Paying a 3rd party company up to $140 per lead. Any ideas on first steps to reducing cost or bringing the lead generation in house?

That's sales! ahah! I can't count the amount of times I have thought someone was a perfect fit to move forward to learn they are just tire kickers... and some that seemed to be a long shot that closed. If it is not happening frequently then you can stack it up as a anomaly - however that never feels satisfying. What you need to do is look at your sales pipeline and try to understand where things went wrong. Now the best way to find this out is simply ask that lead... Noone really likes to do this, but it works. If you know they have decided to go a different direction then reach out to them with a follow up email to wish them all the best, let them know that if anything changes you will still be there and most importantly use it as an opportunity to ask them why they decided not to move forward with you. Ask what you as a business can do in the future to remedy it! Now if they have fallen off a cliff and you can not get a response you will have to look at your sales pipeline and try to identify similarities between these lost deals that you can improve. This is why it is super important to leverage a CRM.

This is a good question, thank you for asking it. I'm sure there are many business owners and newbie entrepreneurs who constantly wake up with the sweats trying to make ends meet by increasing their lead generation, strengthen their pipeline, and increase conversions. At the end of the day, it's all about converting, right? I'll give you what I consider a basic guideline for building a pipeline of good reliable high-quality leads that are easier to convert. We use this methodology for our clients and for our own marketing agency. www.Unthink.me is just a 4 people team with a few contractors helping us on certain projects but the structure that I have created for ourselves is what allows us to work with only certain clients we like and the ability to charge as low or high as we want. For context, we have clients that pay as low as $100 per month and some that several thousand and that is because we get a lot of client requests and proposals, etc. Let me start by saying that you are right and wrong at the same time. Many very large, publicly traded, tech companies rely heavily on cold-calling while mailing is still king for certain industries. Here is a basic methodology guideline you should consider and keep top of mind with any effort you put out there for lead generation or customer facing effort. Voted Best Personality 1. Don't forget that people, humans, work in these companies. If you are able to truly understand what you sell, the value, the critical pain points it solves (with no fluff or ego boosting mentality) you should be able to clearly identify who will get the most value out of what you offer in any company you plan to target, or industry for that matter. You should also be able to understand their needs and their goals. As you decide on campaigns, pitches, offers, products, pricing, and placement this insight will determine better decisions and better outcome. Present yourself in a way that they can relate to, in a context they appreciate and with a medium they enjoy. Clarity On Them 2. Have a stupidly clear positioning statement if you want your prospect commercial clients to pay attention, remember what you have to offer and give you the benefit of the doubt to prove yourself first. At the end of the day, when you get a contract with another company - you are simply given the opportunity to prove yourself and continue the relationship. By starting with a clear and simple positioning statement you give yourself the opportunity for questions, curiosity, and most importantly branding consistency - imagine that everywhere your prospect sees or hears about you, they are exposed to the exact same pitch or statement about what you do for companies like theirs... It's powerful! * Position is the actual value service of what you sell, while the positioning statement is the pitch you use in every medium. Start with a good, potentially viable and scalable position with a niche industry or market and particular use and try to own that before you want to expand your position on a broader market (this is off the Blue Ocean Strategy approach, I follow). Hit'em Where They Ain't 3. Segwaying from the last statement, having a good position and statement will only work if you know where to go pitch right? Again, it's all about reducing those lead costs while increasing conversion rate off the pipeline. For that, you need to be where others are not. Your competitors may not be as sophisticated as you are, maybe they have grown some unorthodox way or maybe they are as clever as you and maybe more. So try to win a battle without having to fight directly with your competitors for clients through pricing, innovation for innovation sake and find both losing the fight through loss profits, lack of attention and clarity and your clients getting all the rewards while you slave yourself to a sinking ship. Instead, spend time doing your homework on what different industries use your service or product for, what other companies might need what you offer, where would this companies' leaders congregate (their watering holes)? Go present yourself there, in the lesser known niche markets, the lesser known watering holes. Thought: You could try to fight and bleed your company's profit for 1% of a large generic market pie, or you can go after a smaller less understood pie elsewhere and with a lot less long term effort you could own 100% of that small pie. Educate 4. At Unthink, we use Hubspot, a content led generation tool for marketers. We handle other Hubspot client accounts. When it comes to building a B2B pipeline you will heavily depend on content and education more so than advertising budget to constantly bombard and interrupt someone's feed on social media or Google Search. If you invest in creating education content that proves you are a market leader and product expert with the best interest of everyone at heart you will be more likely to be liked and trusted when someone needs your type of product or service. We Hubspot because it enables to produce great content and manage our pipeline, but don't be fooled - in itself it does not help generate the content nor drive leads simply provides tools to create and manage them... Whether you use a paid or free tool, create content and educate as much as you can. Once you know