To sell your product and make revenue, you should generate leads. You should identify people and businesses who might want to buy what you offer and establish relationships with them. From this article, you'll get to know how to get a lot of sales leads for nearly any type of goods or services. These recommendations should come in handy for companies of any size and industry.
To generate sales, you might want to use the following tactics:
● Ask your loyal clients for referrals
● Rely on your network to identify sales leads
● Establish rapport with your leads at networking events
● Never discard opportunities
● Look for leads on social media platforms
● Enhance your social media profiles
● Prepare an email sequence
● Share knowledge
● Conduct online workshops and webinars
● Make the most of live chat
Below, we'll analyze all these methods of getting sales leads in detail.
Sales leads are private or corporate customers who might be interested in your products. Yet it doesn't mean that they will order your goods or services immediately. Maybe, they don't need your products right now or can't afford them yet. But you should stay in touch with them because their situation might change at any moment and they might get ready to purchase.
Once you realize that a person or company is seriously interested in what you sell, needs it and can afford it, they become prospects. To identify sales leads that you can later turn into prospects, you can use various methods, for instance:
● Advertising
● Marketing
● Cold calling
● Social media
● Referrals
● Outreach
● Networking
● Consultations
● Product/service trials
Now, let's have a look at the most efficient methods that should help you to generate sales.
If your company has been around for a while, you already have a database of loyal clients. Do you get in touch with them after they purchase your product and leave? You might want to reach out to your loyal customers to express your gratitude to them. Also, they might help you with creating sales leads — here are the steps that you can try:
Get in touch with your customer and ask them whether they're satisfied with your products or services and customer support. Ask them which aspects of your products they liked best and what they would love to improve.
Ask whether your customer could share with you contacts of other people or organizations to whom you could offer your products. Maybe, they can also tell you why exactly those new sales leads might need your goods or services.
Ask your customer to contact the new sales leads on your behalf. You might want to send them an email that they can forward or send to a lead. In the email, you should accentuate the value of your products.
Send a gift to the customer who helped you to get new sales leads. It should be something personal and not just a product that you sell.
That should be a very efficient strategy because your customers already know your company and your products — and the people whom they get in touch with trust them.
Each person has a network of contacts that includes:
Family members
Neighbors
Online and offline friends
Colleagues
Past and current business associates
Service professionals
Try to think of them as your sales leads. Whenever you release a new product, let your network know about it. They already trust you, so you won't need to invest time and effort into building rapport with them.
You might try to tell them directly that you need their help with identifying sales leads. Let them know the characteristics of your target customers:
Age
Gender
Industry
Business size
Sales and revenue ranges
Geographic location
Any other parameters that are relevant for your product
Provide your network contacts with an email that they can forward to these target customers on your behalf. Or, your contacts can ask for permission to share the emails and phone numbers of these target customers with you.
You might be surprised by how many sales leads such an approach might bring you. Social circles of different types of your network contacts hardly overlap. Altogether, they can spread the word about your product to hundreds of potential customers.
You can find sales leads on both offline and online events. To make the most of your networking, you should remember these tips:
People whom you approach shouldn't think that you perceive them as sales leads from the onset. Add a bit of human touch. Find out who they are and what they do — and only then, offer them a product that might be helpful for them.
Whenever you meet a new contact online or offline, get in touch with them on LinkedIn.
On offline events, you should exchange business cards with your potential sales leads. Follow them up in a few days and say that you were glad to get to know them.
To manage your contacts more efficiently, you might want to use dedicated software, such as Bitrix24. It features a top-notch CRM and an in-built contact center. Each time you get in touch with your sales leads, Bitrix24 will save the information about your interactions. You can contact your clients right from the system's panel and then measure the efficiency of your communications. Bitrix24 will remind you that it's time to contact a specific client and will facilitate the process of choosing the optimal message for them. Thanks to this software, you'll maximize your productivity and revenue.
Some sales professionals think: "If people say no, I'll never be able to convert them into sales leads". In fact, this means you shouldn't give up and should keep on trying. These people or businesses already know about your company, brand and product. Here is what you should do to motivate them for the purchase:
Try to reconnect with them every four to six months.
Remind them about yourself systematically with the help of personalized communications and approved marketing emails.
Follow them on social networks and try to stay aware of what might have changed in their lives. For instance, your contact might have moved to another department and have become a decision maker. Or an acquisition took place and your potential client has a larger budget now.
Your ultimate goal is to make your sales leads think of you every time they have anything to do with your industry.
