Warm Lead Generation – Leads You Can Close With Half the Effort

Listen to your top salesman when he is working a warm referral lead and it sounds like he’s is talking to his best friend.  His sales pitch never really has to come out of his mouth.  He converses easily, makes a joke or two, listens carefully to the needs of the referral and delivers a soft sales pitch that sounds more like advice.  When the deal closes you often don’t even have a competitive bid on the table,  the specs are clean, the contract negotiations are resolved in one call, and the profit margins are right where you want them to be.

Don’t you wish all your leads were like referrals?

B2B companies waste a ton of energy and money on lead generation.  You buy leads from brokers, hire cold callers, buy targeted email lists and mailing lists.  You put out whitepapers, offer free webinars and seminars and pay for booths at trade shows.  You do close sales from these efforts but its time consuming.  Cold leads have to be nurtured, trust has to be created over time because the lead did not initiate the conversation, they did not choose you, you chose them.  Warm leads are leads your staff can just “take to the hoop.”

While you drain your sales organization chasing these cold leads there are dozens of people every month who have been referred to your business but they never make it into the sales funnel. They cannot find you easily on the web; or they did find your site but it was after business hours and they did not find a form on your site for you to contact them; or they found your site but it makes no sense to them because the messaging is wrong and the site looks like it has not been updated since 2003.

There are dozens more prospects that are actively out there searching the web for the exact service you offer but your site never shows up in their search.  You think they cannot find your site because you did not spend a fortune on pay per click ads and SEO, but you are wrong.  The Pay Per Click campaign you ran in-house in 2008 was targeted to the wrong keywords and sent traffic to a page on your site that could not convert a visitor to a lead.  The search engine optimization you paid for was not much better. Some company charged you a fortune for something called “keyword research” that basically told you what you already knew about keywords you needed to target.  And after six months of trying to “optimize” your site, you got pretty excited when you made it to page 2 for some keywords. But that’s where it ended.

Then you got into social media for a try, but that’s a dry well too – never saw a single sale result from it.

Internet lead generation produces warm low cost leads on a consistent basis when you have a campaign manager that knows what he is doing.  You need to capture every single referral from every single person who ever mentioned your company: on an elevator, on a golf course, or at their kid’s birthday party.  We typically see firms miss half of their referral traffic because they just assume that all of their referred leads eventually find their way into the sales department.  While they are out working a list of cold leads, their referrals –  their very best leads –  are falling through some large cracks.   Referred leads often get hung up just trying to find your site on the web. Sometimes you have a name that is easily confused with another company who shows up higher than yours. Other times referred prospects do find your site, but it’s off hours and your site has no contact form, or the form is hard to find so the prospect tells himself he will get back to the site in the morning but never does.

Or they find your website, it looks like it was put up in 2001 and never updated, or the copy on the site is so laden with jargon and “benefits” that they cannot even figure out what you do. To make matters worse your phone number is buried on the site on a contact page and by the time they find that number something has distracted them.

It’s so much easier to close a warm prospect than a cold one.  Warm prospects are in the market for your products today and are actively seeking information and prices.  They usually have a specific pain point that has to be addressed.   Cold prospects are the “tire kickers” a cold caller drags up, maybe they already have a vendor and want to get another price anyway just to see if they are overpaying.  Or maybe they think that they might want your services at some point down the road.  Cold prospects are often called early stage prospects, the theory being that they have to be “nurtured” until they make up their minds.  But the fact is that even nurtured prospects don’t become a real prospect until they commit to buying and become warm.

How many times have you nurtured a prospect for months and then all of the sudden they need an updated proposal with new specs within three days because they want to make a decision next week? But now they are taking bids from other companies you never even knew were in the running, companies that are picking apart your specs, highlighting your weaknesses, and undercutting your bid.   It may seem like that lead nurturing gets you to the table every now and then, but wouldn’t you give up a stack of leads you are nurturing for a few warm leads that are ready to move on a proposal? Is your staff’s best time spent writing proposals and negotiating deals or is it working a list of leads from three months ago that are still “waiting for budget approval.”

We specialize in capturing warm prospects for you company and we put them on the phone with your sales team or have them fill out a form on your website.  We do this by optimizing your own website so it becomes a lead generation tool.  Leads generated from your own website are typically as warm as they come.  When the leads call, they are reaching out to you at the exact time that they are ready to make a purchase.  They have likely taken a long hard look at multiple pages on your site, they know a bit about your company, they have read a case study or two, and they feel like you are a good fit for them.  You will never get a lead from an email list, a broker, or from a cold caller that is even half as warm as a lead you get from a well optimized website.

These are the five steps we use for generating warm leads for our clients.

