Growing your business part 2 — Fueling your engine

Customers are the fuel.

Customers are the fuel.

Customers are the coal that goes in the boiler, that heats the water, that cranks the pistons, turning the wheels taking your business into the future. All customers start as leads. A lead is a potential prospect. It is the a combination of intention and contact information. This person may be interested in this item, service, information etc.

Once you have a basic product flow prototype you must start pushing fuel through the engine in the form of leads.

Getting leads in the door is the only way you are going to be able to tell if your engine works. You will also figure out where you engine leaks. If you are luck and the engine works you may very well get a sense of ‘just how fast can we push this baby’. Botttles Tonight is an app company in the Dojo. the Bottles Tonight that app gets you same day bottle service at the hottest clubs and venues for up to 60% off. They need to test their live product. They set up a small Facebook App install campaign to drive people to install the app on their phones. Each one of these installs is a lead. After a few hundred installs, these leads gave the Bottles Tonight team the data they needed to test the experience, improve the conversion flow, and get a real idea of their growth opportunity. In their situation the test worked out so well that they are only expanding their existing lead channel (Facebook Installs) and exploring other lead channels as well.

You must expand your lead base once you are up & running.

Once you figured out how to get customers, you must focus on it and do it more. Increasing customers is the only way to grow a business and the only way to increase customers is to increase your funnel of leads. This does not mean only increase the best leads or only focus on one type of lead. Every lead can be a win and every lead increases the size of your funnel. Each lead is an opportunity to get a new customer, expand your brand and improve your lead nurturing process.

Even a bad lead is probably a good lead.

Leads have a long life. Only a small percentage of your leads will turn into customers right away. The real value of the lead is that a person expressed an interest that can be fulfilled by your company and you have ways to reach them. There is a good chance that your timeline is NOT your lead’s timeline. That means that you must stay connected to them and relevant to them between now and the time they are ready to be your customer. According to published statistics and our internal data, re-engaging your cold leads converts at 150% better than your new leads. The better you are at lead follow up and lead nurturing, the more of your leads will turn into customer.

Every lead is an opportunity to test and improve your follow up process.

There is no such thing as the perfect follow up process to convert leads into customers. Luckily there are many paths to test including phone calls, emails, connecting on social media and snail mail. Also every lead keeps your sale people focused on your funnel, stories about bad leads are opportunities to improve pitches, overcome objections and figure out wins. Once you have a lead flow, improving your lead follow up process and lead nurturing process is the single best thing you can do to grow your customer base and build your business. The real value is in that alone.