Thursday, November 13, 2008

The Size of Your Paycheck Starts With The Quality of Your Leads

By David B. Ascot

You can improve the quality of your customers as well as improve your bank balance by concentrating on your lead generation level. You can successfully prepare your prospective targets when your ads, website and fee-based or free informational product look and feel good to them. It is the same for your company logo. You can make quick efficient sales this way.

High qualifying, ready to buy leads are those that are:

- Faster to close, easier to close

- More value focused, not so price focused

- Naturally motivated for success

- Tend to understand what you do and why you're different - don't require a lot of time to educate

You need to understand that what you do at the lead generation level will affect your results further down your sales line. Feel free to utilise the five strategies that can enhance your lead quality.

1) Target the right prospects

Many business people and marketers are unwilling to laser-focus on the specific prospect group that they can help most. For example, if a mechanic is an expert at restoring old BMWs, instead of concentrating on that market he sometimes makes the mistake of trying to appeal to all car owners.

You can effectively target by means of using a psychographic profile. A psychographic profile portrays prospective clients based upon some type of characteristic, lifestyle or psychological quality. Demographic targeting only provides gender and age characteristics and does fall short in comparison of what psychographics can do for your lead generation.

How do you target a particular group? Start with your headlines. e.g. "Does Not Having Enough Money to Retire On Keep You Up at Night?" A headline like the one above (for, say, a financial planner) would tend to bring motivated prospects into the marketing funnel.

2) Pre-Educate

When considering your value and offering, you can educate your prospective clients by educating them. This is vital, especially when you offer services or products that are in a higher price range, in a highly competitive area or if they are complex or intangible. There are various means you can take advantage of such as Seminars and Events, Surveys and Audits, Questionnaires, White Papers and Special Reports.

You can also monetize the education process by charging for materials. This not only generates a revenue streams but also forces motivated prospects to "self-select". Self-selection is a critical component of the most successful lead generation programs.

3) Pre-Qualify

Pre-qualification includes self-selection. Other aspects involve describing exactly who your service or product is intended for. One example is using special phrases that aid in reducing the number of unqualified buyers from your market niche. For instance making such use of phrases like, "Steady Employment with an income of $60K+ per annum? See our no-deposit First Home Loan!"

4) Pre-Sell

This is fairly easy to understand. When you present compelling materials such as sales letters and advertisements you can make approximately 95% of your sale before even talking with a prospective client. Just take the time to answer a few questions and then finish your paperwork. The most impressive leads are those which are pre-sold. This enhances the success of your lead generation program.

If you have to arm-wrestle every prospect into buying from you, the chances are you're not doing enough pre-selling at the lead gen level.

5) Future Pace

When you apply future pacing you will show your prospective client what their life will be like in the future after they have been using your solution. This method is useful in print as well as in a sales setting. It creates immediate benefits from your offering.

Future pacing backed up by testimonials and case studies are even better. "Social proof" elements such as these are an integral part of many successful lead generation efforts.

Although this article deals more with lead quality than lead quantity, by implementing some of the concepts above you should see a significant improvement in results.

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