You’ve invested in one or more lead generation approaches to fill your sales pipeline and turn those leads into customers. Have you considered what you can do better to obtain more customers without spending additional money? Even a small percent improvement can yield significant returns lowering your overall cost of customer acquisition.

  1. Measure Lead Success – Do you know what percent of leads turn into customers? Without knowing your lead to customer conversion ratio, you’ll never know what lead strategies are most successful and when there is a problem that needs attention.
  2. Compare Lead Strategies – Once you’ve implemented a way to measure leads, track the success of each method and invest more time, effort and money in the methods that are producing the most customers.
  3. Be the First to Respond – Customers often do business with the first company that engages them. Examine all points of potential prospect contact and make sure everyone knows, and a system is in place, for immediate response.
  4. Consistently and Persistently Follow Up – Prospects are barraged with thousands of promotional messages each day. One follow up to a potential customer isn’t enough. By following up more than once you are more likely to convert prospects into customers. In following up, use more than one strategy because different prospects will respond to different approaches.
  5. Recontact Old Leads – If your consistent follow up does not result in a conversion to a customer, don’t discard unconverted leads. Conditions change and, although a prospect may choose not to do business with you now, he may in the future. For example, if a prospect picks a competitor and is dissatisfied with that competitor, he may seek another provider to do business with.
  6. Leverage Your Lead Generation Success – Periodically review what lead conversion strategies are most successful and test other ways to improve on what you are already doing. For example, if you are using print advertising or online pay per click advertising, test different headlines for these promotional messages on an ongoing basis to improve results.

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