- Need to grow your business's pipeline? If so, check out these tips...
When it comes to sourcing a lead for your business, you might think about the generic selling pitch and advertising techniques – but the bad news is that this will not be enough to entice a modern-day audience into buying anything. You need to get into their heads, to be bold but not pushy, to be exactly what they were looking for.
Of course, there are going to be one or two setbacks, and you might find yourself tempted into slowly slipping back into the everyday boring pitches that just don’t work anymore, but with the right help and a few pointers, you can source amazing leads for your business without as much time and effort than you might have thought.
First of all, what is a sales lead?
A sales lead, to put it simply, is a person or even a whole company that might eventually become a customer or client. So, to give an example, if you are a sports water bottle company, someone who goes to the gym every day might be a sales lead, but so might a school or college that would buy in bulk for its sports team. Therefore, despite being quite different entities, you will direct your advertising at them, and not to a man in his forties who lives off cans of beer and drives everywhere and doesn’t do any kind of sport. The aim of having a sales lead is to keep them in your sales funnel until they eventually buy your product.
How do you source sales leads, and how does it work?
A crucial part of the process is when the customer first hears about you, and it’s the first step into a sales funnel. The more they learn about the business and your products, and the more they like it, the more likely it is that they are going to reach the end of the process and buy your product. The ones that don’t think that you are what they are looking for will fall out of the sales funnel, and you can identify these by using sales intelligence.
Sales intelligence is the collection of data to help you pinpoint your sales leads. It creates graphs, reports, and other data showing systems that allow you to easily see what’s working and what isn’t. You can then implement this data into something to help you distill and hone your sales pitch into something a lot more targeted and compelling for that group or individual, instead of just shouting out into the mass of potential customers and have only a few people connecting with your message.
You can do this through social media, for example. By using hashtags in your posts, as well as tagging others, you can target your business to a specific group to sell to them. They will be scrolling through Instagram looking for outfit inspiration for winter, and your fashion business might come up. If they’re interested, they’ll investigate further, and are then pulled into your sales funnel.