How do you stop generating the garbage leads and get the Mitch and Morey leads, the GOOD Leads?
Demand Generation is all of the promotional marketing activities that lead to additional parties being added at the top of your sales pipeline. In my experience, if you want to maximize your Demand Generation, you must strategically structure your lead generation programs around Best Practices and continually tweak them to ensure that you and your team will generate results. Here are some good Best Practices.
Start by performing a quick assessment of your organization’s current Demand Generation capabilities. Identify your team’s strengths, weaknesses, and gaps. Develop a plan to address the gaps by going after the easiest gaps to close first, and closing them. Then move on to the next priority, and so on. Keep moving forward!
Prepare a Strategic Demand Generation Plan based on the tactics, messages, media, timelines and your budget. Consider your available resources to follow-up on each investment, and plan to follow-up in a timely fashion. If you cannot follow-up in a timely manner to each investment, then don’t make the investment. Common sense, right? You’d be amazed how often it doesn’t happen the way it should.
Ensure the alignment of your sales team and your marketing team in pursuing lead generation campaigns. When strongly aligned, sales and marketing organizations agree about how to define leads, how to determine an appropriate lead status and how to track and monitor the lead development process. Don’t let sales and marketing counter-act one another’s best efforts. Get them to raise the level of their games together and hold them equally accountable for results.
Identify a clear and concise understanding of the source of your best leads. Find out where your top customers have come from and which messages helped them to become interested in your company and your solutions.
Next, perfect your message and deliver it often via many media outlets. Engage your subject matter experts (SMEs) to ensure that your message is crisp, customer focused and is presented in the context of a solution to a customer’s known pain.
Employ a solid web marketing tool that is integrated to your website and to your CRM systems. This will ensure that your team has the tools to allow them to properly nurture all leads that are generated and track all lead nurturing activity
I hope these best practices give you some good ideas and the confidence to try something different with your Demand Generation activities TODAY!
