95% of marketing is about what happens after you get the sales lead.
As business owners, we often place a disproportionate amount of emphasis on the importance of lead generation. Yes, it’s great to get lots of people clicking, filling in forms and enquiring. But it’s important to be clear, a click is hardly any commitment at all, and a sales lead, a web form, a free trial sign up, even an inbound phone call, is still a very fragile, fleeting level of interest.
Once you have the permission from an individual to tell them more about your product or service, you have a golden opportunity. You have the chance to build that, ‘OK, I’m listening’ moment into a genuine connection. Now is the time to come alive, to stand out, to give a dazzling account of yourself.
Most businesses, however, will follow up a sales leads with a phone call or two, maybe an email if they can’t get through. If there doesn’t seem to be an immediate sale on the cards, the lead is often left to go cold. As a professional marketer, I see first hand how much time, money and effort goes into generating just one sales lead.
The costs can easily run into hundreds per lead. Letting them quietly slip away is simply not an option.
Put it this way, if you were convicted of a crime you didn’t commit and you could to jail for a long time, would invest some serious time and money building a case? Of course! You would collect irrefutable proof that it couldn’t have been you. You wouldn’t just fire off an email or make the odd phone call. You would commit.
Great marketing is simply the process of building an overwhelming case to buy your product or service. Delight people. Don’t let your competition get a look in. Invest in the tools you need to convince people to become customers. Remember that all anyone has to go on, before they become a customer, is what you tell them and the materials you give them.
“It’s simply a matter of making more effort than anyone else would dream of making.”
Just imagine, if, the day after somebody fills in your web form, they received a box through the post packed with free gifts, case studies, product guides, testimonials, free samples and a handwritten note from you, introducing yourself. What effect do you think that would have on your conversion rate?
And if after you make as much effort as possible, the prospect still doesn’t respond, simply then keep them in your database for regular, lighter touch marketing every month or two. You never know when their interest will reignite and the key is to be top of mind when that happens.
Put simply, if your sales leads aren’t converting into customers, then maybe you just haven’t built your case strongly enough.
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