Where Will Your Next Lead Come From?
Brenda Sexton
For the past 20 years,
we have worked with companies in all types of industries. Despite
the various markets, we have discovered a
common denominator among the businesses
that continued to flourish … aggressive
marketing and a consistent message.
A professionally designed image and message is especially crucial
in the business-to-business market.
Business professionals
are flooded daily with advertisements and marketing slogans. Having
a common graphic look to materials as well
as an effective marketing strategy
that penetrates the advertising bombardment is necessary in today’s
competitive marketplace. However, even if you attract initial interest,
many companies succeed
or stagnate based upon how well their
company tracks and follows up on leads. With marketing budgets
becoming increasingly lean, the
issue of channel development for leads
has never been more important.
Tracking leads is more
than just counting the number of inquiries or hits to a certain
advertisement or medium. Tracking should involve
an entire strategy that starts with
lead generation and follows up to track actual sales. Certain advertising
vehicles can generate
a lot of initial attention, but if
they don’t generate qualified
leads that result in sales, they are
not the best place for the majority of your advertising dollars.
Therefore, it is important to analyze
the cost per sale as well as cost per
lead.
In our experience, it is important to assign an individual or department
to input marketing data and calculate the results. Secondly, you
need to develop a lead development system. This can be a simple process
of handling incoming calls and then tracking the leads with the assistance
of the sales team, or a large lead tracking system that involves
hundreds of phone numbers and telemarketing personnel.
Case Study: Medium-Sized Manufacturer Targeting Engineers
One example of a simple lead generation
system was a medium-size manufacturing
company that spent the majority of their advertising dollars on large full
color print advertisements
in trade publications. Their system
involved training three key people to answer phone inquiries about the
company. They would
ask, “How did you hear about us,” qualify the lead
and then transfer the qualified client to a salesperson. They simply
tracked the number of calls on a spreadsheet, wrote down the number
of qualified leads, and then worked with the sales team to determine
if the prospect ultimately ended up purchasing the company’s
product. Additionally, these three employees would follow up with
magazine “request for information” cards that were
sent monthly from the trade publications.
Together the three employees would count the total number of leads
from both the phone and the
request cards, list the number under
the appropriate ad and continue to follow up with sales. As part
of the spreadsheet, the team would
show the cost of the advertisement
and then determine the following: cost per lead, cost per qualified
lead and cost per sale. They
simply divided the total number of
leads, qualified leads and sales into the cost of the advertisement.
Calculating the cost per lead and cost per sale gives marketing
cost for each advertising channel. This step is crucial. Some channels
may produce a high number of leads but a low number of sales. Some
channels may be expensive, but when divided by the number of sales
they produce, they are more cost effective than less expensive channels
that produce fewer sales.
In the above example,
after tracking the cost per lead and the cost per sale, it was
discovered that the company’s ¼-page,
black and white advertisements, were
generating a significantly more amount of sales than the 4-color,
2-page spread advertisements. As
a result, the company realized significant
savings in advertising expense and yet generated more business.
Case Study: Private Healthcare Company
Another example of a lead generation
system is a private healthcare company
that spends millions of dollars on television, print, radio and Internet
advertising. After
developing a professional slogan,
color scheme, logo, graphics and appearance, they established an extensive
lead tracking system
to maximize every dollar spent. Each
advertising vehicle, from national print ads to regional television spots,
is assigned a
separate toll-free phone number.
The company then contracts a telemarketing company to keep track of the
total number of incoming calls, qualify
the calls and transfer the leads
to the company’s headquarters.
At this point, a well-trained staff
member handles the leads and continues to track results. The internal staff
keeps exact records
on the status of each lead and works
with the sales department to print detailed monthly reports. These reports
include the raw
numbers as well as the cost per lead,
cost per qualified lead and cost per sale. As a result, the company can
not only determine
which marketing vehicle generates
the most sales, but they can also determine when an advertisement has lost
its appeal, if color
or black and white generates more
interest, and a myriad of other key factors that continually shape their
marketing efforts.
Track your Web Site
Whoever is in charge of tracking marketing
costs should also regularly review
the statistics of your web site. You should be able to tell not only how
many hits you are getting,
but the principle key words that
were used in a search find you, how many pages a prospect looked at, which
search engine they used
to find you, and which sites were
the primary referring sites – key
if you are doing any web advertising.
One of the most important things these statistics will tell you
is from what page the visitor exited. You want them to exit on the
contact us page indicating they made an inquiry that could be followed
up by a sales person. Development of your site should be designed
to increase this number. Web sites should fall under the same scrutiny
as any other lead development channel. The cost of development of
the site, hosting and maintenance need to be divided by the number
of sales the site produces.
Web site effectiveness,
however, is more difficult to track that other forms of media,
which takes us back to a crucial step – asking
prospects where they heard about your
company and did they do any web site research. Depending on whom
is doing the study, as many
as 65 percent of purchases are RESEARCHED
on the web, even though the query is made via phone. Unless someone
asks prospects if they
have visited your web site, you will
only have the emails from the contact us button to judge the effectiveness
of your web site. Since
most web sites are used by prospects
for research as opposed to direct inquiries, unless you ask prospects
if they have visited your site,
you may not be getting a true picture
of how the site is working for you.
Don’t
Forget Word of Mouth
Finally, you want to find a way to
track “word of mouth” leads. As most business owners
know, word of mouth is the least expensive, but most effective
form of advertising. By knowing whom is doing the referring, you
will not only know how to reward the source, but you will also
determine better ways to stimulate additional “word of mouth” referrals.
Track Leads through Relationships
Whether it is a great referral source
or an internal sales person, make sure to reward your best performers.
Make sure you reward relationship channels that develop leads that
perform for you.
“Ideas will only get you so far these days. Count on personal
relationships to carry your farther. The new economy is not just
about the exchange of information. It’s about the exchange
of relationships.” – Pam Alexander, CEO Alexander Ogilvy
Public Relations
If a publication is pulling
for you, “reward” that publication’s
sales rep with a gift certificate, special gift or send a small “recognition” to
the editor. You can bet that publication
will now strive to see that you get the best possible placement and
that your product or service
is mentioned as much as possible in
the editorial content of the
publication.
If an existing client
refers someone to you, “reward” that
client. This will assure that they will call you again the next time
they hear of anyone in the market for your goods or services. If
a trade show has been particularly successful for you, “reward” your
sales rep. Again, this person is in
a position to get you favorable placement and write-ups.
Popular incentives are gift certificates or gift albums. If someone
has small children, a seasonal decoration is much appreciated. Even
a thank you card can go a long way.
In conclusion, without effective lead tracking, you spend money
haphazardly without any real direction. Tracking lead producing channels
allows your business to develop cost-effective avenues to produce
the greatest number of sales.