Build A Sustainable Lead Genertion Program
Three Principles to Improve Your Sales Success
In a recent iSales™ workshop, lead generation was one component of the training. A participant asked the question: “How do I fill my pipeline with the right types of leads?” Sales professionals usually spend between 20 to 45% of their time prospecting. Consider an average week. Twenty to forty percent of one’s time spent prospecting equates to approximately 12 hours per week seeking out new business.
In a study we conducted, we found that 31% of the leads in a professional’s pipeline did not fit their ideal customer profile; that means that almost four hours of every week is wasted on chasing leads that will never turn into viable business opportunities. Consider the impact on even a small organization with 10 sales professionals each wasting four hours per week on bad leads – that’s 40 hours per week and 2080 hours per year of wasted time. That equates to 260 days of lost productivity per year. This is staggering!
The challenge for many people and organizations is how to minimize bad leads. Here are three things you can begin doing today to positively impact your success in creating quality new business:
- Establish an Ideal Customer Profile
- Scrutinize new leads based on the Ideal Customer Profile
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Test lead sources before purchasing
1. Establish an Ideal Customer Profile
In the iSales Process™ for New Business Development workshop we teach professionals how to build a unique Ideal Customer Profile. This article is not the proper forum to teach you everything about building your own Ideal Customer Profile, but you can certainly build a good working model. Here is what you need to do:
Put together a list of the top 20% of your customer base. To create Ideal Customer Profile, the first calculation you make is to take your total number of customers for this year and multiply this number by 20% to reach the total number of customers to...
