Lead generation is all about attracting, capturing and sorting prospects. In turn, you’ll create opportunities for meaningful interaction with those prospects, hopefully leading to an eventual sale.

But leads are not disposable commodities. Today’s leads are tomorrow’s (or next month’s or next year’s) buyers. The goal of lead generation is to create a workable prospect database that you can effectively and efficiently market to over time, even if they don’t buy something on the first go-round.

A study done by the Association of Sales Executives revealed that 81% of all sales happen on or after the fifth contact. Even when people show interest in your product, they usually don’t want a pushy sales call right away. They need time to work through the process.They are the ones who decide when they are ready to buy.

So how do you engage with them until they are ready to buy? The answer is follow-up.

When you focus on follow-up (nurture), you’ve got a productive pipeline that can yield new customers month after month (and year after year) as long as you keep it moving forward.

The Cold, Hard Facts

Here is an incredible stat: According to Focus.com, nurtured leads make 47% larger
purchases than non-nurtured leads. But, according to the same study, fewer than
10% of businesses are using their platform to follow up with prospects after the initial communication.

That’s a whole lot of businesses who are missing out on a whole lot of revenue. We don’t want that to happen to you, so we’ve outlined a few principles that will help you keep your follow-up on track.

Think Like a Marketer, Not a Salesperson

To educate your leads the right way, you’ve got to think like a marketer. Most small businesses think differently; they think like salespeople.

There’s nothing wrong with thinking like a salesperson, and most business owners can find decent success with a sales mentality. But it also means that there will be ups and downs, good months and bad months, easy rent payments and difficult ones. There’s an ever-present stress that comes with a sales mentality, and it can haunt the entrepreneur day and night.

We have to make the shift from hunter (thinking outbound) to harvester (thinking inbound). You’ll enjoy sustainable, long-term success that doesn’t rely on your personal sales skills (even though you are probably pretty darn good at closing a deal).

Understand the Future Value of Your Leads

Effective lead generation means understanding the real value of a lead. This all goes back to the bedrock principle of marketing that says, “People buy when they’re ready to buy, not when you’re ready to sell.”

When you understand this principle, you realize that acquiring new customers is all about timing. And just because a lead is not ready to buy from you today does not mean that person will not buy from you in the future. Today’s leads are tomorrow’s (or next week’s or next month’s) buyers.

The digital revolution has brought about many changes in our lives. While the public appears extremely willing to adopt the latest and latest tech trends, others are less obliging. Especially one as large as the Music Industry. Sales statistics have been changing at an alarming rate as of late, as most people are preferring to only receive digital copies of their favorite music albums, and less interested in lugging around piles of CD’s and figuring where to store them when their music preferences change 5 years later. But as music slowly transitions towards this medium, there are other battles to fight.

The challenge with movers is they often have only 1 location outside the main city center but they service dozens of Cities inside their metropolitan area which they don’t rank for in the Google Maps Results. We’ve created physical sales offices to cover ALL the locations they service and increased visibility over 1000% and sending them massive quantities of Quality leads on a daily basis.

#2 – Facial Plastic Surgeon Encino V’s 317,000 other sites.

We rank 2 times on page 1 of Google. Having the video also show up on the first page will increase traffic but more importantly is increases conversions around 200-300%.

#1 Result V’s 47,400,000 Other sites! Client sells feathers online, we’ve been ranking #1 for this keyword term for 2 years now. Also undergone a full site re-design in 2011.

#1 V’s 12,600,000 Million other sites! Client is an online Feather wholesaler and generates allot of traffic from this keyword. We also rank page 1 for 100′s of others.

Ulthera is a very popular new non surgical treatment offered by Plastic Surgeons around the country. We got Dr Persky ranked #1 and his video on the first page in May 2011 and look at the results he’s been getting ….

Search Results…