Although the ultimate goal of every business owner is to generate sales and increase their revenue, your focus shouldn’t be on sales. If you become obsessed with making sales, you might miss out on an important business development process. Instead, your attention should be shifted to building a system that continually sends you qualified leads that you can educate, engage and delight, then turn them into loyal customers of your products or services.
As a business owner, one of the most important steps you can take to build a profitable brand is setting up an effective sales funnel that can continue to fill your sales pipeline with leads, even while you are sleeping. As you may have already noticed, getting qualified leads is crucial to the success of any funnel or system you might be building.
In this article, you will learn how to fill your sales pipeline with high quality leads and how to turn prospects into customers.
But before we get into that, let’s answer some quick questions:
What Is A Lead?
A lead is someone who has indicated an interest in a product or service that you provide. Having a consistent inflow of leads is essential for sustainable business growth. This is the first step in the sales process. Thus, you should focus on creating strategic marketing campaigns that help you attract leads and turn them into prospects.
What Is Lead Generation?
According to Hubspot, Lead generation is the process of attracting and converting strangers and prospects into someone who has indicated interest in your company’s product or service. Some examples of lead generators are job applications, blog posts, coupons, live events, and online content.
Lead generation provides you deep insights into who your prospects truly are and what they want. This makes it easier for you to demonstrate how your product or service can serve them. For many businesses, it isn’t quite difficult to identify lead opportunities, the real challenge has always been nurturing the leads into actual customers.
Quality Over Quantity
Although it is important to generate leads at scale, priority should always be given to attracting quality leads. A lot of businesses are filling their sales pipeline with low quality leads because they are marketing to the wrong people. If you have a lot of leads and you are struggling to turn them into customers then something is definitely wrong, and needs to be addressed.
ONE simple hack to attract high quality leads is conducting comprehensive market research before building a funnel or launching any marketing campaigns. The first step is learning about your ideal customers and gaining an insight into their pain points. When you figure out who really needs your product or service, and what their struggles are, it becomes easier to market to them. Now, you know who they are and where they hang out. This helps you decide what marketing channel is the best to reach them, and how to build a marketing campaign and messaging that is both effective and results-driven.
Now that you know how to attract qualified leads, how do you nurture them into actual customers? That’s exactly what you will learn in the next section.
How To Nurture Your Leads & Convert Them Into Customers Easily
Online Content: Once someone has indicated interest in your product or service, the next step is sustaining their interest in your business. This is one of the effective ways to inform and educate someone about the solutions your business provides.
You can create online content such as blog articles, educational or how-to-videos, and social content, which tie into your unique selling propositions (USPs), to keep them educated about your products or services. This is one effective way to be in the face of your prospects without being a nuisance. Inform. Educate. Delight.
Email Marketing: This is another effective strategy to connect with prospects and interact with them on a personal level. You can create a series of emails with specific messages designed to address specific needs or questions of your leads at the initial stages in the buyer’s journey. The type of emails you send out in each campaign should be determined by the awareness level they are in. Additionally, consider drip email campaigns to automate this workflow. Some of the best email marketing platforms on the market today are: Klavio, GetResponse, MailChimp, and Constant Contact.
White Papers: White Papers are considered to be the most influential form of business collateral and 76% of people have used white papers as part of their decision making efforts. You can share your thoughts on a particular complex issue in your industry, and provide guidance on how a business can navigate things for their benefit.. Doing this will help you open doors to new sales opportunities without any extra efforts.
Final Thoughts
Focusing on leads instead of sales is one of the important mindset shifts you can have as a business owner when looking to scale your business. Yes, sales are the lifeblood of every business, but what is equally important is building a system that increases your chances of getting consistent sales – and that is exactly what lead generation does, if done right. When you do things differently, you can finally stop worrying over when the next customer is coming because your sales team is now busy with sales calls and bringing you new customers on a consistent basis.
Focus on leads instead of sales and watch your business crush your revenue goals. It is really that simple!
Recent Comments