What is the best way to reach your audience and create a relationship with them?

 

We offer Business Mailing Lists , industry leading Targeted Sales Leads solutions, Advertising Mailing List information, and Targeted Sales Leads tips. See Marketing Strategies .

 

Where do leads come from? Leads may come from space ads, direct mail, trade show exhibits, point of sale displays, dealers and distributors, salespeople, broadcast advertising, publicity, card deck advertising, customer referrals, unsolicited queries, and other sources. Once you record a lead, you'll want to determine its quality. Find out exactly how they plan to use your product. This latter question can help you cross sell other products or supplies later on.

 

A computer industry survey recently showed that only 8 percent of high tech companies followed up literature requests with telephone calls and not all those calls were successful in qualifying the leads.

 

This is appallingly bad marketing, especially in light of the average cost of the initial mailings, more than $6 each. To be a useful and cost effective source of new business, leads must not be merely generated—they must be qualified and managed. How complex a task that will be depends on how many leads you need to keep your company rolling, the sources of your leads, and the working relationship between your advertising and sales people. As with consumer direct marketing, prospects or leads need to be recorded and tracked in an orderly way; software will help.

 

 

 

Whether you have one salesperson (you) or 20 people in the field, a key to profitable lead management is identifying the best leads early and spending the most resources on them. Furthermore, you will be able to plan the best sales approach when you know a little more about the leads and why they originated.

 

Telemarketing is usually the easiest way to check out the quality of a lead and, at the same time, let the customer know promptly that you're interested in him. People who have responded to your direct mail or print advertising assume they'll receive a response, so a call will be neither unexpected nor unwelcome. Ask whether they have ever seen your product demonstrated. Ask when they think they night be making a purchase.

Sales people complain that advertising produces low quality leads that are sometimes outdated by the time they reach the sales force. One way to avoid these common complaints is to qualify all leads before they go to the sales department. Qualifying and sorting leads quickly, like this, will keep you from wasting time on poor prospects.

 

Continue to track leads until they result in a sale or are no longer active. Your data processing system should remind you when periodic calls need to be made to continuing prospects at various intervals. Ultimately, you should analyze your leads by source to determine their cost effectiveness. For the business illustrated, the chart shows that direct mail generated the most leads and a higher conversion percentage than printadvertising.

 

Advertising people complain that not enough leads are converted to sales and that leads are not acted upon quickly.

 

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