Leads are the lifeblood of any business, whether the business operates online or offline. It is essential that you generate high quality leads otherwise your company will struggle to get, and stay, profitable. Leads turn into prospects, prospects into first-time customers, and with luck those first time customers will become loyal customers and perhaps even spread the word about your business, feeding you even more high quality leads.
Lead generation is not an easy job, however. Many people misunderstand how lead generation works and fall into the trap of favoring quantity over quality, wasting their time chasing low quality leads that will never offer significant return for the business. Acquiring a large number of leads is often a false economy. Not only are most of those leads unlikely to convert, marketing to them is a waste of time and money and nurturing them takes valuable resources away from nurturing leads that are more likely to convert.
At the other end of the spectrum, there are some business owners that make the mistake of focusing too much on getting the sale. Of course, sales are important, but if you are spending all of your time chasing one customer after another you will never have a large group of people waiting to buy your product or service. Ideally, you should be networking and generating new leads every day, while also investing time in closing the deal with your best prospects. Even a few minutes invested in networking each day can be a big help towards sustaining your business.
So, what makes a quality lead? Well, quality leads are ones that are highly targeted and carefully qualified. Ideally, you should be looking to reach people who have the interest and the means to purchase your product or service. No matter what sort of lead generation techniques you use, you will always get some leads that will never convert – especially if your product or service is something that is highly aspirational, such as a car or a holiday. However, the right lead generation techniques will help you to narrow down the majority of the leads that you reach.
Using a service to generate leads for you can be a good idea. A good lead generation service will find the right places to reach leads for you, and will also qualify those leads, sending you only the best ones for you to work on with more direct marketing techniques. They will not waste time with cold leads or bulk marketing techniques. Rather, they will focus on reaching the people that are most likely to turn into buyers.
Once you have those hot leads, it is your job to nurture them, keep them interested, and turn them into customers. It can take a dozen or so contacts with a brand to turn a prospect into a customer, but it is worth the effort. Once you have got them to open their wallets once, selling to them in the future should be relatively easy.