Marketing is expensive and in a lot of ways mystical. What works and what doesn't is often this most obvious tweak in an image or value message. This is why aggressive sales professionals that thrive on good conversations and building personal relationships quickly grow frustrated trying to create effective and sustainable marketing programs. Luckily, there are individuals that can reduce that frustration and help efficiently stock that pipeline with new potential relationships. Several capable lead providers generating hundreds of thousands of leads per day and can filter and target these customer inquiries specifically to your products and services. The best news is that generally they only charge you on a pay per lead basis. Meaning you only pay when a customer raises their hand for you to call.
As easy as it sounds, pay per lead marketing requires your understanding and tuning of your sales process for real success.
Creating a Pay Per Lead Sales Process
Your sales process today is more than likely highly focused on prospecting and methodically building relationships as you move folks through the sales funnel. In a lot of regards Internet leads, and pay per lead programs in particular, short circuit that process. Often these leads, or customer inquiries, are more like the coveted in-bound and unsolicited call--they are ready to go. They are at a stage in the sales process that they expect immediate response, frequent follow-up if you miss them, detailed information, and minimal time, hassle, and interaction to get the deal done. This probably means you need to alter your sales processes a bit.
You need a system, a lead management system. Typically, this is best accomplished with lead management software, but can be constructed with a disciplined combination of email and spreadsheet lead tracking. This system need to help you create efficiency in key points of pay per lead success: immediate lead receipt from the point of customer inquiry, real time distribution, enforced contact management, and lead tracking. Without these key ingredients you will be wondering why you can't get promised conversions and ROI out of the leads you buy.
Understanding Pay Per Lead Marketing
A significant part of refining your sales process for pay per lead marketing is understanding how it produces a lead and what you have when you receive that lead.
The majority of pay per lead providers use one of two prevailing techniques: email marketing or paid search (pay per click). Both require scale and efficiency. Generally speaking these marketing methods are based on the theory of large numbers and are made or broken by the slightest nuance.
These techniques produce leads in a similar fashion. The idea is to engage a large number of targeted email addresses or Web traffic with a compelling offer or value for submitting a limited amount of personal contact information and details of your request. The ultimate result of this process is generally a well targeted prospect, but because of the simplicity of the offer and low risk to commit only a small percentage will be immediate buyers. Consequently, the sales process and the system to actively follow-up is notably critical.
Evaluating Lead Providers
Understanding the basic elements of the marketing will help you pick a good partner. The key to success in picking the right lead provider is asking a lot of questions.
- How long have you been in business?
- How are the leads I will be buying generated?
- What industries do you generate leads for? What is your expertise?
- What is your return policy?
- What are some of the best practices in working your leads?
In addition, to these basic questions about their leads make sure you do your business research. Validate their business location(s), contact information, and business licenses. Check the better business bureau. Google their company and principles' names. Ask your colleagues and friends in your industry about opinions and perceptions.
Optimizing Your Lead Buying
Once you are ready to begin buying leads optimizing that buy by matching your lead requests (lead filters) to your specific business' products and services is probably one of the biggest hidden secrets of pay per lead buying. Although the information provided by the customer on a 10-20 data point lead is limited it is very robust in targeting your ideal client. Make sure that when you begin buying leads you at a minimum filtering for customers you can truly help--that means matching geography, product attributes, and lead quantity.
As you begin receiving and working leads your investment in lead management will help you continue to optimize your targeting and buying. You will be able to go beyond matching your business and begin matching leads to your specific sales force.
Tracking Leads and Sales
Evolving to that perfect state of getting the perfect leads to the right sales people is completely contingent on great sales lead tracking. The ability to see what happens to each of your purchased leads. What works and what doesn't is critical to process improvement. By tracking your leads and the sales processes that work them you can see opportunities to improve both.
Maximize your lead tracking by defining and consistently tagging your leads with time, date, and action taken. This simple methodology will show you bottlenecks in your sales pipelines and at what point in the funnel customers are falling away. With this data determining marketing or sales as the source of the fall out is a more straight-forward process.
Pay Per Lead Needs a Process
Pay for performance lead generation is an efficient and value-based way of paying for marketing. However, to create consistent and predictable success you need to create a trackable, repeatable process. Make sure you evaluate this marketing approach for your business. Ensure you have a good fit: partner, leads, and sales culture. Then set in place these key processes and watch your success grow.
Contact the Author: Bill Rice Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Bill_Rice |
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