who your customer is, where they hang out and the pie you want to go after then you should know what type of content they want and you can create it for them. * Think about it, me writing here gives me content ideas and allows me to position myself well through a non-invasive channel while providing actionable guides to others. Strategy Is Not King 5. This pains me to admit, after all I am an MBA Strategist and have been helping many startups as a stealth partner or advisor exactly on strategy - how to compete more efficiently. But it's actually my years of experience that force me to admit that the most brilliant of strategies can be outperformed by someone who can execute passionately. While I have also seen great strategies fail due to lack of execution, testing, or any other marginally expected effort. thought: A lot of B2B marketers/owners rely heavily on the idea that if they belittle others or make themselves look like experts or promote their years in business or experience that it's enough. And it's not. Client's could care less about your experience or expertise - again people like doing business with people. Show your scars, leverage failed projects as ice breakers on email campaigns or on social media, stop pretending your company is perfect and show your bad reviews too! Strategy Is Queen 6. It may not be king, but it is definitely Queen and at least in my house, Queen rules. A strategy will dictate where your efforts go and how much of them. After all, why would you invest all into something if you have no clue as to how much potential it has or how difficult it is to sustain? There are various strategies for conversion such as the lesser logic (www.BetaBulls.com for example, starting to promote that their code is good enough for fighter jets but amazing for corporate needs). Or the Recency Effect which might drive an accounting service like www.BluePearlTax.com to heavily look for startups who are being audited or need to pay back taxes so that they can help them reduce or eliminate their financial responsibility. Something that just happened and has a huge impact in our lives has an incredible potential for driving us towards buying or trying something we wouldn't otherwise. Leverage the recency effect if you can when you can and drive it with a no-brainer value proposition without assuming people will be smart enough to see the value - instead clearly state it for them. Also deciding whether maybe your business as is now or for ROI purposes if you would benefit from being the Good Enough option? If you take the good enough option, your prices should most typically be lower than the best alternate, wider known brand, but not as low as the one scraping and fighting on price - instead you position your company as a human, person led company that has its struggles, its potential and its dedication towards the end user and what you lack elsewhere you make up for in commitment and price driving up the value. Sometimes people look for good enough but many companies struggle to position themselves as the best or cheapest that they forget the middle grounds making the decision that much harder for these type of consumers which delays the pipeline build and the conversion into leads and then into customers. Maybe your pie (whatever niche in a market you chose) can be owned by being the good enough option? I will give you an example using our team, Unthink is becoming widely known as the most helpful agency. Since we have clients worldwide we figured we would leverage this because being helpful translates into any language and culture. We also clearly state through our communications that we let our clients negotiate their monthly budget which allows us to bring big business tools and experts to small growing companies. We break these branding statements because another thing to consider with anyone is that the more you say the less people hear. Especially when it's about yourself and not for them. This messaging has allowed us to constantly get new client requests, the opportunity to prove our worth no matter the budget, and the transparency that companies (people) ask for when they are hoping to make a connection with a partner who is invested in their success as much as their own. This has an added perk of clients reaching out and talking to us when they aren't happy instead of publicly shaming or simply instantly cutting us off. Typically their unhappiness is a matter of a simply missed communication and our clients average at around 2 years with us until we have either built something sustainable or it's out of our scope of interest. I hope this has been helpful if you would like I would really appreciate your follow in any of our platforms. Get in touch and stay engaged. www.Facebook.com/iWillUnthink https://twitter.com/OfficialUnthink https://www.facebook.com/groups/MySmallBusinessResource/ - Humberto Valle #Unthink

I think Facebook is great for really targeting your audience and you’re on the right track. But I think you can have a better funnel than that. I find, for getting better conversion today, it is better to get your Facebook traffic off of Facebook as fast as you can to your offer and into your funnel. It is more effective for driving actual sales. If you’re just looking for social branding etc. then your funnel might be ok. A very effect strategy is to create either a video or report that you give away to your audience in exchange for an email. It should be something that helps solve or bring to light the problems patients are suffering from and how to go about solving them. Then mention how having a great Chiropractor can solve all of that and can be the most effective way to get ride of the pain. I would also have some things in there that would help them in other ways. Then I would send them to an event or webinar with your top Chiropractor and you in an interview / reveal-all type webinar to educate your lead and manage their fears of going to a Chiropractor. You could tell them that the first step is making an appointment for an assessment. You should make it easy for them to find the best and most effective Chiropractor in their area. You might have a discount on the assessment only available to them for being on the webinar to get them to sign up at the end of the webinar. By the way, once this is recorded, you can make this evergreen so you don't have to do a webinar all the time. As long as you are reaching more and new people with your Facebook campaign you won’t have to change the video all the time.

