. “Since I became listed in the Mailchimp directory, I’ve doubled the monthly revenue for my agency and receive anywhere from 4-5 new business inquires per week,” Farmiloe said.
Creating Partnerships – Building relationships with other companies and businesses that offer complimentary services is a fantastic idea. These partnerships will help you offer a “bundle” to your customers that will be hard to turn down. It gives them added savings and gives you and your partner extra revenue, not to mention great business relationships.
Promoting Local – It is important to a lot of people to “go local.” Use this trend to your advantage, by appealing to those in your area. Customers are often even willing to pay more if it means they can buy local. Make sure you tap into the local market, offering those in your area the best possible services. Find these customers by tapping into things like Local First and your Chamber of Commerce.
Develop Referral Strategies – You should have a referral process implemented. Always ask for referrals when the customer is happy and taken care of. Make sure to track these referrals and see how they perform over time.
Expand Your Business – If you’ve hit a bit of a lull in lead generation, consider adding to your existing business model to draw new attention. Make sure to continue to grow and you will be noticed. “We’ve decided to not just expand our business via adding clients but also by adding services,” Peter Czech said. Czech, CEO of New Possibilities Group, LLC, continued “This helps us grow in two ways; it provides another valuable service to existing customers, and it gives us a larger pool of prospective customers to pull from.” These are just a handful of ways to further generate leads. If you implement just one or two of these, you’ll see results. Implement all of them and you’re golden!