1. We help you capture every single referral lead possible.  First, we make sure you are running a low cost pay per click campaign that allows people searching for your business to find you no matter how they spell your company name, no matter how they thought they heard it from a friend.  Most of our clients do not have giant branding campaigns, so people do not instantly recognize their names, but we do make every effort possible to capture your referred leads by making it as easy as possible for them to find you.  We also make sure that your phone number is listed on your search engine “snippet” so that if your prospect is searching for you from a cell phone they don’t even have to go through to your website, they can just tap or grab that number and call your main number.  There are about a half dozen other ways we make sure that referrals end up on the phone with your sales staff, including making sure there are chat buttons,  contact forms, and clearly visible phone numbers in your page headers.  We also make sure that, when a referred prospect lands on your site, they quickly find the content on your site that describes the services they need.  If they come into your site’s home page and find a giant slide show of stock photos and feeds of recent press releases, they may just give up there. Or they may go to your menu bar and find a drop down menu for “services” with everything on it but what they are looking for.

2.  We drive traffic to your site from search engines, directories, blog posts, and social media – but we only do this after your site is ready for that traffic.  We also drive the lowest cost, highest converting traffic first, and by low cost we always include the resources it takes from your staff to generate and nurture that lead.  Twitter, Facebook, and Linked in are free traffic sources, but if you have to pay your staff an hour a day to maintain those channels you need to justify that time investment with some real results that are actual sales generated from those sources.  Oftentimes you will see traffic generated from those sites that has nothing to do with sales – about 80% of your LinkedIn traffic are job seekers not prospects, so don’t equate traffic with sales. Of course the lowest cost highest performing traffic is always traffic that comes to your site from people searching on your name.  The second most effective source of traffic is the free traffic or low cost traffic you get from directories such as Google Places or free industry directories like Microsoft’s PinPoint directory for Microsoft Partners.

3. We help you optimize your site so that it appeals to the warm prospect;  so that it builds confidence that your firm is the right one to fill their needs.  We help you create strong calls to action that are located in places on the site where prospects can easily find them.  We help you turn all the internal pages of your site into “landing pages” that give a prospect a complete picture of your firm’s capabilities to deliver on that particular product.  We help you create a home page that captures the most search engine traffic and then pushes the visitors from your homepage out on the internal pages of your site that specifically address the needs of the prospect.

4. We comb all the data in your campaign and look for opportunities and problems.  We look for errors on your site, slow loading pages, and forms that don’t function properly;   we look for new keywords that show in your Google Analytics that we may want to target;  we look for other keywords we may want to block from an AdWords campaign because we are paying 14 dollars a click for “Great Plains Indians” when we want clicks for “Great Plains Software”.

5. We bring you new ideas to improve your campaign every month. We’ll also have you test the use of chat on your site, which can generate an 8-fold increase in leads if you have the staff to maintain it.  We set up a low cost retargeting banner campaign to bring first time visitors back to your site.  We’ll suggest you develop sales collateral that attracts traffic and holds visitors’ attention such as demo videos, case studies, blog posts, and recorded interviews with your staff.  Behind the scenes we are always updating and optimizing your campaigns incorporating all the latest research based on real time split tested campaigns.

Why waste time chasing leads that are easy to get, but hard to close? You can buy leads, hire a cold caller, or convince yourself that a “hand raise” for a white paper is a lead.  Or you can let us help you generate warm leads,  leads that allow your sales team to “Always Be Closing” (in the immortal words of Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross)

Here are some examples of our work with large and small businesses:

Microsoft – We created six separate group blogs for over one hundred Microsoft Gold Partners. The sites generate mid market ERP and CRM software leads at 1/5th the cost of an AdWords Campaign. Visit one of the blogs at www.erpsoftwareblog.com .

Volvo Rents - A division of Volvo Construction Equipment with 80 stores nationwide. We created the site structure and lead capture systems and have provided SEO and SEM for the site since its launch in April of 2010.  The site now generates over 300 leads per week.

Dr. Alex Jamieson is a chiropractor in Philadelphia who never has to worry again about advertising because we completely manage his online presence. He is number one in pay-per-click on all the major search engines for his top keywords. He is also number one in natural search and on Google and Yahoo map listings. He gets over 40 new patients per month from the web and never has to think about marketing because we bring him new ideas all the time to improve his marketing. His ROI on ad spend, including our fees, is over 500%.

Sam Geller of Marriagebyproxy.com had a problem late in 2010 as his sales slipped when visitor traffic from his top listings on Google and Yahoo plummeted. New competitors came into the market and they were splitting up the traffic and undercutting his prices.  With no obvious solution in sight, we worked with Sam on about six different ideas, each of which took a month to implement.  We never charged him an extra dime for our services because Sam was one of our first clients and we feel a deep loyalty to him.  We finally found a way to generate steady targeted traffic with social media (sorry we cannot be more specific).  We also improved his conversion rates with  improvements to the ad copy on his website. Some of these ideas came from Sam and some came from us. We don’t just “optimize” campaigns with technical know how;  we are always experimenting with the latest Internet marketing methods;  we also listen closely to our clients, learn about their businesses, and work together to create campaigns that dominate their market niches.

Please call Dave Foreman at 888-800-0999 and allow him to create a five minute video that reviews your website. He will give you specific recommendations to improve lead conversion rates and drive more search traffic to your site.