Thursday, August 21, 2008

4 Fundamental Components of a High Impact Lead Generation System

By David B. Ascot


The biggest constraint to most businesses is attracting the right kind of prospects that can be converted into lifelong clients who make repeat purchases and refer others to you. Therefore it is important to understand how to attract the right kind of clients. Here's an overview of how to set up your high-performance lead generation process on the internet.

Let's look at these four things:

1. Define Your Selling Philosophy

2. Your Lead Definition

3. How Do You Generate Leads?

4. Testing and Tracking

What's Your Selling Philosophy?
Why are you in business and how do you engage with both prospective customers and those who are already clients? How do you make them see your value? How do you see your role as you relate to your customers? These can be rather difficult questions to answer, but what I want to know is what your corporate philosophy is, why you do what you do and how you do it. This is the driving force behind how you will generate leads.

Determine a Lead Definition
Now, let's talk about what a lead is and isn't within your organisation. It might seem obvious to you what a lead is, but it's not quite that simple. You need to take the time to define in detail what a qualified lead is; if you do this, you're going to be able to attract more of them.

One of the more common shortfalls of not having a specific definition is that you spend too much time on prospective customers who just aren't ready to become true customers, thus wasting valuable time that could be spent on those prospective customers who truly are ready for a sale.

How Do You Generate Leads? A Lead Generation Map
When you generate leads, your process can be mapped out, sort of a "lead generation map." When you take a look at this map, you'll see that you can clearly define everything in your sales process, from the time you first say hello to a customer or prospective customer to the time you make the sale. Dr. Marc Dussault defines this as your "pathway to profits".

You need an effective lead generation map if you want to design and enhance a lead generation process. The more complex the sales process you have and the more complex your lead definition, the more components are going to be needed on the map to convert those who are just visiting into actual customers.

For example, your lead generation map might begin with your process to traffic generation, followed by tracking an opt in with a white paper or special report. Then, you could move on to automated messages, which can be designed to inform and educate prospects even as you overcome any objections for prospective clients and weed out those who are not likely to complete a sale. This is quite a simple example, of course, and many other situations can apply.

How Do You Test and Track?
If you run your business on the Internet, you can have the ability to see into the minds of your website visitors as they go through your particular process for lead generation. Minimally, you're going to need to be able to track how your website visitors are visiting you, using web analytics. Google Analytics is great, because it's both powerful and free.

Secondly, being able to track your marketing efforts and expenditures, whether it's online advertising, email marketing, or off-line methods like print or mass media advertising. If you're not tracking everything on your website, you're throwing away a huge source of leverage and leaving cash on the table.

Remember the lead generation process map from a few minutes ago? Well, when you have analytics correctly installed on your site, you can establish benchmarks for all of the nodes on your map, such as opt-in and enquiry rates. Once you have real numbers for all the key points in your process, the next step is to deploy optimisation strategies in the right area at the right time to ramp up your results.

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