Rons How to I-Marketing

While most books on sales training or classes do a good job covering closing a sale, few cover sales leads.  Every sales process begins with generating leads, so the more you know about sales leads, the more profitable your small business can be. 

Can you count the number of leads you received over the past 30 days? The quality leads that are the most probable to end up in a sale are usually easy for people to name, but a great deal of other probably leads are actually lost each month. 

What’s the big deal?  Because a company spends so much time and money to get leads, the more you know about them, the more profitable the business will become.  And, wouldn’t it be worth it to use some of the things you learn about your leads to cut marketing costs or the time you spend getting leads? 

The first step is to establish a system to track identifying information about your lead generating activities.  Below are some questions to ask to get started: 

1. What is the main venue through which you get your leads? A “pre-lead” is really just a prospect, for example a website visitor or someone you shake hands with at a meet-up group.  Your job is to identify those venues you use to collect your prospects, such as trade shows, meet-up groups, advertising, or your website.

2. Next, what are the more particular sources your leads come from? Organic search, PPC, a specific networking event, another website, response to a blog post on someone else’s blog, or a specific advertising campaign are all examples of specific lead sources.

3. Last, what quality would you rank the leads you get from the sources you defined in the earlier steps?  The best way I have found to pinpoint this is to assign a percent value to each lead.  So, if a lead actually results in a sale, it receives a higher percentage value than one that expressed interest but didn’t get past the proposal stage.

Once you know where your best leads originate, you will find you are able to spend your marketing dollars and your time much more efficiently. 

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it simple to track your leads and conversion rates.