How to Develop a Lead Generation Plan for Your Business

Don’t settle for just any lead generation plan and let Trendy Communications develop a plan for your needs.

When you invest in lead generation for your business, you attempt to stimulate interest in your product, online or off, to create a sales pipeline.

Lead generation is different from conventional mass advertising. It is inbound in nature and aims to help potential customers find you with targeted approaches. Every business needs a lead generation plan.

To develop one, you need to go through these steps:

? Determine your sales process and define what your objectives are.

? Define what a lead is worth to you.

? Create the right lead-generation messages for different channels.

? Decide how you will respond when leads get in touch.

? Design a high-quality database of leads that you keep updated.

To begin, however, how exactly does developing a lead generation plan help?

Time is your sales team’s most valuable resource. A working lead generation plan is relevant to your sales team simply because it enables it to do more in the time that it has.

When you maintain a steady stream of qualified leads to your sales team, they can use their time to do what they do best, which is to close.

A thorough lead generation plan can help you do the following:

? Give your sales team a steady supply of meaningful leads.

? Allow your sales team to focus less on wasteful cold calling and more on closing.

? Build your business reputation as experts in the field among your target audience.

? Deliver quantifiable results.

? Help your company’s marketing and sales departments work together.

If the prospect of helping your sales team in these ways seems attractive, you need to make your way through five basic steps.

Set out what your objectives are

Think about the different buying stages that your typical sales prospect goes through.

Does your sales cycle involve a marketing step that generates and nurtures leads and a separate sales step that takes care of the closing, or do you rely on your online efforts to achieve both steps in one go?

Depending on the sales process that you follow at your company, you need to determine how many leads you need to generate to achieve your sales goals. The number that you arrive at is the basis of your sales objective.

Determine what a lead is worth to you

Both your marketing and your sales teams need to first arrive at a shared definition of what exactly constitutes a lead.

Once there is an agreement in this area, you should be able to accurately estimate what each lead is worth to you, depending on the percentage of raw, initial leads that you successfully end up closing.

You can bring this figure to bear when you determine a budget for your marketing campaign.

For instance, if your business makes $50 off each sale, you know right away that you can’t spend more than this sum on each lead. You’ll only be able to invest substantially less to be able to make a profit.

Determine what lead-generation messages to use

Lead generation works differently for different industries. In most cases, however, leads must be targeted multiple times with marketing messages. You need to create a budget that will take you the distance.

It can help to start with the least expensive lead generation tactics and work your way up to the most expensive ones.

You can begin with in-house email lists and online PR and continue with social media marketing, purchased email lists, pay-per-click advertising, advertisements taken out in relevant newsletters, and conventional mail.

Other options such as telemarketing, print advertising, trade shows, and in-person visits by sales staff, may be expensive but may be relevant and useful when applied to truly promising leads.

If yours is a B2B product or service, you may need to target your lead generation plan at purchase committees at businesses.

Considering that they will need the information to arrive at a buying decision, your plan should provide them with return-on-investment information, technical information for the chief financial and technical officers, and so on.

Design a response system

Before you begin with a lead generation program, it makes sense to work out how you will capture leads when they get in touch, how you will measure them, and how you will respond to them.

For instance, you may direct leads to a specific webpage, an email address, or a toll-free number.

You will also need a plan for how your marketing department will work together with sales to smoothly transfer leads that are ready to be closed. You need to make sure that the entire process works smoothly before you launch your lead generation program and get actual leads.

Practice good database housekeeping

A quality in-house email list is the most cost-effective way by which any company can find new customers. Good email lists, however, require maintenance.

People who have unsubscribed need to be removed, duplicates need to be weeded out, and information gained about each lead over the course of contacts made needs to be updated on the list.

If you aren’t able to perform the maintenance work necessary, third-party marketing services may be able to do it for you.

Many businesses make it up as they go along with their lead generation. Considering how much well-defined lead generation can contribute to your business, however, it makes sense to draw up a lead generation plan, to constantly update it, and to improve it over time.

Contact Trendy Communications today and gain access to resources and tools to start driving and buying more valuable and quality leads that can generate positive results for your business.