All businesses have goals for growth, but occasionally struggle to achieve them. The challenge with reaching a unique goal isn’t that the goal itself is too lofty or unrealistic. Often it’s in the lack of a reliable system that gets a business from “here to there”. Without a reliable lead generation system in place, achieving goals becomes increasingly more difficult.
As mentioned in this 2017 Inc.com article, many organizations lack an organized strategy for generating new leads. Instead of randomly sending out prospecting emails and making sales phone calls at sporadic intervals, companies should plan out a systematic, consistent strategy for lead generation.
7 Steps For Building A Reliable Lead Generation System
1. Research
When it comes to generating leads, it’s not just about creating new inquiries. It’s about attracting new business opportunities from the right kinds of clients. Otherwise, you’ll be handing your sales team leads that they’ll have a hard time closing.
When it comes to research, you want to identify three main attributes about your ideal client:
– Demographics, such as regional information, revenue or net worth, and age. – Psychographic information, such as what they care about most as it relates to your product or service. – Media information, meaning where they’re likely to be open to receiving information about your company whether it be online, on their smart phone or at an event.
Without identifying all of the specifics about your perfect target audience, you’re likely to miss out on marketing opportunities.
2. Messaging
Once you have a solid understanding of the people you’re targeting, figuring out what to say to them comes next. All too often, companies launch a marketing campaign with the expectation that people are going to respond to a message that might as well just say, “Buy This!”
However, attracting your customers starts with either a headline (if they’re reading about your business) or an experience (if they’re meeting you for the first time at a networking event or conference).
The first thing a prospect notices about you must be memorable and intriguing. And these days, with busier-than-ever jobs and technology distracting your prospects away from your sales messages, your main task is to clearly communicate the benefit you’ll deliver in exchange for their valuable time.
Once you’ve gotten their attention, your job is then keeping it.
3. Getting Out There
Being in the right place at the right time isn’t due to luck. It’s due to careful planning.
By executing the items mentioned in steps 1 and 2, your marketing should be aimed at the right people, with the right message, in the right places.
No longer is marketing about just “getting your name out there”. It’s about crafting carefully orchestrated messages and publishing it in places where you know your target audience has a presence.
Does your business have goals for growth that you’re struggling to achieve? Find out why by taking this quiz.
4. Continuously Improving Campaigns
Once your campaigns have launched, don’t just sit back and wait for leads to come in. Instead, review early metrics against your goals and look for opportunities to make adjustments.
Rarely do marketing campaigns instantly perform out of the gate. It’s often through relentless attention and tweaking that goals are eventually met over time.
5. Won/Lost Analysis
A key aspect of a reliable lead generation system is not only creating leads, but creating new deals for the sales team. In other words, the leads that are collected make their way through your sales process and turn into new business.
This doesn’t necessarily mean that every lead converts to new business. However, by scoring the leads that are generated, you’ll have a better grasp at knowing how your marketing is working.
Not all marketing methods that generate the most leads are necessarily the methods that generate the most won opportunities. By scoring your leads and then tracking each lead back to its marketing origin, you’ll gain the critical intel you need to make wiser marketing choices moving forward.
6. Technology
In order to measure marketing effectiveness of every part of your lead generation system, technology is required. Some quantitative items your technology should evaluate and measure for you, include:
– Open rates and click rates of email campaigns – Website traffic and highly visited pages – Sources of leads generated – Quantity of leads generated per source
In the absence of a robust, comprehensive marketing tool, measure the impact of your marketing by recording data in a simple spreadsheet.
Capturing quantifiable marketing data and measuring it over time will help you improve your marketing as mentioned in step four.
7. A Strategist Managing It All
Creating a reliable lead generation system involves strategy, creative thinking and keen analytical skills. Identifying someone within the organization to manage marketing deliverables isn’t enough.
A marketing strategist knows how to execute marketing, measure it, and challenge its performance by constantly presenting new things to test. They’re neurotic about attempting to out-perform the current state of your marketing. It’s this passion for optimization that ultimately creates your reliable lead generation system.
Struggling To Build A Lead Generation System And Meet Your Goals?
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