A Formula for a Sales System That Consistently Generates New Leads

Business can be very fickle, and many companies find themselves going through a never-ending cycle of feast or famine. If you feel trapped in such a risky setup, what you need is a repeatable system for generating leads and herding them through a sales funnel. Fortunately, there is a proven long-term strategy for avoiding the lean times in a business, and what’s especially great about it is that it does away with the need to waste time and tea on prospects that are not going to pan out.

Instead of concentrating on one lead at a time, this technique has you leveraging your time and putting your efforts toward highly qualified prospects. That’s not to say you ought to abandon other, more traditional sales approaches such as going to events, handing out business cards, and urging your clients to refer you to others. While these can still work, they’re not really scalable.

If you want to keep the leads coming, you need to broaden and automate your marketing. The following are the steps to a tried and tested formula for consistently generating new leads.

Step 1 – Understand who your ideal client is and find your unique value proposition (UVP).

This is where you start. Evaluate your market. See how big it is and determine who your competitors are and how you’re going to stand out. Instead of being a generalist that offers a laundry list of services, get yourself branded to solve specific problems for specific types of clients. Creating one or two buyer personas will really help here so you can be more astute in your marketing efforts.

Step 2 – Craft targeted content for your personas.

Most businesses have blogs, but more often than not, the posts are generic and bland. You want content that stands out and resonates with your target audience. You want something well-written, entertaining, and helpful. It has to be something that provides answers to their problems. You can provide articles, videos, graphics, podcasts, etc. Have one format that you regularly produce, at least once a week, and another one that requires people to give their email address. Of course, your content has to be visible to be effective, so you should have a variety of tactics to drive traffic to it, such as organic search traffic, email, social media, and paid media.

Step 3 – Give away FREE value added content… your LEAD MAGNET.

Whatever your lead magnet may be, you need to have the right elements in place to generate leads. These include:

1. A landing page – This must have a headline that refers to your target audience’s need.
2. A call-to-action – This must be strong enough to compel people to exchange their email address for your value added content.
3. Email nurturing – By using tools like Active Campaign, Mailchimp, or InfusionSoft, you can continue to offer your audience even more free value added content and start to build a relationship.
4. The content itself – Although free to your audience, the lead magnet content must offer high value and immediate gratification. Some great examples of lead magnets are; webinars, resource guide/tool kits, free trial, top tips, cheat sheets and so on. Steps 1 and 2 will help you to define the most relevant lead magnet for your audience. 

Step 4 – Introduce a foot-in-the-door (FITD) offer..

This is something that your lead has to pay for, but it’s quite small, so it’s easy to close. If you were able to carry out all the previous steps correctly, you ought to have some engaged leads at this point and they would like some one-on-one attention from you. Before converting them into clients, first ensure that they’re a good fit for your business with regard to matters such as budget, size, and desired results. The FITD offer will help you determine this. It could come in the form of an audit, a one-on-one workshop, a discovery session, etc. Here’s how you can go about this offer: At the end of the webinar, share some visuals of the offer, indicate its value, and underline its exclusivity. Throw in another lure by saying that you’re offering a free consultation for the first five calls.

Step 5 – Let your gatekeeper do his job.

Calls and emails should go through your gatekeeper for vetting purposes. What or who’s a gatekeeper? He’s the opener to your closer. He will handle inbound leads and put them into your CRM. He’ll ask your leads a lot of questions to learn all about them, figuring out along the way if they’re a good fit or not. Upon his judgment, a lead may or may not proceed to you for your closing. He will book a call with you and the lead before you send a proposal. Your gatekeeper plays a very essential role, so he should be paid a good salary and not just commission.

Step 6 – Close the deal.

You should have a streamlined proposal, so it’s recommended that you use a tool like Panda Doc. Come up with a great template and then load all your content into the library so it can be easily reused. This is in keeping with your aim to automate your sales. With the client on the phone with you, send your proposal.

Step 7 – Make your pitch.

For this all-important call, you need to set a time frame and let your client know what it is, discuss what you know about their goals and challenges, tell the story of your agency, and give them a deadline regarding their answer. Any follow-up will be done by your gatekeeper.

This system frees up a lot of your time and ensures that the time you do spend is actually productive. The traditional methods can still bring in new business, but this particular formula is so much more scalable.

Need support in generating new leads? Give us a call on 01604 491 678 or email us at [email protected]

Written by Chris Anderson

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