Following on from last week’s article here is part 2 of Michael’s “What can I do to generate more leads for my business?”

Call To Action

If someone takes you up on your offer what is it that do they need to do? You want this action to be as easy as possible. For example click here or call this number or fill in this reply paid card. You want a single step easy call to action. And you want your call to action to be void of any hint of a sales person about to pounce – we all have built in radars to protect ourselves from sales people pouncing.

Provide Repeated Value (for free) & Call to Action

Think of this as a boxing match. Now whether you are a fan of boxing or not you probably know that it is unusual, very unusual, for a boxer to jump into the ring and land a knock blow with his first punch. Yet that is the approach that many businesses take with their lead generation.

They put something out there to attract prospects with an offer, a prospect responds. And bang.

Bang. Bang. Bang.

Buy me now. Buy me now. Buy me now.

This certainly doesn’t work now and even if it did work in the past was not the best way of doing things.

Imagine that you are a single person – easy to do if you are one. You go to a party. You see someone that you like the look of and they notice you too. You start chatting and you kind of hit it off. You think you like them and they seem to like you.

Then after 10 minutes the other person says “marry me.” At first you think it is an amusing complement then you realise they are deadly serious. And for the remainder of the night – or the part of the night that you are brave enough to stay at the party – they follow you round: “will you marry me, will you marry me.” Pretty quickly you would flee the scene and disappear into the night.

And so it is in lead generation. No-one likes being hunted or pushed to do something that they are not ready to do yet.

Before your lead goes any further with your business you need to get them to trust you.

The best way of doing this is to give them repeated value without trying to sell them anything and without asking for money.

Each time you deliver value to them do so with a new call to action that makes it easy for them to take the next obvious step in building a relationship with you.

Engage

The number of steps that will you need in giving them value will vary depending upon your target market, what you are selling, the price point of what you are selling and the risk to the buyer.

When you get to the last step in your giving them value process the final call to action will be ask them to engage with you in some meaningful way where some more of your value is exchanged for either time and effort on their part or for a small number of dollars. This is unlikely to be the “big final sale” and is more likely to be the bridging step between no financial engagement and a complete financial engagement.

Think engagement and not marriage at this stage.

At this stage you may do a small paid for study, or a paid for diagnostic or paid for design or an initial paid for trial period.

You want the steps in your engagement process to continue to educate, add value to your prospect, and earn their trust.

During this process you should be able to fully qualify your prospect to make sure that you want them as a client/customer.

When you have a qualified prospect who trusts you then the lead gets passed to sales and the start of the sales process begins.

Building Your Action Plan

To build your Lead Generation Action Plan here is KONA’s 11 steps to create a powerful lead generation action plan.

11 Steps to Crafting a Powerful Lead Generation Action Plan.

1. Identify a Narrow Target Market.

The narrower the better. This may mean that you have several Target Markets – that is OK. The reason for wanting a narrow target market is that the wider you make your definition of your Target Market then the more difficult it is to identify specific burning problems that the Target Market desperately wants/needs to solve.

2. Describe your ideal prospects in this Target Market.

Your ideal prospect is one who absolutely should buy your product or service. It’s just perfect for them. They have the need, they have the money, they have the buy-in of any other stakeholders. You need to define who they are and where they are – the more detail the better. Here is an anonymised example from one of our IT clients:

The Managing Director of a training businesses in the Greater Sydney area. This type of training business is focussed on helping large corporates and medium sized businesses stay compliant with all forms of employment legislation. The MD needs more tightly integrated IT applications to support winning a bigger share of her client’s training budgets – at the moment the MDs unconnected IT apps are a barrier to this. The MD would ideally like a simple way for all their IT apps to work together and share the same data – this would unlock more revenue growth for them. The MD doesn’t want to ditch existing IT apps. Their revenue from training activities is at least $2M plus.

3. Their Problems That You Solve

The logical problems that you solve should be easy for you to document – go ahead and write them down. But to craft powerful Offers you need to go beyond the problem and solution statements to what it means for your ideal prospect to solve these problems. Start with a blank sheet of paper. (I recommend using pen and paper, not a computer, for this exercise). At the top of the paper, write the following:

“If I could only…“

Imagine you are your ideal prospect. What’s your name? (Really, give yourself a name. Don’t skip this because it seems silly). Age? Marital Status? Do you have kids – what ages? What do you believe? What communities do you belong to? What really annoys you? Who do you want to be like? What’s most important to you about your performance in your role? To be a hero? To avoid mistakes? To look good? To have fun?

