Lead Generation, cont'd

The most cold calls I’ve seen in practice is 100/day. That’s one every 6 minutes without stop for ten straight hours. Using an industry average of 2-3% hit rate, this will generate at most 2-3 leads per day assuming that the sales person can continue to make 100 cold calls per day, every day on the month. Taking a half day to actually make real sales calls would deflate the sales lead productivity tremendously.

Now I also know that it is impossible to sustain 100 cold calls/day. I challenge anyone to prove to me that for a month straight, this level of cold calling cvan be produced. I will send $100 to anyone who can prove this to me.

However, it should be obvious that the sales lead acquisition cost for cold calling is abysmal.

Today, the most cost efficient and effective means to generate sales leads is the following:

1. Make yourself easy to find by search engine optimizing your website with professionally researched keywords implemented in the website copy, blogs, and emails

2. Write an intelligent whitepaper on a subject of general interest written by a true expert in your field and devoid of anything even remotely similar to a “sales pitch”

3. Make the whitepaper available on several places on the website including the primary landing page in exchange for an email address (just an email address…think low friction!)