Once you have people signed up to make an appointment, make sure they are also putting a deposit of a 100 dollars or something down. This will increase your show rate for the Chiropractors. Then give them a voucher for that Chiropractor, for more than you’re asking for at the deposit for services, to use with that Chiropractor. Allowing you to prevent cancelations etc. so that their getting their money back in the form of a voucher for services which, by the way, is not a discount and shouldn’t diminishing your Chiropractors Rates. This strategy I have used in several markets that has produced more prequalified leads and patients / customers. Remember to test, track and know your metrics. You’re going to need to make some tweaks in the beginning, but this can be very effective for you. So to recap: 1. Setup a landing page with your offer in exchange for an offer. You can build this in software like Leadpages.net or Megaphoneapp.com 2. Make your offer downloadable if an ebook or white paper or present your video after. I recommend using Wistia instead of YouTube for playback as you will be able to have heat maps of your video to know where your fall off points are. You can also make this page with the software mentioned above. 3. Use an email autoresponder to engage your lead and email them about the event you’re doing after they had time to read or download your materials. Or, if a video, I would just pitch them at the end with a link below the video to automatically register. 4. Put on a webinar with your guest using either GoToWebinar or Google hangouts if you know how to set that up. 5. Make sure you have your appointment getting page with your the down payment created. You can use several different type of scheduling services so you can automatically deliver the lead/ appointment to the chiropractor. To Note: The reason I don’t send the visitor to the webinar first is because it is better to get the visitor predisposed to your information before asking them to commit to a webinar and when you do it the way I played out, you will have a much better show rate. This is it in a nutshell. Obviously there is more to it. If you need another funnel idea I am hear to help. I have used other effective strategies in the past to also make money on the front end to make your advertising free. It just depends on what you want to do and how advanced you want to get. Hope this helps give you some ideas. :) If you need help implementing something like this just let me know.

Not totally clear on what you are asking, but if the questions is; does giving out a referral code to an existing user in hopes that they would refer another work? My experience (largely in B2B software) is not all that well, at least not without some sort of incentive. Even if your user is super satisfied with the product/service you are providing, simply giving them a code to give another person doesn't necessarily drive them to make the handoff. Now, two things. First, if you either incentivize the existing user with say a discount on his next bill or a free goodie, then he'll be more likely to do it... Even better, if you do that, plus give the referred user some kind of benefit, like a discount on his first bill, free trial or other goody, then it can work rather well. Second, all that said, know that referrals in general are gold. You should test and do whatever you can to get referrals. Generally @Leads360 we found that providing really high quality customer service (more so than even the best product) lead to referrals. To that point, our sales people worked in tandem with customer service in this way. Whenever a CS person realized they gave a great customer experience they would let the sales person know and they would then reach out to that customer while still warm from the nice touch and simply ASK for a referral. I was always surprised when we could get referrals simply by asking. I like to stick with 1 referral at a time, just ask for 1 person to be email connected with, don't overwhelm them with the statement "hey, can you refer your friends and colleagues to us", be specific. Something like "I see on LinkedIn you're connected with John B from ACME corp, I'd really like to speak with him about our product, would be willing to make an introduction for me".

Given that you are marketing your ability to build websites and mobile apps, your website lacks a lot of credibility as compared to other vendors offering similar services. A few specific examples: Links to what might be apps that your firm has previously built, link to almost illegible screenshots of appstore listings. This shows poor design decisions and raises significant concerns about why you chose to do this. Too much text that says nothing. There is a lot of text throughout your site that for all of its verbosity doesn't give much detail about what you do, why you're the best at it, and why you should be trusted. No customer testimonials. This is a big red flag. Generally, the website does nothing to inspire confidence that your firm is a quality provider of the services you are offering. I would suggest you focus on simplifying your website significantly, emphasizing whatever recent projects you have done where your customers are willing to offer written testimonials, and link directly to the sites and/or mobile apps.