Best Practices to Convert Prospects into Leads

For anyone who isn’t familiar with the fable of “The Pied Piper,” it’s about a town called Hamelin that dealt with a horrible infestation of rats. To rid the town of the vermin, a piper who dressed in bright red clothing played his pipe to lure the rats into the river.

A company that can play the instrument of lead generation is much like the Pied Piper. All that’s required is the know-how to learn. A healthy combination of targeted content, email campaigns, display ads, webinars, social media, and keywords make a beautiful song that consumers will follow. This will lead to a larger audience and increased bottom line.

It’s a Busy, Busy Online World

With everything transforming and becoming digital, the online world is busier than Grand Central Station. To navigate your way, it’s essential to understand how various programs complement each other. An opportunity to convert prospects into leads only exists when you know what to capitalize on.

Because people have more options than ever, you need to create an effective strategy that will lead consumers to your business over another. Enter, lead nurturing, an optimal process that differentiates your company from competitors by following up with consumers until they are ready to buy.

For example, when you think of a visit to a car dealership, odds are the car salesman will attempt to put you in a new car that day. If you walk away, you’ll get a call the next day to follow up on your experience…then again the next week to tell you about a new model you might like. The car salesman will follow up with you until you’re ready, and because of his persistence, he already has your business.

In essence, that’s what lead nurturing is. Only online, follow ups are done through emails, targeted ads, and newsletters. Determining where your customers are on the buying spectrum allows you to engage them in a meaningful way that will ultimately lead to a decision to work with you when the time is right.

You already have some of the insight you need if you have a blog or social media platform because you can physically see the types of content people engage with. Use this to tap into people’s behavior and patterns, and produce more of what your potential customers want. This will establish trust and build a strong relationship that leads to, well, leads.

Start Your Lead Generation Journey

Because you already have some of the insight you need and the ability to tap into people’s behavior and patterns, you have the advantage of fully understanding the needs of your consumers and building on those relationships. Your relationship begins at the first engagement they make with your brand. From there, it’s all about nurturing that relationship, much how you would tend to a garden. By properly caring for your relationship with consumers, you’ll deepen your intuition of what works and what doesn’t while converting initial consumers into life-long customers.

First, though, it’s important to understand what your consumer is thinking when they first land on your website or brand. Initially they will look for a source of credibility. How reliable are you? What kinds of services do you offer and how well are they performed? Provide details of positive testimonials so you can speak to any concerns before a consumer moves on to another company.

Additionally, they are wondering how your services will benefit them, and if you offer short-term or long-term solutions. Along with that, they will wonder how much they need you, which is where cost often pops up as a potential hindrance. If you’re costly, speak to that by playing up your value and how it’s unlike any other competitor in the space.

If you know what your consumers are asking before they even have a chance to ask themselves, you can beat them to the punch by addressing those concerns. Write about the value of your business and the benefits of working together. Assurance is the best way to quell any concerns and gain trust.

Choose Your Words Carefully

Once a consumer is interested, you have the power to make them stay, or the power to make them leave. How you handle the next level of interaction is up to you, and it’s the place where most companies lose consumers.

The best way to further your relationships with potential clients is lead nurturing, as discussed above. Content is oftentimes the most premier way to deepen those relationships because you can positively and effectively use your words to grab people’s attentions.

Suggested ways are through consistent blog posts, social media updates, and monthly newsletters. This gives your business presence and staying power in a consumer’s mind. You can showcase your brand as an industry thought leader and a true source of industry knowledge.

Create Long-Term Customers

Lead nurturing isn’t about pitching or selling, it’s about becoming a helpful companion that consumers trust. Once you gain a buyer’s trust, you gain their business. And once you gain their business, you gain their future business. The common misconception about lead generation is that it’s cyclical–it’s not a one-off transaction.

5 Ways To Encourage Innovation In The Workplace

Smart leaders know they have to maintain a competitive edge within their industries in order to sustain their slice of the marketplace pie. It remains essential, therefore, that a business continually improves what it offers and how it operates.

