3 posts from September 2007
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-by Shamus Brown
I've been getting lots of email from you lately. And one thing that I hear often is that you need more sales leads.
In order to generate sales leads, you need three things:
- A written profile of your target prospect,
- A list of suspects containing potential prospects,
- A method of reaching your sales prospects.
In this article, I am going to discuss eight proven methods of reaching your sales prospects.
Complementary Partner Referrals
I put this sales lead generation method first because this one generates the highest quality sales leads. How you do this depends on the market you are in. There have been a lot of articles written about networking through chamber and association meetings, so I won't rehash that here.
If you are selling business to business, you want to strike up relationships with sales reps from companies who call on the same businesses as you do. An example is if you sell an information technology consulting service, then partner with a few computer systems hardware vendors. These reps call on the same customers as you and you complement each other by sharing leads and information about customers and prospects.
Cold Calling
As much as nearly everyone dislikes this one, it is very effective for sales lead generation when executed properly. If you consistently prospect for leads by phone, you will consistently generate sales leads.
You can find more cold calling tips here at this website and I also recommend that you check out Anthony Parinello's "Selling to VITO".
Live Seminars
Live seminars are a great sales lead generation technique because you are usually delivering your a pitch to a prospect very early in their buying process. The key to a successful seminar is offering a solution to a problem that your target market really wants to solve. You can give the pitch yourself, or get one of your company executives to do it (sometimes business "celebrity" can help pull more sales prospects in).
Live seminars can be done inexpensively. The costs for in-person seminars are comprised of room rental, refreshments, audio-visual equipment, and promotion. Teleseminars are the least expensive, with the only costs being conference phone line rental and promotion. Webinars are actually more expensive due to the hefty fees the online meeting services charge to use their services.
Trade Shows
Trade shows are a good way generate sales leads if you can find events highly targeted to your prospect audience. Often such events yield low-quality sales leads because they are attended by the recommenders and influencers and rather than the true decision-makers.
I rate this method lower on the list, yet it is a valuable one if your company has the budget and there are industry events well-targeted to your audience.
Mass Mailings
Sales letters are one of the more underused sales lead generation methods. There is an entire industry of people dedicated to selling this way called direct marketing. But most field sales reps and business professionals don't know how to use this technique well.
Success with this method comes as a result of mailing a well-written letter to a good quality list of names (quality = targeted at your audience).
Two good primers on this are "The Ultimate Sales Letter" by Dan Kennedy and "Selling to VITO" by Anthony Parinello.
Advertising
This method can be highly effective when done right. You must find publications that are able to deliver your target audience. You must run ads that stimulate people to take action. To generate sales leads, you must avoid big-company style image ads.
I am no expert on advertising, but I do know that if you can't do this one right don't do it at all because you can blow through your marketing budget fast.
Internet Advertising
This one is very appropriate for small businesses and some independent professionals. With a well-designed website, you can generate sales leads through "ads" that the search engines create from your webpages. If you know what keywords your prospects are likely to search for you with, then you can generate very targeted and qualified leads.
This method is not for everyone though, as your prospects must be searching for something related to your products, services or the problems that you solve.
Email Publications
What you are reading right now is an example of an email publication that keeps my name and business in front of 9000 people every month. I collect all of my names through my website, but that isn't the only way to do this.
A sales rep or business owner could create an email newsletter and mail it to sign-ups from an offer presented at a seminar, at a trade show, in a mass mailing, in an advertisement, or on a cold call.
If your a sales rep, why not create your own email newsletter? You could send out industry news and tips to suspects in your market. Eventually a few of them will become customers because you are on their mind more often than your competition.
LinkedIn and Xing aren’t the only ways for executives to stay in touch and share contact information. Another Web site called Jigsaw might actually beat these services - as well as other business networking sites like Plaxo - as the best way for corporate executives to find a perfect hire or sales lead.
Jigsaw, which lets people submit the office phone numbers and e-mail addresses of individuals at large companies - virtual business cards in a sense - is thriving, according to CEO Jim Fowler, because the site has a community approach and tries to ensure that people have the most accurate information in order to recruit employees or make a sale. You don’t have to be a member of someone’s network in order to see their contact information.
“We are a wiki. We’re not about networking. People don’t come on to Jigsaw to get introduced. They come on to get direct information,” Fowler said. “We are a data company. We hope to do to the corporate data dinosaurs what Wikipedia is doing to Encyclopedia Britannica.”
So how exactly does the site work?
Fowler said that site’s more than 310,000 members have submitted information in order to build a database of 7 million records. He said that the site’s primary users are sales people and job recruiters.
People can use the site for free and earn points that allows them to get more information about people by referring the site to other users or sending in new contact information or updating existing information. Users also can pay in order to earn points that can be spent to get more relevant leads.
Fowler said the company should be profitable by the end of the year and is considering selling advertising on the site next year. For now though, Jigsaw generates its revenues primarily from subscription services as well as premium corporate offerings that it can cater to specific businesses. For example, a business could pay to have its entire sales team listed on Jigsaw.
There is, admittedly, a lot of competition in this area. Fowler said he sees a site like business search engine ZoomInfo as a rival as well as big data providers like Dun and Bradstreet (DNB), Acxiom (ACXM) and infoUSA (IUSA). Interestingly, he’s not as concerned about competition from big search firms like Google (GOOG) or Yahoo (YHOO) though because searching for contact information about people is not really a key part of those sites’ search results.
But Jigsaw appears to have a lot of promise, so much, in fact that my sister publication Business 2.0 named it one of its Next Net startups to watch last year. And even though Fowler is quick to point out that his company is not really competing with LinkedIn, Fowler does share one thing in common with LinkedIn: a strong desire to take the company public.
In this environment, where many dot-coms are shunning the public markets in favor of selling out are staying private, LinkedIn executives have been very candid about their desire to one day go public. And Fowler also is hopeful that Jigsaw, which has raised $18 million in funding so far from venture capitalists Austin Ventures, El Dorado Ventures and Norwest Venture Partners, will one day go the IPO route.
“I’ve got a wooden desk and I’m knocking on it,” he said, when I asked him about going public. “We want to transform the data world and take it from a closed proprietary system to a community and to do it globally. We would love to go public.” Fowler said it would probably be a few years before going public makes sense though. But he said he’s not interested in selling out even though some data companies have made offers.
So Jigsaw looks like an intriguing piece of the growing corporate networking puzzle. And if LinkedIn, as some suspect, does file for an IPO later this year or in 2008, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise to see Jigsaw follow suit.
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