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26/08/2010 - How to get personal with your lead generation

Hot Dates and Hot Prospects or Blind Dates and Cold Calling – Lead Generation Gets Personal

Generating sales leads is like dating - you need interest, intelligence and rapport if love is going to blossom.  Matt Hall, MD of Profunnel, looks at the importance of lead generation in the current climate and gives his tips for success

A guy asks a girl he has just met in a bar: “What are the chances of you going out with me. She replies disdainfully: “One in a million.” His face lights up and he exclaims: “So you’re saying there’s a chance!” It’s an old joke but sadly it’s one that is played out in sales teams all over the world in the shape of cold calling. 

There is no interest from the target company but the approach is made nonetheless.  The sales person has no idea of who - or what - the supposed ‘lead’ is looking for but they make the call nonetheless – after all, they are on the list of leads.  Like so many sales professionals there is no differentiation to their approach – they still see it as a numbers game and when love doesn’t blossom they simply move on to the next victim.
Despite the competitive markets in which we all operate, this lack of ‘nurturing’ prospects continues to be frighteningly common.  ‘We don’t have the time or money to really understand our sales leads’ is a phrase commonly heard.  But without this knowledge, how can any relationship flourish? 

Undoubtedly sales is a numbers game but cold calling has to be adjusted for the modern era, refined and perhaps re-defined.  Here are my top tips for ensuring cold calling for lead generation actually delivers results….

1) Build Intelligence into every call - If you take a look at your ‘cold’ calls that have turned into profitable business the truth is that there is typically some interest or connection that makes that call more relevant to the prospect – be that a personal relationship, geographical link or knowledge of the market.
Successful cold calling should build on this, adding some intelligence to help form a relationship and creating something far more powerful than old style cold calls. 

By building up a more complete understanding of the prospect, their people, markets, motivations, sales cycle, touchpoints and more, your sales team will have the ability to truly nurture customers.  The result is communication on a more personal level, enabling sales to contact prospects when they are actually ready to buy, and building the relationship for the long term.  This is where marketing automation software is key, providing a more reliable method of intelligence building that helps ensure measurable, methodical lead generation, allowing you to focus activity on the hot leads you need to secure business.

2) Use your website - Most businesses today have a website, but when someone visits the site how do you start interacting with that individual and progress the relationship?  What you really need are their contact details and information about their requirements – but how many visitors to a site offer such specific facts?

The good news is that there is now a subtle way to start building a profile on these contacts.  Web forensics allow you to identify individual web visitors and tag and track their ongoing activity on your site, whether it be general browsing or downloads of items such as white papers, case studies and other website collateral, enabling you to understand more about where their interest lies.  By identifying the whole journey that your customers take through your website you can interact with them more effectively, influencing potential future business back onto your site for you to convert.

3) Communicate at the right time - Traditional cold calling science says that persistence pays - and persistence is good but there’s no sense in making a fool of yourself, indeed you may turn your target off.
But how do you know when enough is enough, while keeping the contact alive?  This is where marketing technology plays a key role and integrates with CRM.  It can manage your on-going relationship with all levels of contact, sending reminder emails at key times and building lead profiles to give you an automated marketing system that is capable of developing and maintaining relationships. 

If a contact starts showing an interest by visiting your website more often than usual or visiting new parts of your site the technology will flag up the change, triggering a personalised message to be sent out and giving your sales team more information on which to follow up the lead.  Without this comprehensive tracking of behaviour you will never know when your contacts are in the mood to buy. 

4) Listen & learn – Nurturing customer relationships is all about communicating with people as individuals, listening to their requirements and motivations and learning from this to create a more personalised stream of communication.  Just as no two people are the same, no two businesses have the same set of challenges and opportunities, therefore for sales to be successful you need to ensure your team builds their understanding of each prospect and tailors their approach.

In days gone by sales people would keep notes on everything from prospect birthdays and children’s names to promotions and awards, but in today’s competitive market that’s nowhere near enough.  The technology is now available to help you learn and react to every element of prospect activity, be that their response to eletters, business successes or Twitter announcements.  It’s just a matter of gathering and using this information to aid your sales communication, timing and long-term nurturing.

5) Don’t waste time - We’ve all spent time chasing relationships where we don’t have a prayer, but the danger is that we miss out on people where there might be a spark. With marketing automation it is now possible to have the equivalent of the scorecard, providing you with more detailed information on those contacts where love will blossom.

The technology works by scoring visitors to your site on the way they interact.  If they visit often and/or complete calls to action such as signing up for a newsletter or following your blog their score increases. You can set the criteria to assess this interaction, so the sales team is only asked to contact high scoring leads. The result? No wasted time on no hopers, who never intended to buy from you in the first place, and a more targeted approach to sales.

It takes a lot of nerve to approach a stranger with the cold calling technique and it takes some courage to move over to a new way of forging relationships. But in today’s business world the key to successful sales is to understand what works, when and for whom.

With tools such as marketing automation and web forensics you get clear results on which activities paid dividends in terms of developing a lead into a sale, and you’re rewarded with a better basis for building a revenue stream. You will still need to do the numbers but you will be an altogether more attractive and intelligent proposition.