The two most important questions on a leader’s mind are always:

• How do we increase the benefits we offer our clients, and
• How can we improve our operations?

Successful business leaders are constantly looking for ways to improve their products and services, and simultaneously streamline production costs. This is no easy feat and takes continual monitoring, yet this is the equation for building success.

But ideas for improvement that lead to success don’t just happen–it takes a concerted effort to encourage innovation from your staff. So how does a leader encourage innovation in the workplace?

1. Encourage alternative points of view.

Yes, there’s usually more than one way to solve a problem, but it becomes more beneficial to find the most efficient and cost-effective way. Cognitive diversity in the workplace is a healthy attribute. Looking at different options to address issues and different ways of completing tasks can keep a workplace vibrant and more open to new ideas.

2. Inspire people to voice their opinions.

Eighty percent of creative new ideas come from your employees on the front line; less than 20 percent of business innovation is generated from members of the C-Suite. The question on employees’ minds should always be, “How can we do things better and how can we provide better services to our customers?” If you are willing to take the advice of employees when they suggest how they can improve operations, there will be a noticeable increase of new ideas.

3. Model and promote fearless behaviour.

If you want employees to feel safe trying out new ideas in the workplace, they need to be assured that any mistakes they may make while testing new ideas will not cause a backlash for them. The best way to get a workforce comfortable to take risks is to model the way. Your employees will be more willing to take risks with their ideas if you communicate when you have tried something and it didn’t turn out as expected.

Mistakes provide opportunities for learning and making more informed decisions in the future. Open communication promoting the idea there should be no fear in making a mistake will encourage employees to be more willing to test their ideas, and an innovative mindset will begin to take hold.

4. Consider continual improvement one of the company’s core values.

List continual improvement as one of the foundational values upon which your company operates. Show examples of how continuous improvement has been incorporated throughout the organization—from product design through operating procedures. This attitude should be pervasive throughout the business.

5. Reward innovative ideas.

When employees introduce ideas that are incorporated into the company’s operations and services, recognize their efforts. Public recognition in the company’s newsletter or in employee meetings goes a long way in motivating people to voice their suggestions. Holding employee contests to incorporate new ideas is another way to create a team attitude within the company. People will go the extra mile when they feel respected and recognized.

Start The Sales Year Off Right: How To Reach Your Sales Goals

Maybe your last year was a great one–or maybe you’re glad to see it go. Start the year with new strategies to reach your sales goals, and to make the new year a success.

What are you not going to do?

I always think of Albert Einstein at the beginning of every new year. Is it because he had the formula for selling more? Not exactly. He did have a great understanding of what it takes to get better results. He said, “Doing the same things over again and expecting different results is insanity.” I agree. To get better sales results you have to stop doing the things that don’t work for you.

In order to stop doing something, you have to realize what is not working. For example, I find that too many salespeople kid themselves by thinking the prospects they’re talking to are actually going to buy. Another way they kid themselves is by not specifically defining the ideal prospect and comparing those specs to every prospect included in their new year’s objectives.

Think big.

I worked with a salesman who was only comfortable calling on small accounts. The idea of calling on larger accounts terrified him; however, he was never going to meet his sales goals by thinking small. In fact, his company was going to have to let him go. I was called in to work with him to improve his skills and get the results the company wanted.

Don’t be like him. Are you afraid of making sales calls on a specific type of customer? What’s holding you back? You’ll need to work just as hard getting business from a smaller account as you would from a larger business.

Seek strategy advice from another successful salesperson if you can’t move forward, or ask your sales manager for help, if your manager is a good mentor. Start by identifying larger accounts that could be potential prospects, then discuss what your goal is. Ask your sales manager to accompany you on a few sales calls to debrief your work as well as to offer help during the call.

Just be sure you are taking the lead in the sales call. It’s your job to sell, not your manager’s job. He’s there to support you only.

Every new year offers a fresh start. That clean slate may be just enough to motivate you to do what it takes to be even more successful this year. If it’s not, remember what Einstein said: you must do something different to expect to get other results.