5 Practical Ways to Get Leads

One of the fundamental things every business needs for sales growth is qualified sales leads. As a result, your marketing and sales teams may be in a never-ending discussion. Also, we know, there’s an immense amount of noise, including ads, emails, and of course, social media.

As a result, your marketing team does everything to bring in new prospects, but the sales team says they’re not qualified. The chances are you’ve sat in meeting after meeting trying to figure out how to get leads—sales qualified ones.

Problem: Every company needs qualified sales leads. As a result, marketing and sales teams spend a lot of time figuring out the magic formula. As every business leader knows, marketing and sales are inextricably linked, and you can’t have one without the other. However, the reality is that marketing must bring qualified leads. The question is how.

Opportunity: Unfortunately, business leaders spend a lot of time looking at options outside their company. However, most businesses have the secret weapon right in their companies, but they don’t see it. The most significant opportunity is to pause and look within the company instead of exclusively looking outward.

Solution: The secret weapon most businesses have for obtaining qualified leads is right in their CRM. Yes, your database. Want to know how to cut through the noise of social, paid ads, and emails? First and foremost, look at your database. Doing so gives you the base of contacts to generate more leads. So, let’s explore how to get more leads with what you already have on hand.

Why Your CRM Already Has the Answers for Qualified Sales Leads

Like many other companies, perhaps in your business, there’s always tension between the marketing and sales teams. A chasm exists, it seems, for many companies between those two units. One of the primary reasons for it is because marketing raises awareness for the brand and provides the sales team with leads.

Meaning, the marketing team does its thing with ads, direct response, and social media. But, their definition of conversions differs from that of the sales team, affecting your revenue growth.

For example, conversions for the marketing team could mean when anyone asks for information about your product or services. However, for sales, unless the person requesting the information is a qualified buyer, it’s just a time suck for them.

Often, they’ll get on the phone and find themselves with a prospect who’s just kicking the tires. Or perhaps they’ll go down the proverbial rabbit hole with someone that seems like a big prospect, but that person already knows in their minds the company they want to provide the service—and it’s not yours. All they’re doing is the process due diligence of getting three bids.

There’s an answer for how to get leads and qualified ones. It’s as simple as going back to what and who you know, and it’s right in your CRM. The reality is that the value of your company is in your database. It’s not the walls or even the products or services you offer.

The gold is in your database. It’s in all your contacts, and you could use them to generate more sales leads for business—today. Instead of looking outward, why not look at what you have in front of you and take a turn to maximize it?

1. Review ‘Closed Won’ Deals and Sharpen the Content Marketing

As we know, your clients’ journey and customer experience are essential to your revenue growth. So, if you want to get more results out of your marketing, leading to more qualified leads, you need to start at that point. Look at the closed sales and examine their journeys through your funnel. Moreover, one of the best ways to understand what your customers experienced on the journey is to ask them.

So, don’t be shy about sending surveys and questionnaires and incentivize them to reply by providing give-aways or discounts. When you look at your current customers and how they converted to sales, your marketing team has a chance to refine the content marketing, increasing the opportunities for qualified leads.

2. Follow-Up with Past Clients to Determine New Opportunities

Who are your best leads? The answer is that it’s your current and past clients. Therefore, as we explore how to get leads, consider your past clients. They bought from you, and the chances are that you may have a new product or service they could use. One of the fundamental sales rules is never to allow your past and current clients cold.

Unfortunately, that is one of the most significant mistakes that happens repeatedly. Often sales teams think that once they close, that’s it, and they move on. However, that’s when the customer journey starts with your company, and if you nurture those relationships, you could upsell them.

3. Reach Out to ‘Closed Lost’ Leads and Explore a New Chance

Just because you may have a long list of ‘closed lost’ doesn’t mean that all are lost. In fact, that list still offers you an immense opportunity for revenue growth. For instance, the closed lost may not have yet been ready for what you provided at the time you closed them. Or, they had another leadership team that’s no longer at the company.

Perhaps since you last spoke to them, you created new product lines or refined how you deliver your services. Whatever the case, your closed lost prospects should get reviewed by your sales team. Also, you should include your marketing operations group to see about treating them with unique campaigns.

4. Capture and Organize Sales Objections to Inform Changes

When leads give you sales objections, it’s only the first step in the process. The fact of the matter is that you want to hear objections because they help you understand what you need to do to overcome them. People new to sales don’t realize that personal bias and past experiences often influence objections.

Still, objections are an excellent chance to glean information and should always inform your sales team. Institute a policy of capturing, organizing, and regularly reviewing all objections. Doing so will not only educate and inform your sales team, but it’ll also give clarity to the marketing, finance, product development, and operations teams what the market thinks. Inevitably you could make informed changes as needed.

5. Review Your Database and Develop Targeted Sales Campaigns

Look at your database and create targeted list campaigns for your past clients, leads, and even your current clients for upselling them. The reality is that we live in an era of high customization. Technology allows for in-depth messaging not only for groups of people but for individuals themselves. Therefore, you can’t treat everyone the same.

Review your database and create special sales campaigns customized to your leads based on predictive analytics. When you use potent technology tools, you can maximize your marketing efforts, which leads to qualified leads for your sales team.

In sum, think of your database as a living and breathing technical organism. In other words, if you use it every day, it should change and evolve as your business grows and develops. Ultimately, it means that you need to make it a point to regularly see what opportunities exist within your database to maximize and refine content marketing, leading to boosted sales and for new service and product lines.

---

Ben Stroup is Chief Growth Architect and President at Velocity Strategy Solutions where he helps leaders design, develop, and deploy smarter business growth strategies. Ben is a futurist, disruptor, and data champion. He leads a team that takes a structured learning approach to business challenges, which allows them to assist leaders in bridging the gap between ideas, innovation, and revenue—taking ideas from mind to market.

Velocity Strategy Solutions is an on-demand, next-generation business strategy and management consulting firm which provides clients with a relentless focus on data, execution, and results that positively impact the bottom line. Velocity delivers integrated people and revenue strategies combined with a disciplined approach to growth architecture that elevates the capacity of leaders, teams, and organizations to succeed and win more.