A Quality New Lead Stream Can Propel Your Business to Revenue Records. Let Our Experts Use Fresh Brains & Contemporary Approaches to Harvest Well-Stocked Pools of Relevant Buyers
- Jul 27, 2024
- The Big Innovations Team
- Tampa, Florida
Most companies constantly search for quality, new lead streams. Discover even ONE of good size and record revenue should follow... probably for many years. The process to find new lead streams is widely varied and leans on a dynamic mix of experience, art, science, deduction, technology, HARD WORK, fresh brains, intelligence and yes, some luck too. There are a number of tactics common to many searches...
7 PROVEN NEW LEAD STREAM DISCOVERY TACTICS
1. Use in-depth customer research: we are always encouraging our clients to get closer to their customers. If you get really close- that is, you accumulate a great deal of intelligence about your customer database- you can apply database mining, information overlays and a number of modern profiling techniques to identify new lead opportunities sometimes hiding in plain sight. This is a very effective way to target new markets or market segments, develop terrific new products they will want to buy, etc.
A company might sell to a market segment defined by certain demographics. For example, one of our clients sells an information product to aggressive investors who are mostly male, 45-65 years old, married, homeowners, etc. Their principal lead source is lists from competitors who sell a similar product.
Their simple demographic profile didn't really offer a lot of differentiation, meaning they didn't have enough information to make hidden nuggets stand out from the crowd.
A little in-depth customer research revealed a large number of these buyers happened to be firemen- an unexpected discovery that was perceived to be an intuitive mismatch for the product until our research proved otherwise.
As a result, the company discovered a completely new, narrowly-defined pool of leads that would turn out to be a lucrative source of sales. It was easy (and cheap) to source and sort out direct response marketing lists of only relevant firemen and very specifically promote them. Doing so maximizes marketing ROI because...
Costs are significantly reduced with such NARROW marketing focus... and an audience of willing buyers will open their wallets.
Had this client not engaged in the research, they would have NEVER noticed that segment, nor would it have been likely for them to guess their way into it. There's always gold to be mined; the trick is knowing how and where to look. We know. Let us help you!
2. Use in-depth competitor research: while it is extraordinarily logical to keep an eye on the competition, many companies don't do this very well. Worse, corporate egos, internal rah-rah, etc, can breed foolish mentalities
like "we do EVERYTHING better than our competitors," implying there is nothing to be learned from the competition.
Meanwhile, those competitors have a bunch of very bright people spending all day, every day working just as hard & maybe harder... searching for great new sources of business too. Ignoring or discounting them for company rah-rah means their discoveries will remain exclusively theirs... and only their business will grow from those discoveries.
Investing in a good model of ONGOING competitive analysis will give you the opportunity to catch such discoveries as early as possible. For example, promoting directly to firemen involved running what appeared to be out-of-place ads in firemen publications. There, among ads for fire equipment, fireman-oriented educational offerings, etc, they were exposed to ads for an investor product.
Good competitive analysis can notice the "crazy" things competitors are doing. If they are spending money to do it, chances are high it's not so crazy.
Detect their "crazy" early and you can share in their newfound bounty...
... actually using the work of THEIR own talent to help YOUR business grow. OR ignore them and leave all that new revenue & profit to your competitor. Choose wisely.
3. Look within: one of the best sources of new leads is your front line sales and/or service people, as well as any other employees who directly interface with customers. We always want to work with them when we are engaged to help a company grow because they are typically a treasure trove of great ideas begging for a non-threatening outlet.
They are also the ones generally charged with finding new business for their employers... so some of them may be experimenting in their own ways to uncover new buyers. One or more of them may find a lucrative source that doesn't come out because they aren't asked... or are afraid to tell. Consider this example...
A jewelry retailer was particularly impressed with some very big ticket transactions by a small selection of deep-pocketed customers (think corporate titans and pro athletes). One or two of these transactions could make a retail store's entire month- a very exciting scenario considering that it would typically take SEVERAL HUNDRED normal transactions to accomplish the same.
In hopes of winning more of this kind of business, they decided to shift their marketing budget & energy into positioning themselves as the chain for the very affluent. High brow models were used in their new advertising to imply that the elite shopped their stores. Marketing keyed to the biggest-ticket offerings instead of what was traditionally sold by this chain.
In spite of a great effort, big sales growth from this newly-targeted audience did not manifest. Why?
