Improving Your Lead Generation Success

If your day is anything like mine, you’re devoting a large portion of it to designing innovative ways to find qualified prospects. You look near and far for ideas, you craft your own innovative campaigns, you “borrow” from others, you go about setting lures to attract those with the need you can solve. Because they come with needs in all shapes and sizes, vetting them from the chaff can really be challenging.

It’s like “finding a needle in a haystack” right? The Myth Busters video featured a competition between the myth-busting inventors Jamie and Adam. They are both being challenged to individually design an approach for finding the needles in a haystack. There are three steel needles and one bone needle to find.

Jamie uses high rotation tubes and fire to burn the hay; theoretically the needles will not burn and drop out of the tube. Jamie uses water and a tank; theoretically the needles will drop to the bottom of the water and the hay will float, separating the needles from the hay. Both inventors designed different methods to achieve the same result.

This is truly a remarkable and entertaining analogy to what it is like to find a qualified prospect. I’ve posted the video for your entertainment but it highlights the challenge. You have to keep moving the hay through the mechanism to get that needle to drop.

I have spent a lot (more than I care to count) of dollars, Euros, Yen and other currencies to find NEED-les around the world. The interesting thing is, the most successful approach to finding NEED-les is often in the most obvious places.

Before you spend money today in these uncertain times, you should first make sure you are doing some basics that do not add a burden to the bottom line.

Here is a checklist of the key places where I have found a higher proportion of NEED-les. I wouldn’t spend any money on lead generation activities until I have this mechanism in place:

• Understand the current and historical proportion of repeat business and repeat customers
• Get referrals from current customers inside and outside of their business
• What can you sell to your current customers?
• What can you do to help sales open new doors in current accounts?
• Is there an account plan that you tap into and recommend approaches to help sales?
• Create approaches to tap into the known need of a specific customer or prospect: 1:1 or 1:many
• Build prospect hit lists for your sales reps and research key contacts they choose by getting more personal information by using Linked In and Google searches. Craft approaches based on their day-to-day concerns
• Call each sales representative and see what you can do to help them find and qualify prospects faster, they may have ideas that they have trouble implementing manually

A highly customized email targeted at an individuals concerns provide a better return than a form letter. But an email is just the first part of the approach. Each email should be followed up with a phone call and email – the primary purpose to land a meeting. Through the process of getting that meeting on the schedule the callers are also, yet secondarily, qualifying the prospect.

Though finding prospects with a need you can fill does take time and effort, but it doesn’t have to require a large lead generation budget. The “mechanism” you build to target your audience will provide a higher return if you bolster up the basics.