KONA LEAD GENERATION ACTION PLAN AND GUIDE

What can I do to generate more leads with my business?

Good quality leads ultimately mean money and more sales. They are the key metric of how well your marketing is performing. Businesses need a regular and reliable flow of new leads to remain healthy. In a recent survey that we read (late 2013) only 1in 10 marketers believed that they had effective lead generation processes or an effective lead generation system in their businesses.

Lead Generation System

Unfortunately more and more power now resides in buyers control. They can bypass your marketing and sales people and arrive at the selection of a provider or solution before ever making the first contact with a provider. So your approach to lead generation needs to be sharper and more in alignment with your buyers priorities and research processes than ever before. Here’s how to do it. Firstly all lead generation activity needs to be thought of as part of a defined and documented set of processes. A successful lead generation engine can only be built, optimised and fine-tuned by knowing, and measuring, the key steps in each lead generation process. Broadly speaking lead generation engines have four sub-processes that are tightly connected to each other.

Attract

To begin attracting your ideal prospects and convincing them to take the first step with you ask the question: Where do my ideal prospects look? Not where do they look for you but where do they look for the solutions to the problems that you help them solve? This means of course that you need to have a crystal clear understanding of what the burning problems are that you can solve for your ideal prospects and also how you solve them. Also be aware that there are some subtle, and some not so subtle, differences between why people look in different places. As an example: A search engine user tends to be either in a problem/solution mindset or in a getting ready to buy mindset. Either they have a problem and they are searching for solutions. Or they have found the solution and are looking for suitable providers of that solution. A blog reader is usually in a news getting or learning frame of mind. They are exploring a subject that interests them but they are not necessarily seeking the solution to a burning problem. An email reader is usually in a “let’s be productive” or a “I wonder what’s up with Frank” or a “what’s entertaining to take my mind off what I’m meant to be doing” mindset. Social media site readers(Facebook, Twitter etc.) are either looking for entertainment or some fun or some juicy gossip. Yellow Pages or True Local browsers are looking for a local provider of service X that they need. This list is not comprehensive nor obviously does it apply to everyone using each of those medium. However you get the point that depending upon where you find your ideal prospect, your message will have to have the right tone and the right context to attract them. Also have a look at what your competitors and are doing to attract prospects – not to copy them as they may not have thought through their lead generation very thoroughly. Do this to build up a picture of the competitive landscape.

Offer

Offers can be education, product trials, diagnostics, samples of service etc. Always presented in compelling way. The critical thing here is not to fall into the cheesy or lazy “buy me now, buy me now” category. It is easy to slap together an offer than gets rejected as irrelevant or way too ‘salesy’ or too pushy. In the past you could sometimes get away with this. But now we are all surrounded by marketing messages and lead generation offers. Each of us has become much more discriminating about what messages and offers are allowed through our “protect me from sales people” filters. This is true at work as well as at home. The starting point to crafting your offer is to think through “if I were in the shoes of one of my prospects what are the burning issues and questions that I would want to have answered ?” In the case of KONA Group one of those burning questions in the minds of many of our ideal prospects is “how can I generate more leads – reliably and regularly?” The document you are currently reading is one of our answers to that question and you received it by responding to an offer that we crafted. You will find nothing in this document trying to sell you anything and you will find nothing in this document to buy. The critical thing to take away from this is that you will find that the best performing offers give your best content to your ideal prospects freely. No obligation and no pitch to sell anything. Your offer can be to give information, a product trial, a free diagnostic or free inspection, or educational material. The key, once more, is what does your prospect really want? Find this out and put it at the core of your offer. For more information, contact Michael Butler on info@kona.com.au or 1300 611 288 See you next week for part 2