Anyone who has worked in a sales function, runs or manages a business knows that successful lead generation is one of the primary factors behind ongoing success. Sometimes leads come easily, either through recommendation, a directory listing or purely by chance. However, for the most part, modern businesses need to get smart with the ways and means of drumming up new lines of enquiry, nurturing those leads and turning them into sales.
Years ago in the days of Bingo card responses it seemed easy to get leads – although there was certainly an element of never mind the quality, feel the width! Not that they were necessarily followed up! (If there was a pound for every time I heard “We must do something with this pile of magazine bingo leads!”…)
Today, however, while page advertising is excellent for branding and awareness it is no longer top of the list when it comes to generating enquiries. Online ads and pay-per-click can do a great job – as can press releases and articles – but the importance of online activities such as blogging, search engine optimisation and social media in providing highly effective, measurable, methods of reaching out to customers in an engineering environment cannot be ignored.
The secret of success is to generate content and share it, use call to action buttons on your emails and websites, and create a sales funnel that will allow you to develop and turn your hard won leads into business.
Our ebook “Everything You Need to Know About Successful Lead Generation” was created using the results of a survey of over 4,000 companies that generated almost 10 million leads in 2012. In it we examine this data and apply the results to marketing for engineers, demonstrating how you can significantly increase your sales.
