Start to fill your sales pipeline by attracting customers, targeted prospects. This can be achieved by providing information and services that these customers need to make decisions. This should be the objective of your sales lead generation platform.
Here is a simple framework to use in creating your first lead generation platform:
* Descriptive domain or URL
* Blog software
* Post keyword-based articles
* Add in interactive widgets (i.e., mortgage calculators)
* Highlight contact information
With this set-up you can, without any knowledge of SEO or web development, quickly get yourself into relevant Google search queries. Bringing in targeted customers to your organization with their searches. It will also validate and reinforce your other offline marketing efforts.
Learn the Sales Process Before Spending
The first reaction of most sales teams is to take the short-cut and start buying leads or traffic. The better approach is to learn to manage and generate Internet leads and then begin spending.
Online customers are different and require a different sales process. So, learn how how to build a sales process that converts first--then think about spending more marketing dollars.
Certainly at start-up your own online lead generation efforts are not going to flush your sales team full of leads. To make this work you will need to subsidize your own lead generation.
Start with some inexpensive Internet leads. Start you practice with low risk, this allows you to refine your sales and lead management process. You will find that Internet leads and high volume sales pipelines need to be managed differently.
Achieve Quality, Then Scale
Once you have your lead generation in place, learn to subsidize this flow by buying leads, and optimizing your lead management. This will build up your sales lead generation capability.
While carefully tracking your lead performance and profits, begin to improve the quality of those leads. Improve your own lead generation process as well as improve the leads you buy. Smartly scale your sales operations. To do this you need to closely monitor sale performance and metrics.
Be Creative
Once you have the basics down, you will get a steady flow of leads--start trying some more creative approaches. Test different lead generation techniques, alternate lead providers, and refined sales processes.
