Lead generation is the biggest single challenge for a small company moving from selling strictly to friends and family of the founding tram to a broader market.
The most common approach is to look for seasoned salespeople who have a Rolodex™ in the target market and a professed appetite for cold calling and mass mailing/emailing. The sales person is given 3-6 months to produce results and if they can’t, a replacement is found.
Just yesterday, I received a call from a Japanese telecommunications company who was looking for “hunter sales people“ in the NYC metro with relationships at target companies and an “ability to cold call all day long”. This search is repeated, I’m sure many times over, on any given day.
This old school approach is tired, expensive, and largely ineffective. Here’s why…
I have implemented eight SEO based, demand pull projects over the past year. In two accounts, website generated sales leads grew from 2 or 3 per month to 346/month in one case and 247/month in the other in a 3 month period. The cost of the 100X growth in sales leads was only the cost of my consulting effort to implement the program. The other accounts all had substantial sales lead increases although not as dramatic as these two. Both accounts offered a whitepaper written by a domain expert on a current topic of interest and used PR/Web to promote this availability creating persistent and link backs to the client website across the Internet.
So, roughly these sites generated 12-15 sales leads per day for every one of 20 business days in a month.
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