By Craig Klein, CEO of SalesNexus
Most of today’s businesses know that they need an internet lead generation strategy. But a large portion of effort to turn internet leads into viable buyers is a complete waste of money. It costs a whole lot of money to get an exceptional SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategy in place and it often doesn’t come close to a good return on your investment. If you use a PPC campaign, it usually either is like throwing money down a hole – or – you get a surprise deluge of inquiries that bury your sales team and too often don’t turn into closed orders. Either way, money and time seems to be totally wasted.
Take these five steps to update your approach to prospecting for new business:
Step #1 – Increase Number of Ideal Prospects
The internet is full of ways to get targeted lists of people who fit the profile of your potential clients. Our favorite is LeadFerret .com. You can have access to more than ten million contact records. Each record includes an email address.
Step #2 – Clearly Identify Your Prospect’s Pain
When you know exactly what pain your product/service resolves for your customers, you can engage your prospects with useful – even educational – content. Although you may have ways of pushing out content to the public already, the magic of this system is how you deliver the content to your prospects.
Step #3 – Create Content
Take five of your prospect’s greatest “pains” and create useful content pieces to send to them via email. WARNING: Do not send the entire content piece via email. Stay with us to find out how to use the articles effectively.
You want your email to sell the content piece. In other words, you want to send only a short email that addresses the prospect’s pain and offers more information if they click on a link. If you have a good email program, you can track each time the email was opened and when they click on the link to get the content piece.
This 5-Step System works like magic when you have your CRM integrated with your email program . That way you don’t have to transfer data from one program to the other. It all just works seamlessly.
Step #4 – Qualify All Prospects
Once your sales team sees that the articles have been opened, you have a “warm lead.” In other words, you know a lot more about the prospect than you would have with sending them the articles directly. The prospect has shown some interest in resolving a pain they are currently experiencing. You will want to qualify them further with carefully crafted qualifying questions. We use SalesScripter .com to develop qualifying questions. In fact, the web-based and self-paced program allows you to get good qualifying questions and a whole lot more. It will even help you identify the prospect’s pain.
Step #5 – Develop FAQ’s
You may already have an FAQ section on your website. At the least, you can think about the questions asked by most of your clients before they made the decision to purchase your product or service.
Use the FAQ’s as the basis of a second email campaign. Any prospect that is not qualified enough by the questions you asked when you called them can be sent emails to guide them along your sales process without any pressure from you.
We’ve covered a lot of territory in this short article. It may be hard to digest in this small amount of space. To learn more, please take advantage of our Business Growth webinar series at http://www.salesnexus.com/sales-growth-webinar-series/
Buyers are different these days. They want to stay in control of every step of the buying process. This system allows the buyer ultimate control. It saves you lots of time and money chasing down unqualified leads and offers a huge return on investment.
Isn’t ROI what you really want after all?
Craig is the founder of SalesNexus.com, a leading provider of CRM, Email Marketing and Lead Generation solutions to business 2 business sales teams.
