How to Crank Up the Sales Leads

Wouldn't it be fantastic if you had a steady stream of leads coming into your sales department? Wouldn't it be even better if this steady stream were filled with qualified sales leads? This is possible, and it's often achieved by businesses actively working a lead generation strategy that includes both inbound marketing and thought leadership marketing.  

This isn't a quick-fix scheme that I'm trying to sell you to jumpstart your leads in 30 days. Instead, it's a proven strategy that starts with the development of a thought leadership position for your business. With this asset, you can set up an inbound marketing initiative that will help you to get found by interested prospects so you can convert them into sales-ready leads.   

If you commit to inbound marketing, you will significantly improve your inbound sales leads. Rather than go into all the details of exactly how this works (happy to do that outside of this article, just email me at mattsunshine@csscenter.com), I want to give a “plain English explanation” of inbound marketing. After reading, I encourage you to give some thought to how you might implement this in your business to start generating more sales leads.

Step 1: Share Your Expertise  

Create a blog and commit to publishing often. I recommend 2 to 3 times a week, but the rule of thumb is that more is better when it comes to creating and sharing your expertise. When you write, you will want to share your thoughts and opinions with your customers and prospects, on the subjects they care about and count on you to understand. Do this in the spirit of educating rather than selling something, and soon you will start to become a thought leader in your field.

Step 2: Engage Those Most Interested in What You Have to Say

Create ebooks, webinars, white papers, and videos. Again, your goal here is to share your knowledge with your prospects. As your prospects continue to read your articles and download your premium content, they will begin to see you as an expert. When a prospect chooses a business partner, he or she chooses the one seen as the leading expert. So this is important!

Step 3: Give Them a Great Reason to Get in Touch with You

Offer prospects a free consultation or product trial. If someone has been interested enough to read your work, watch your videos, attend your webinars, download your ebooks, and request a free trial or demo, then congratulations, you have a true qualified sales lead!

Maintaining a disciplined approach to generating sales leads is important today. It is too expensive to pay our highly-compensated salespeople to sit in the office because they don’t have any appointments. Using a lead generation strategy like inbound marketing is a great way to help your sales department to crank up the sales-ready leads.