Now imagine your ideal prospect at the exact moment they are about to search Google for your main keyword. Complete (“If I could only …”) from the point of view of your prospect. What are you hoping for? What are you afraid of? How will you know when you’ve found the right solution?

Talk about the emotional as well as technical aspects of the problem and its solution. Is it fun? Something you’re looking forward to solving? Are you worried about failing? About making a mistake? Who might be judging or second-guessing you? What triggered your search?

Write as much as you can.

When you’re done, search Google for the keyword and look at the search results page from your ideal prospect’s eyes. Do any of the ads or organic listings really speak to them?

What do you (as your ideal prospect) want the ad to say? What do you want to be promised? By whom?

For more information, contact info@kona.com.au or 1300 611 288

See you next week.

By Glenn Dobson

Good products sell well; but they don’t sell by themselves.

If your sales team doesn’t know how to adapt the way they sell to the way your customers want to buy, even your best products could be consigned forever to the ‘lost opportunities’ section of your business.

Too many companies overlook this fact and don’t pay much attention while hiring and managing their sales people.

They think their products are so good that anyone can sell them, but this can be a dangerous mistake.

Recently, impressed by the positive reviews received by our customised sales training courses around Australia, an organisation approached us. Their problem was that their market share was not improving.

The company had recently upgraded and repackaged all its products, and it was an accepted fact within the industry that its products now were miles ahead of others. The sales figures, nevertheless and inexplicably, registered no improvement.

The case was not unique so for two weeks around Australia our sales training specialists accompanied the sales team whenever they went on a sales call.

We soon unearthed the root cause—almost all of the sales people were ‘product flogging, brochure dropping, order taking reps’, and were only able to talk about their products features (no benefits), and weren’t able to uncover how their products would relate to the customers business goals

We then implemented a rigorous ‘Hearts and Minds’ sales training and coaching program for them which also included sales management training and sales pipeline training and field coaching and within only a couple of months their sales results improved dramatically.

What happens when this is the issue?

It is the sales people who bring new customers and ensure repeat sales from old customers. Irrespective of how good your products are, if your sales people are not well versed in the art of ‘selling how your customers buy’, your sales results are likely to move in only one direction—down – as the market changes around you.

A below par sales team may cause you to lose your existing customers. On top of it, it may fail to guarantee a regular flow of new ones. So, in effect, your loss is twofold and the consequences can be dire.

How to solve this issue?

Sales managers play the most definite role in the hiring process, and it is with them the responsibility of hiring professional sales people, not ‘product flogging, brochure dropping, order taking reps’ must lie.

A good sales manager may not necessarily be a good recruiter, a position that demands certain skills however  these skills can be acquired.

Here are a few tips to improve the hiring skills of your sales managers:

Know the specific skills you require.

Before interviewing candidates, as a manager, you must be aware of the specific skills you need in your sales persons. Sounds simple however do you need a ‘Hunter – Cold Caller; a ‘Farmer’ or account manager: a networker/relationship builder; or someone who will service your existing customers to death?

Ask the right questions in an interview.

While not easy, a sales recruiting program can help your managers become better interviewers. As the needs of different industries are different, it is best if your managers adopt a customised program specifically developed to your industry, rather than an off the shelf course that will give them core competency and Behavioural Event Interviewing skills then they have a far between chance of recruiting the right person.

Match the training to the role

For instance, sales people in a call centre must participate in a call centre training program rather than a ‘field sales training program, as it will offer them most value. Sounds simple however doesn’t always happen

Experience doesn’t always matter.

A sales person with a proven track record might appear to be a safer bet than a novice however they can often be embedded in old ways and not flexible to adapting to how you want them to work.

If you are hiring new sales people, while they might not have the skills or experience, if you ensure that you give them proper direction, sales training and field coaching then you start to develop your team, rather than managing the remnants of someone else’s

Focus on their Pipeline

Your Sales Pipeline in the backbone of your future prosperity. So drive the number of opportunities each person has in their Pipeline then help them convert those opportunities through your field coaching

Glenn Dobson a Sales Performance Specialist with the KONA Group and if you would like to discuss how he can help you to get your sales people back on target please contact him on 1300 611 288 or glenn@kona.com.au

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