Most sales leads have accounts on social networks, so you just need to find them there. You should concentrate your efforts on those platforms that match best with your brand and products. For instance, if you cater to the B2B segment, you should focus on LinkedIn.
These three strategies should help you to generate new sales leads on LinkedIn:
Connect with as many people as possible. You don't need to know them all personally. Every connection enables you to reach your contacts' connections, so you can deliver your message to a larger number of people.
State it openly that you're looking for individuals with some specific characteristics because you might want to offer something useful to them. Maybe, your contacts can recommend sales leads to you.
Ask two to three of your loyal customers to provide recommendations or testimonials for your products. That should accentuate the high quality of your goods or services and show how you value your clients
A similar strategy can be built for any platform that you use to find new sales leads.
When your potential sales leads visit your page on a social platform, they should get to know the most important information in the first couple of seconds. You should instantly attract the attention of your sales leads and make them want to learn more.
Here are a few examples of how you can organize your personal profiles on different social media:
LinkedIn. You should specify your industry, the name of the company that you work for and your position. Try to use keywords that your customers might be looking for.
Twitter. Your profile should feature the following information: a professional photo, your title, a link to your company's account and a link to your LinkedIn account. Follow Twitter profiles in your industry and those of potential sales leads. Post regularly, retweet and comment. Accompany your posts with relevant hashtags.
Instagram. Here, you should avoid being too serious. Focus on visuals: share eye-catchy images, choose a top-notch professional photo for your profile. As for the text, you should be very concise and deliver only the most necessary information.
Whenever anything changes about you or your company, make sure to update your profile. For instance, if you get a promotion, you should promptly indicate your new position in your profile.
An email sequence is a series of emails that are automatically sent to groups of recipients from your mailing list. You can choose between two types of email sequences:
Trigger-based. This approach suggests that you should send out emails based on the person performing a certain action. For instance, your potential sales leads might have visited your website or put an item in their shopping carts.
Time-based. This term means that you send out emails at specific times. For instance, you might reach out to your sales leads on an anniversary date or a week after they use your services.
When compiling an efficient sequence, you might use the following purposes for each email:
By doing so, you try to make people curious about your goods or services and turn the recipients into your sales leads.
To prove that you're an expert in your field, you might start a blog or write articles for third-party sites. You can share knowledge on the following types of web resources:
Your personal site or blog
Your company's site or blog page
Social media
Other corporate, industry and personal blogs
Sites that publish industry blogs and articles
Your client' websites
Plus, you can create an email newsletter and share the most valuable materials only with those who subscribe to it.
You should educate your sales leads and help them make informed decisions. You can share advice on any issue or type of activity that you know well. For instance, you can explain to people how to:
Boost their personal and professional efficiency
Improve sales
Cut down expenses
Scale their business
Feel free to add links to your company's website in your articles. Or, the links might lead to the landing pages of your products. By doing so, you'll be using a content marketing strategy. On the landing pages, your customers might discover calls to action that will encourage them to get to know more about the product and ultimately buy it.
Sharing knowledge is a great tool for generating sales leads, but it has one drawback: you might get little or no feedback. Meanwhile, webinars and online workshops have the following benefits:
They enable you to teach and interact with people
While talking, you can create time-limited live offers to engage sales leads
You can go into greater depth in sharing your knowledge with prospects
People start to perceive you as an expert and trust your more
All the participants of your educational events are your potential sales leads. You can reach them 24 hours a day. You're free to choose whether you'd like to conduct webinars and online workshops on your company's website or a dedicated platform for this type of event.
Probably, you already have a live chat on your company's website and use it to respond to your clients' questions. To get more sales leads with the help of the chat, you should behave proactively. Install a chatbot that will greet visitors as soon as they open your site. Chatbots can carry out the following types of tasks:
Ask questions to people (for instance, they might find new sales leads by asking "Would you like to check the advanced version of our main bestseller"?)
Respond to questions that consumers ask (either by interpreting the questions that people type in or by offering them sets of most frequent questions with predefined answers)
Qualify sales leads
Book appointments and meetings
Connect visitors to the right human specialist
An ideal chatbot should be personalized to match your corporate brand's look and feel. Ideally, it should be AI-powered and employ machine learning algorithms to enhance its communication with customers over time. The chatbot can gather a lot of useful information about your clients that you can analyze to improve your products and the quality of service.
Try to ask your loyal clients for referrals, rely on your network to identify new leads and establish rapport with your leads at networking events. Never discard opportunities, look for leads on social media platforms and enhance your social media profiles. Prepare an email sequence, share knowledge, make the most of live chat, conduct online workshops and webinars. These methods should help you to get many sales leads and boost your revenue.