Two of the biggest mistakes sales and marketing teams make are giving up too early on prospects and relying only on a few tried-and-true lead generation techniques. If a sales rep doesn’t get a response after a few emails or cold calls, they assume the prospect isn’t interested and they move on. More often than not, however, the prospect’s lack of response has little to do with interest and everything to do with awareness, understanding, and attraction.
In fact, when a sales and marketing team struggles to generate leads, I’ve found that it has a lot to do with their failure to proactively educate and nurture prospects on business issues before they become a problem. You might hear some sales and marketing experts refer to this approach as “awareness campaigns” or “warming techniques,” but I like to call them “Attraction Strategies.”
Specifically, I think there are 14 unique Attraction Strategies that can be linked together to improve Recognition ROI and, as a result, closing ratios. In my book, “The Sales Magnet,” I lump these strategies into three categories that I call the “Attraction Trifecta.” Here’s how that trifecta breaks down:
- Personal Attraction Strategies
- Personalized emails
- Hand-written letters
- Post cards
- Networking events
- Phone pursuit
- Digital Attraction Strategies
- Social media
- Social networking
- Articles and blog posts
- eNewsletters
- Collaborative Attraction Strategies
- Local events
- Online PR
- Offline PR
- Alliance partnering
- Online events
Now, for these Attraction Strategies to be most effective, you’ll want to link several of them together to create a campaign that broadens your reach and recognition across your target market.
Here’s how it can work.
If you’re a sales rep who knows that prospects in your target market respond to a more personal approach, then you might attend a local event, follow-up with a series of hand-written letters, and send emails that encourage prospects to check out your blog.
If you’re in marketing, you might create a nurturing email campaign personalized to the target market and include links to compelling blog posts on your website. You have sales team follow up with calls to everyone who clicks through several times and throughout the campaign, you use social media to engage others in the target market who may not be included on your email list.
Ultimately, taking this approach will broaden your base of contacts, increase your perception of value in the market, and put you in a better position to join conversations where and when they’re happening. At the KLA Group, we like to call this a “Connected Lead Generation Strategy” (check out this link for a free infographic that breaks down this process). At the end of the day, there are many tools at your disposal. But to leverage them successfully, you need a detailed lead generation strategy that gets you in front of prospects before issues arise. Do that and high quality leads will follow.
