21 Jul Consistent sales lead generation delivers a stronger ROI
Consistent sales lead generation delivers a stronger ROI
Being persistent and consistent helps us to achieve many goals in life, whether improving at a sport, losing weight, or also increasing sales for your business.
In order to deliver consistent, quality, business to business sales leads it is critical that you carry out constant outbound activity to deliver a strong ROI. Yet, all too often outbound sales lead generation campaigns are stopped too early or only planned to cover just a few short months.
In the early stages of an outbound campaign, there is a significant ramp up period of effort. In business to business sales in particular there are often multiple influencers and decision makers that can lead you to a successful sales. This time initially is spent identifying key people, discovering information from a range of contacts at different levels, sending emails, and establishing visibility of your brand, services, and solutions.
During this time, you are also building rapport with individuals, connecting, gaining trust, giving insight, and exploring potential needs and challenges. You will also gain a clearer picture of how each of your target companies prioritise, how they are structured, make decisions and how they operate.
In sales, I believe that an identified need or pain and a clear timescale of when this needs to be resolved are critical to propel a sales opportunity forward. But, this is where consistency counts. Timescales and need will vary from account to account unless driven by legislation.
Yet, quite frequently as a campaign unfolds you will start to build a string of callbacks, sometimes months in advance, but if the campaign is abandoned after 3 months these leads are likely to get lost.
There are different ways to control this by manipulating your resource profile across each campaign. If you are sector focused it may be that you stagger several different campaigns, promoting different services or solutions, and your resource can be balanced as needed. The key thing is not losing sight or contact with the people and the opportunity.
If you are running a campaign as a pilot to test a service, solution, or market then you could run a ‘long tail’ at the end of the initial pilot period to keep a small amount of focus on key callbacks across several months to close down opportunities. This way nothing goes to waste.
And, ultimately, those extra sales leads that you generate as part of longer term follow up that convert to leads will make all the difference when it comes to delivering that all important ROI.