How to generate more leads — without spending a penny?
If you are a brand that is recognised, it is much easier to get people interested in you. The thought of them walking up to you asking for your services/product is not ‘wild,’ let’s say it like that.
But for brands that are not known or are struggling to gain trust in their market, it can prove nothing short of a Herculean battle. Say you don’t have any success stories as yet to prove your worth. Why would someone invest in you? Beautiful presentations and brochures alone can’t do the trick for sure. Even a successful digital campaign seems unlikely to be on the cards for you right now.
And say, you have brought in innovations in how the industry is used to approaching a situation, or have been able to build success stories enough to gain the trust of your prospects, how do you escalate the process of making the customer trust you? In short, if your brand lacks visibility, expecting customers to take interest in us can get unrealistic. Let’s make it realistic.
Identifying target accounts
Going all over the place never helps, whatever the situation be. To succeed in the quickest possible time, you always need a laser focussed approach. A customer, on his part, is clear about the kind of product / service provider he wants. And so should you be clear with the kind of customers that you want to serve. Segregate your target organisations very carefully. You could use industry type, employee strength, company’s revenue, amongst various criteria for identification.
Then, you need to understand who are the relevant people in the organisation who will be responsible for your acceptance there. This needs to be looked right from entering the account for the first meeting to making the sale actually happen — direct stakeholders, influencers, people you already know who can help you with internal insights. Tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator, through their auto suggestive process, can help you immensely with the process (other than accomplishing the sale itself through its other useful features). The only catch in case of this tool is to have your audience on LinkedIn.
Also, having just the names of the people will not help. Have their credentials profiled — email address, phone numbers, etc. You are going to need the coordinates of every possible touchpoint of these people in order to maximise your chances of generating a lead.
(To ensure you have the right business / marketing strategy before identifying and targeting certain accounts, refer to this piece here.)
Building your case before asking the customer for his interest
A lead generation process is a target based activity. You have dashboards that you are responsible for. You need to ensure you plan every single day very carefully, measuring your success frequently.
But in the process of hitting the target every day / week, what most of us might end up missing is the “focus” on building our case. This might delay the starting of lead-gen process a bit but will recover the numbers very soon.
Why focus & spend time on building our case?
Let’s remember one thing: we have extremely limited time to gather our customers’ interest — a second worth of impression on their screen, or maybe 5–10 seconds on the phone before we hear the kind words “Thanks, I am not interested” (rather than having the phone hung up on your face). We need to ensure that amongst the many thoughts that will pass the customer’s mind when we (our campaign) approach him, some positive thoughts / emerge about us. This can only happen if his mind tells him that we have at leas ta potential to be valuable to him. We will have to go a little into the past for this.
Before a customer is approached directly, we need to ensure he has had a chance to make that (partial) judgement about us. How does it happen? — It’s all a part of the brand building exercise — compelling content on social media / email campaigns / etc. (which is a different topic that needs a separate discussion). But that might require us to pump in some money. If you don’t have huge budgets, your immediate lead-gen team needs to play an active role here. There’s a process for it. Let’s look at it:
Non interruptive to interruptive approach
If you have the resources and time to invest in inbound marketing, or have already been successful at it, then this is not for you. But if neither of the above, you will need to attempt something called interruption marketing (exactly what the graphic above did to you as you tried to read further).
As against inbound marketing, which pulls a person to come to you himself for his needs, interruption marketing interrupts a person in his ongoing activity as you aim for his attention. Some examples could be pop up ads in an application; a sponsored post as you scrol down on your Facebook / LinkedIn feed; an unsolicited generic email in the inbox as part of “Promotions”, etc. But that’s all paid. We don’t wish to spend any money in the process. So what can our Inside Sales team do on its part to ensure effective lead generation? Answer is simple: We have a few mediums which are accessible for (almost) free: Email Service / LinkedIn / Facebook / Phone. We shall stay oriented to disturbing the customer to the least degree possible. So we will begin with emails.
1. Send a compelling personalised email, giving details and access to content available online about you. Emails provide you sufficient space to cover your points, attach a few files — your brochure / some videos you would like the customer to see. It is also the least interruptive mode of digital communication in interruption marketing. You can use a free tool that provides you read receipts of all the emails you send out. Just google it. If a person doesn’t reply for a week, send a follow up email, using the same mail thread so that he has a reference point if he opens this one. Send up to a total of 3 follow up mailers. One each week after the initial mailer.
Didn’t get any response? Nevermind, let’s move to the next step.
2. Next, we will take up social media to connect with a customer. See where your customer is most likely to be — it’s generally preferred that you use LinkedIn for all business purposes. Send a small message along with a connection request. Depending on the platform, it is likely that you will have very limited character space for the message that you can send — so ensure you are compelling. If possible, include links to relevant content or attach files.
Didn’t get any response? We will move to the next step.
3. Now we will need to interrupt the customer a little harder — interruption is inherent in the process, unfortunately. Drop in a small message requesting the customer for a small slot for a call. If you don’t get a response, try to followup after a few days while, again sending across your collaterals, links to relevant content. This mode of communication has the highest chances of making the other person go through the content you are sending along with your messages. Why? because this content is more readily and easily accessible to him when on his phone in a message.
What we have already done till now is, as I said above, “built our case.” The customer has been approached on multiple platforms, and has been made aware of what makes us special and why he should buy from us. In short, we have made all possible attempts to build our brand in front of him- for free.
4. Now is the time when we call the customer. In the few seconds that we get, the customer is likely to have a background of who we are and what we are trying to sell. This is your last attempt at getting his attention. You have invested last few weeks to keep yourself on top of his mind. Kill it with a killer scripted discussion (as much as possible).
To ensure success of the above workflow, you will have to work extremely hard to draft your communication. For every step of the flow, equip your lead — gen team with scripted emails — be it the first or any of the followup email; scripted linkedIn message, a smart call script. (For a sample scripts for all stages which you can easily tweak to suit your needs, please drop in a request in the comments below with your email ID)
At any given point, if the customer responds and says he is not interested, ensure that you respect his choice and stop targeting that customer then itself.
If you follow it with enough dedication, track the progress regularly, and are targeting the right audience, you will certainly see results very soon. This is an investment of time that always turns out something worth it.
We are done.
So, what is your current lead generation success rate? Compare your ongoing success rate against this approach and share how it impacted you (in comments below).
Waiting to hear from you all.
Did the article make life any simpler for you? If yes, why not be generous and give a few 👏🏻 👏🏻 — As much as 50 maybe :)
Also, if there’s anything you would like us to post about, just comment below and we promise to have it in front of you in our very next post! Till then, Chao!
