Leads are to customers as the egg is to the chicken. You require a lead to develop a customer, and the customer gives you the means to continue developing more potential customers.
The difference, however, is that there is no question pertaining to what came first when talking about opportunities and customers. You always generate the lead before you generate customers.
The challenge with lead generation is ensuring that you can acquire more customer opportunities. The reason for this is that you may be selling to customers who will be unlikely to purchase the same product or service multiple times.
Let’s explore both the importance of the lead as it pertains to your marketing and overall business, and explore how you can effectively generate more customers by increasing your business’s sales potential.
Understanding the Importance of Potential Customers
The potential customer can be any person. They may be someone you know, someone who will find your products or services through an Internet search, or someone who arrives at your website through one of your many advertising avenues.
This person represents the first step in a long line of actions in the sales chain.
This means that every lead is a potential opportunity to make a sale. You may be able to turn every lead into a sale, but you need people to begin that long chain of actions and the resulting profit you desire.
There are two qualities integral to completing a sale: the quality of a lead, and the quantity of your customer opportunities.
Quality tends to trump quantity, especially when you are investing a large amount of funds to acquire new potential customers.
The Differences in Lead Quality
Imagine that you have four companies capable of producing opportunities for business: Brand A in the US, brand B in the Philippines and brand C in India.
Brand A may produce moderate to high quality opportunities, but this company will generally require a large investment to do so. This can severely hinder your ROI.
Brands B and C may be able to produce these visitors at a fraction of the cost that brand A can, but these opportunities will tend to be substantially lower in quality. They may convert at a small fraction of the rate that visitors from brand A convert. Some may not even convert into customers at all because they are derived from automated means.
The problem is that brand A may also use brand B or C to generate traffic. They mix mix their own traffic with them, or substitute them completely.
This difference in quality can mean the difference between a lot of wasted dollars and the generation of many profits for your business.
The best alternative is to utilize a company that pulls visitors from a number of sources, or that focuses on utilizing a number of reputable generation tactics. Companies like the Ukraine-based Leadware excel at providing this to businesses.
Illustrating Lead Quality
The reason companies like Leadware excel at generating quality leads revolves around something that is independent of their location. Their intention is to act like a proper business rather than someone selling an addictive substance to an individual.
Lead quality can be obtained through processes such as theirs.
This process involves the following three steps in a closed loop:
- Lead Research – Their team communicates with your business to determine qualities about the visitors your desire. This is the building block for customers in every business, which include E commerce.
- Lead Enrichment – Their team works with you to continue finding new potential customers using social accounts and other marketing avenues, which creates the presence of positive PR. Each lead is focused, which results in a high ROI.
- Sales Development – Leadware’s teams set appointments to keep in contact with your business. This focused cycle repeats to drive business that stays both lean and effective.
The quality contained within this process derives itself from the way your business stays intimately connected with the lead provider. This allows you to drive reliable potential customers towards businesses focused on E commerce.
The secondary attributes, such as the positive PR generate on social media networks, helps to further your business. It leaves people with the impression that others care about your business, which means that your business becomes recognized as a reliable provider for your products and services.
These qualities can be used to generate even more customers by integrating them with your overall advertising strategy.
Can You Make Your Advertising Efforts Travel Further?
The one quality that separates a successful business from one that merely breaks even is the ability to stretch a dollar even further. So long as it works, this action will provide your business with a leaner way of generating more revenue that can be reinvested into your company.
Services like SearchQuant.com can make this goal a reality. You can incorporate it with an effective lead provider to make your lead generation into something explosive rather than just multiplicative.
Imagine the many ways a potential customer could come in contact with your business. By utilizing several tactics, you can help increase awareness about your brand while creating results that complement one another.
If you add tactics like social selling on LinkedIn, Facebook and other networks to the mix, you can further these results even more.
The One Thing to Take Away About Lead Generation
If you come away with one thing about lead generation, it should be this: not all leads are created equal.
To drive business, your goal needs to be to acquire high quality visitors whom consistently convert into customers. The more cost-efficient this acquisition is, the better your profits will be.
By branching out and using multiple methods of lead generation, you will make your efforts significantly leaner than they would be otherwise.
You can compare it to one person fishing from several interconnected small ponds instead of just one lake. That person will need to expend less effort to catch the same amount of fish, and those fish will continue to be abundant.
Customers are similar, except they aren’t attracted by simple bait. They require you to lure them with good intentions, amazing products and worthwhile services. They will then tell their friends to seek your business for solving their problems, which in turn is what creates the exponential effect that good advertising can have.
If you want to hook your customers into your business, then one thing is for certain: you can’t treat them like fish. You want to acquire quality customers to keep your business soaring.
