Harvesting Your Leads

One of the really tough things that many sales people hate is cold calling. Its probably even worse for entrepreneurs who often come from a non-sales background.

Equally tough is to gain the attention of your target market- with the thousands of marketing messages bombarding them each and every day.

So once you’ve got through to them, engaged in verbal or written conversation, and at least got past the automatic ‘No’ - you need to make sure that you stay in contact with them.

The likelihood that anybody buys from you at the first contact is very low. The quoted number of ‘touches’ that need to take place is anything from 6 to 20 contacts/communications ( in one form or another) before you are likely to get a sale.

Offline Businesses’ Tools

The implementation of SFA (Sales Force Automation) and CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems in many offline businesses is specifically because companies want to improve their tracking of communications that have been established with prospects. Relying on human memory and discipline to keep following through for the 20 touches is leaving too much to chance. The more sophisticated tools allow you to capture multi-step lead conversion processes, so that your sales staff are reminded at predetermined intervals to keep following up with your prospects - improving significantly your chances of closing a sale.

Online Businesses Use The ‘Name Squeeze’

In a similar fashion, web marketers are also trying to build relationships with their target markets. On many sites, the ‘Name Squeeze’ method is applied - where a simple page is presented to first time visitors - and you need to surrender your name and email address before you can gain access to the main content of the site. Sometimes free reports or ebooks are offered as additional incentives - just to get the prospects name and contact details.

Once you’ve given up your name:

• free courses,
• sample chapters of ebooks,
• free ebooks,
• trial access to membership sites

are amongst the range of offers made - either immediately or via followup emails - all geared to building the relationship and trust between you and the marketer.

How To Effectively Harvest Your Leads

To ensure that you do not squander warm prospects, you need to ensure that you have most - if not all - of the following elements in place:

• A means of capturing the names of all prospects. This simple recommendation poses some challenges:
  • Online visitors often give a ‘throwaway’ email address to avoid being spammed in future
  • Offline businesses don’t have adequate systesms to capture prospect details quickly at all touchpoints. Staff often offer to find things out for prospects - writing the details down in little notebooks and pieces of paper - and then fail to follow up - because there are no systems in place to remind them of their commitments.
• A software-supported followup system. Once again, there are significant differences between online and offline businesses:
  • Online businesses have it pretty easy with this one. Autoresponders (sequenced email followup systems) often come with the web hosting package at no extra charge. It merely takes a few minutes to type in a few mailing sequences, and these will then be automatically posted off at the designated time intervals after the initial ‘NameSqueeze’ details are captured.
  • The offline equivalents are SFA or CRM systesm - which can cost a small fortune to implement, and requires a lot of staff training to entrench the discipline of capturing and following up on prospects. Once again, sequences can be captured - but in this case they mostly involve prompting staff to interact with their prospects at predetermined intervals. The reliance on human action obviously can lead to the sequence being broken.
• Use the first few contacts with each prospect to prequalify the prospects.

Dan Kennedy in particular feels strongly about prequalifying prospects before too much ‘face time’ is spent with the prospect. He suggests using prerecorded messages as one method whereby the prospect is provided with information about the product and service, and the typical price range / terms of doing business are provided.

Why this is a powerful recommendation is that if the prospect continues investigating your solution, he/she is doing it with full understanding of the cost implications. There is no need to discount prices heavily when trying to close the sale - as the price has been known from the early stages of the engagement.

Another marketing consultant, Alex Mandossian, an alternative way of dealing withh initial contacts with prospects. He offers free telephone consulting for one morning each week. The deal is that you can call him to discuss a problem. After half an hour, Alex reminds you that your half hour is up, from now on you are ‘on the clock’. If you choose to continue the discussion, not only is the next half hour billable, but the first as well, as you have indicated by your willingness to continue that you are getting benefit from the consultation.

• Make the initial offers / follow-ups as low risk as possible for your prospect

  Irrespective of whether you are an offline or online business, you can use a variety of ways to build the trust with your prospect to make the eventual sales merely a matter of time. Providing your prospect with:

  • Magazine / ezine articles on areas of interest whenever you come across them
  • Free book or ebook
  • Trail or free software
  • Notification of upcoming seminars

  all provide you with opportunities to stay in contact with your prospect, and therefore build the relationship. Information that you gather during this stage could help you with an up sell or cross sell when the prospect converts to a client.

Note that if the relationship is building well, but budget or timing issues are delaying the sale, you can possibly use the established rapport to ask for some referrals - as they might be in a different buying cycle. Strive as much as possible to provide high value - preferably information - products and services that don’t consume a lot of your time.

• Make sure you regularly ask for the sale

Without being too pushy, don’t neglect to regularly ask for the sale. When your prospect starts asking for personal attention / custom advice, its time to convert them from interested to committed. Some prospects will quitely happily use your services and time - when they don’t have to pay for it. If they balk at converting to a paying client, think carefully about how much more time you spend on them - they could become a problem, low profitability customer if they have resist paying for the value you provide.