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Paper by Terry Proxton - marketing manager of Pulse Enterprise UK Ltd.
A question I am often asked “How can my company produce business to business sales leads cost effectively?”
Quite often my response frustrates the inquisitor – “Tell me a little bit about your business and how it currently works? What do you market or sell? How do you market your product or services at present?
Where do you leads come from at present? Who provides those leads? How much do they cost? How much can you afford to pay per lead? What distinguishes a good lead from a bad? What is your average order value? What can of profit margins do you work with? Etc.
To be perfectly clear about this – establishing precisely how to cost effectively produce sales leads takes proper investigation and time. There are very rarely quick or simple solutions.
In fact to further re-iterate this – how hard would it be to generate sales leads if cost were no object? I would say not very hard at all. If money were no issue buying leads would be simple.
But this is not the case for 99% if not all businesses – most owners have to find or generate leads as cheaply as they can – it is not uncommon to find that the most successful entrepreneurs have found very clever ways of delivering new enquiries for a fraction of the cost.
So where would I begin? First of all I would try and evaluate what market the company is currently operating in, who they are trying to sell to and what their short, medium and longer term plans are. From this research it would be possible to establish who their competitors are now and perhaps further down the line.
My first point of call would be with these competitors to try and work out what they do as far as lead generation is concerned. I would particularly examine the successful companies – as they are more likely to have found cost effective lead generation sales routes.
What is a lead? There are numerous and often very complicated or boring explanations as to what a lead consists of, or is – but to me it is not rocket science. A lead is a piece of qualified information that perhaps points to the fact that a consumer or business maybe interested in a product or service.
I do not believe that there is anything more complicated than this. My experience has taught me that relying on one lead source is dangerous – the more leads we generate the more likely the business will be successful – but to me even more important than this is the number of different lead generation sources. Why do I say this?
What happens if one or more of our lead generation sources suddenly dries up? This does happen from time to time. Or what happens if the cost of one particular source of lead doubles or trebles overnight. A good example of this is paid for advertising.
Before the invention of the world wide web – how much did paid for advertising cost per lead generated? How much do the same leads cost now? I would hazard a guess that in most instances the associated costs have doubled at least if not trebled. This happened almost overnight.
It is also a very difficult dilemma trying, finding or testing new lead sources? Why? Certain lead sources may cost a fortune, others cost very little. It is simply a case of how much risk are you willing to take or how much money can you afford to invest, to try new marketing channels?
When times are good it is not uncommon for most business owners to begin relaxing – comparatively speaking – perhaps this is the time to look at new lead generation schemes or what others in your industry are doing.
One thing is for certain – I love finding new lead generation sources – it gives me a “real buzz” discovering any new method or way of making money or generating extra profits. |
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