I want to get salespeople in place that will contact these connections. I'm curious to know how other places have reached their clients.
Lead generation is very important - more importantly, being aware of what works best to keep a steady stream of leads coming in to the top of your sales funnel. There are a number of ways to ensure you have leads, but before you get there, it's important that you understand your customer. By creating a thorough persona for your customers, you will have a better idea of how to reach them and what to say to them.
After this foundation is set, there are many different lead generation techniques you can employ. Usually this will involve a content strategy and lead nurture approach that will keep your company top of mind for the moment your lead is ready to convert to a sale. Additionally, by having a content plan, you can give your sales team the support they need when making those connections.
I would be happy to talk with you to better understand your business and help you by laying out a lead generation and lead nurture plan.
Hope this is helpful!
Thanks
-JL
Hi!
Lead generation is vital for many businesses to keep going and get a steady amount of revenues.
But it should not be the first thing to think about.
The first thing to think about is always related to your customers. And that's why the creation of the user personas is helpful to understand more about them.
Using empathy maps is a good exercise (I suggest you to use this exercise with different members of the team) to really understand more about the feelings, desires, problems that your potential customers have. And that will help to communicate with them in a better way.
After that you can think of better ways to attract leads. There are different ways and some can work better than others. Some examples are:
- Google Ads (search and display campaigns)
- SEO
- Social media
- Online communities
- Word of mouth
The important thing for each of these platforms is to create content that can be interesting for your audience and can help them to solve the problems that they have.
I hope this can give a general idea of the possibilities offered by online marketing.
I am always happy to answer other questions that you might have!
Cheers,
Giacomo
The launching of a shop on software development is synonymous to starting a business, keep in mind the following ways to generate software development leads:
1. Targeted and Personalised Email Marketing: Traditionally, email marketing is easy process to generate leads for any business provided you have right verified contact database with you. As this is easy approach, most of the businesses take this approach and execute it. In my experience, most of the businesses do not do this correctly and generate more problems for their brands like domain blacklisting, marked as spam, making prospects angry etc. These are serious problems and should be tackled with right strategy to target prospects, who may want to do business, with personalised messaging. If executed well and nurtured well, email marketing will offer 1000% ROI on your investments in quick time. It can be a real winner.
2. Business Website and Social Profiles: In my experience and research, I have found that many companies do not pay much attention to their website and social profiles. This sounds like a too much effort, but this should be treated as long term strategy to build your brand and start getting business in long term. This is Ultimate lead generation machine in long term. Following are some common problems I found: -
1. Website does not give clear messaging and have complex way to find relevant information for a prospect.
2. Social profiles and website messaging are not in sync.
3. Wrong promises are made on website which does not resonate well with prospects.
4. No unique value proposition is used
5. Showing no customer/Fake customer testimonials
6. Not having blogs or blogs are just general articles.
7. No clear flow or website and no/unclear call to action (CTAs)
Whatever approach you are using to generate leads, nowadays prospects research about vendors online and on digital properties. If messaging is not correct and consistent, then it will not leave good impression to prospects and they will not respond to you.
3. Social Media Outreach: Social media is good to know prospective companies and people responsible for various initiatives in those companies. It provides particularly good insights about a person and company. It is extremely easy to connect with those prospective people, collaborate with them, engage with them and do business with them on sites like LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook etc. Each social network offers different free and paid ways to connect with right prospects and service them. Before you take this approach, you need to have consistent and clear messaging for your business. You should have clear brand promise and how can a prospect get benefit from your product or services?
4. Freelancer Portals Lead Generation: Based on my research, many small and medium IT services business rely on freelance portals (like Upwork, AppFutura, Guru, GoLance etc) for their lead generation. These platforms provide targeted leads for your business, but these platforms are hyper competitive, and you may need to sell your services at less prices.
Because of hyper-competitiveness, these platforms require lots of effort to create, manage and build reputation on these platforms. Many businesses just spend more and more effort on these platforms to get business, but ROI of such investments are questionable.
5. Tele-Prospecting – Inside Sales – Sales Dev Reps (SDR): This is a most challenging and people dependent lead generation approach. This approach requires lots of focus, good people, good training and continuous monitoring and improvement to generate results. If executed well, this approach can be a game changer for your business. It can give you targeted clients who can stay with you for long term. Deal size for these clients would be bigger and you can command premium price if you can provide them solution they are looking.
6. Partnerships & Partner Portals: As world is getting digital day by day and freelance portals are having 100k+ vendors providing services. It is getting difficult for businesses to find right vendor for their needs. Hence last 2-3 years, there are mediator companies are coming with services to find, evaluate, screen and shortlist vendors on behalf of prospects and connect them. Companies like ContractIQ, Clutch, GoodFirms etc. As few people know about them, it is right time to find and connect with those companies and be on their panel. These partnerships may not result any immediate business but continuous nurturing with them will result a long-term sustainable business. In my experience, companies generate 5-10 qualified opportunities/month on such platforms.
7. Digital Advertisements: Google is pioneer when it comes to digital advertisements to drive leads to your business. 95% of prospects use search engines to find and evaluate vendors for their needs. Having on top of search results with appealing messaging will attract good quality leads for your business. These digital advertisements can be very costly if not executed well. This requires complete understanding of digital advertisements on a specific platform to improve your ROI. Following are some points you should keep in mind when using digital advertisements.
1. Identify transactional services/products which you want to sell. This works best on digital advertisements.
2. Identify your target prospect, their age, gender, geography, interest, behaviours. More you narrow, more specific you will get but make sure you have sizeable number to target.
3. Identify key pains/problems their target prospect face and research your keywords. Look at specifically how many searches happened for each keyword. This is really particularly important.
4. Design your ad copy with clear messaging and target pain point or benefit.
5. Have a well-designed responsive landing pages to land these prospects. Landing pages should offer brand promise with clear offering (transactional) and form or call to action to take next step.
6. Monitor performance and conversions for each ad-copy and landing pages and improve further.
8. Product Partnerships: An IT services can become partner with product companies they use to develop software solutions for their needs. These product companies have different partnership programs based on individual business needs. These partnerships will help you position your company’s product and services in front of your prospects. And they will feel confident about your expertise.
Some product companies also refer clients to you in your geography reason whom you can connect to train them, integrate product with other systems and customise it based on their requirements. This kind of partnerships requires focused effort to build relationships with product company’s representatives to get good ROI.
9. Awards, Brand endorsements & Join Local Communities: During your journey, it is good to collect as many strategic awards, affiliations and brand endorsements from 3rd party research companies, media platforms, and industry bodies. This helps you in building trust among your target prospects. You may also want to network and join local or niche communities to meet fellow vendors, prospects, and businesses. Such networking will help in spreading the word around and help you get more exposure and hence business. ROI of such investments/time is difficult to track but it will certainly help in building a solid brand for your business.
Besides if you do have any questions give me a call: https://clarity.fm/joy-brotonath