We worked with the top salespeople at the front lines noticing that they tended to let other sales personnel approach "the suits" (those who appeared to be the newly targeted prospects), but would practically jump over the cases to get at those who appeared to be of more modest means.
The front lines knew that the suits were often very difficult transactions. Genuine corporate titans & pro athletes in search of big ticket items while shopping in retail malls were few and far between. Most of "the suits" were middle manager or below, cash strapped, keep-up-with-the-Joneses credit risks, etc.
However, the middle-class prospect was quicker to buy and could often spend as much on each unit as this type of "suit." In a nutshell, the front-line employees knew where the company's bread was buttered. Had the company asked... and listened to THEM, all the expense in a mismatched strategic thrust could have been saved... or been better directed at those who are actually the more lucrative customers... and who are available in good numbers, unlike those few-and-far-between mega deals.
The point of this story: it's very easy for those disconnected from the front lines to lose sight of important concepts like customer profiles and even what sells best (and why). But those right at the point-of-sale always know. They are striving for sales every day... and attempting to deal with new objections and competitive challenges as they happen. If you (regularly) ask them, you gain insights that are much closer to target than anything a disconnected district, regional or executive manager can know.
4. Strategically monitor anomalies: most companies work in the (right) NOW, finding it very difficult to step back and observe... especially from a strategic level. Back when online shopping was still a toddler concept attempting to find its legs, we worked with a company that was very good at turning a list of relevant leads into lucrative sales. The sole limiting factor was volume of leads. Their approach was to blast out some marketing promoting their products, then have the sales team follow up via phone to talk the prospects through each promotion. This model worked exceedingly well.
Meanwhile, their new website was kicking out a number of information requests every day from interested parties all over the world. The quantities of these new leads were consistently growing month after month. Of course, this new lead source was shared with the sales team, but conversions were very poor. The assumption quickly became that Internet leads was a weak lead source, not worth much telesales effort.
We were charged with trying to find a NEW, robust lead stream. Again, the problem was not converting leads into revenue... they just didn't have enough QUALITY lead flow from the existing sources. So we dug in. We too quickly discovered the ever-growing pile of leads coming in via their website. And again, we were told that those leads would not convert... that they were a poor source of opportunity.
First thought: "A bird in hand..." Besides...
We like the tough- even "impossible"- marketing challenges! Bring 'em on!
So while working through our process that would ultimately drive our best shot at new lead source discovery, we started working that bird-in-hand problem as an aside. Our observations identified some key anomalies:
- many of these prospects were outside the typical market of North America, but the telesales call times were heavily linked to domestic work hours. What if sellers adapted to buyer time zones?
- the proven model of sending them a promotion and following that up with a telesales call was not being implemented; instead, only the telesales function alone was being used (which equated to a COMPLETELY cold call). What if the well-proven model was applied in the most compatible way for THIS market?
- the accumulating pile of these leads was several times greater than the volume generated by the usual source, meaning there was a very big revenue opportunity if this source could be harvested,
- the existing model had customers engaged in 2-way communications via phone but the web-sourced prospects were reaching out via email. What if they wanted to communicate that way, supported by their choice to email instead of calling the number prominently displayed all over the website?
- there was little-to-no strategic consideration given to HOW this source of leads was to be worked. There were no adjustments from the established telesales approach. What if we isolated variables of the proven approach and simply tested different tactics?
We addressed the anomalies and began testing a variety of new approaches to try to harvest this lead pool. Small tactical tests began pointing the way to successful sales from this "weak" lead source. Refining tests of working tactics yielded more sales. More experiments, MORE conversions. You can probably see where this is going.
30 days later, sales from this source spiked 600%. 60 days later, 1300%. 90 days later and the company was rushing to create a new department for Internet-sourced business: adjusted hours, more communication via email, email promotions before live follow up and some tactical adjustments to the approach used with the traditional lead sources as fleshed out by our refined tests.
It was only a short time before sales from this lead stream exceeded the long-established sources. The "weak" had risen! As is often the case when a legitimate new lead stream is discovered, all-time record revenue for the company followed... and then, with more refinements and mainstream marketing scale, those records were broken AGAIN the following year.
3 MORE CATALYSTS FOR NEW LEADS ARE NEXT
We've split this article into a 2-pager. The next page covers:
- 3 more strong catalysts for discovering new lead streams, and
- how we can apply our own expertise to help you with that very lucrative objective.
If you would rather talk with one of our experts right now...
Otherwise, click the NEXT button to see the rest of the article...
