Chapter 7
If you are serious about scaling up your business, then winning new customers must be part of your overall strategy. Lead Generation refers to the number of new enquiries your business generates from advertising and other marketing activities.
You can’t make a sale without first attracting the attention of someone who is interested in your product, so think of lead generation as the first half of the process of creating a new customer.
Lead generation is the Key that most people focus on, because it’s an obvious place to start if you want to grow your business. Who doesn’t want more customers, after all? But beware that it is often the most expensive and difficult of the Seven Keys to increase.
Generating new leads requires some form of advertising or promotional activity (remember that Referrals are dealt with separately under Key number Six). The good news is that there are many, many different ways of promoting your business to potential customers and new opportunities are cropping up all of the time.
There’s newer media like Facebook, Twitter, Google, YouTube and LinkedIn. Or you could go old school with newspaper and magazine ads, radio or TV commercials, or even dynamic signs. Some of my clients are using flyers and getting excellent results.
Cold calling is very unpopular, but businesses are still doing it, along with text messaging, email marketing and of course, the humble sales letter. You could raise the profile of your business by engaging a public relations agency or sponsoring events in your local community.
Now, these are all good ideas, but here’s the problem: if you launch into any of these activities without a clear strategy for what you want to achieve, your results are going to be mixed, at best. You’ll probably end up wasting money.
The truth is, before you even start thinking about which advertising channels to use, you need to know who you are trying to reach. And before you create your first ad, you must be clear about exactly what message you want to communicate. And what you want people to do after they’ve received your message.
To ensure that you have the fundamentals covered, I’ve created the Lead Generation Engine. The LGE has four components: Market, Message, Media and Measurement.