The Lead Pool that is Much Larger than Your Current Market, a Crazy Like a Fox Tactic and How to Use Technology to Find New Pools of Buyers
- This is page 2 of a 2-part article. If you landed here first, you might want to start on page one.
In the prior page, we covered 4 great catalysts for discovering new, relevant lead streams. This page shares 3 more good ones...
5. Think globally: Most of our clients think of their revenue growth opportunity in terms of their LOCAL or native market. For example, an American-based B2C client may think of their market as Americans... perhaps cut down to a state, region or the local level within America. There is sometimes good reasons a product or service can only fit a local market... but many times the offering(s) is something just as desirable to customers beyond traditional borders.
We've worked with companies who, when introducing us to their web team, will point to a map showing how the website has sold customers in a good number of countries around the world. Sometimes, they will point out that they are doing especially well in a couple of countries "without making any real efforts to sell there."
Naturally, we ask them why not make some real efforts to sell there, and they'll quickly spin into some talk about language barriers, not knowing the market, etc. Often, all such excuses are remarkably easy to overcome with even modest investment. And part of the justification might be recognizing how much those international buyers might have had to go through on their own to actually buy the product or service: language barrier, international transaction, exchange rates, high shipping costs, import challenges, even finding their way to the seller.
An American company we work with tried it and now realizes a great deal of revenue growth from Germany- a country that wasn't an intuitive front runner for "the first international market with good potential for us is...". In fact, Germany wasn't even in the top ten on the executive, subjective (gut) guess list of better international markets to target. But the Internet can reveal where buyers are in absolute, OBJECTIVE terms: exactly where does the money come from? Pay attention and a new, deep source of business- even unexpected pools of buyers you might otherwise never guess- may reveal itself.
330M people in America is only about 5% of the total population of potential buyers on the planet.
If your product or service is not limited to only a local market by design, perhaps another 5% of the planet's population beyond your local borders is anxiously awaiting exposure to your offerings. If they can be moved to buy your products or services as good as the home market, you DOUBLE your business... DOUBLE! And if so, you'll still have the other 90% of the planet to which you can cast some additional lines as your new global market trailblazing proves itself.
Go ask your web team to make you a map of the countries where your products have already sold and in what volumes. Then, put some real effort into selling in some of the places that stand out from the crowd... or engage BI to help you. There's a massive amount of untapped prospects when you adjust the arbitrary boundaries of what has been the traditional market.
6. Encourage some failures: What??? Encourage failures? No, you should NOT have stopped reading with #5.
Put yourself in your marketing leader's shoes. If any weak or outright failing tests are significantly booed... if risk of failure makes them worry for the future of their job... what do they do? They stop taking meaningful risks. Your reactions- if you take a hard anti-failure stance (as many leaders often do)- condition them to play it (too) safe. Where there is nearly no risk, there tends to be relatively little upside. The always-safe play is the always-conservative play. You don't get home runs from only trying for base hits.
As odd as this may seem to read...
if you've had no marketing failures in quite some time, you're doing it wrong!
Marketing is your company's lab. At least some of the time or in some of your efforts/campaigns, it is important to take SOME bold leaps in trying
to realize bigger successes. Some test cells SHOULD be swinging for the fences. It's how you get to actually hit some home runs... albeit at the cost of enduring strike outs on the way. Those go TOGETHER: there is no such thing as a home run hitter every time they step up to the plate.
Manage your own reactions to those strikes. That's where most of this particular problem tends to live. Be sure your marketing team understands that some failures are OK... even expected... because YOU know that means they are taking some risks of size to AIM HIGHER than only the safe plays. If too much time passes with no failures, do the "crazy" leader thing of getting after them to take bigger risks.
Illustrate that you WANT them swinging for at least some home runs... even if they strike out... AND that you want them to keep swinging when they DO strike out. If YOU encourage them to try... and KEEP TRYING... they WILL hit some home runs... and the company will take bigger strides forward.
Else, pressuring your company lab for only success after success means a slow & steady growth curve at best. That's managing from a position of fear (of a flop) instead of boldly pursuing your 'next big thing.' View flops through a half-full lens. It means there are tangible attempts being made that push the envelope. If you've had no flops in some time, you are definitely missing lucrative opportunities. Do you want to keep ignoring those?
It doesn't mean your marketing team is great. It means they are AFRAID and playing it too safe.
If marketing is not the lab where bigger swings are swung, from where else are you going to discover home run opportunities? Operations? Legal? HR? IT? Marketing IS your potential big hitter department. If they are not trying for some home runs, the rest of the team is highly unlikely to fluke into one.
Often the driver of them batting for singles is "the boss" ridiculing poor results and/or making marketing leadership feel their jobs are at risk unless their efforts work out well EVERY time. If you want big business advancements, the first change often starts with how YOU react to the work of your company LAB.
An occasional grand slam changes everything. Go for it! Or hire us to pinch hit a few times. Our brand is all about knocking 'em out of ballparks. Look up there at our name again. It is NOT Marginal Innovations... or Incremental Innovations.
7. Leverage technologies: It can feel like a big task to try to keep up with technology changes. Striving to do so can help you uncover quality new lead streams. In all work, better tools tend to yield greater production.
For example, B2B salespeople are increasingly finding ways to squeeze more revenue out of social networks. Website forums and sites that encourage buyers to rank products & services will also have postings by people interested in those same products & services. They are basically pools of people publicly showing they are interested in your product right now. Do you have representation there? If not, why not? "Location, location, location" is still about trying to be where your market frequents & congregates... but that's no longer mostly around a physical address. And there are many other examples along these lines.
You should build layers into your own web and mobile app strategy that tracks prospect behaviors & interests, striving to learn a lot about them even before you know who they are. We've helped clients develop this kind of technology along with a wide variety of ways to get prospects to finally identify themselves. When they do, you have a brand new lead to work... and they come with highly qualified, data-rich information to make the selling process considerably easier.
For example, it is not complicated to track each prospects focus on your website. You are basically tracking where they tend to spend their time on your site. If you were in a business selling- say- newsletters for investors, you might have a variety of newsletters focusing on a wide array of investments: gold, mutual funds, options, stocks, ETFs, currencies and so on.
We can help you develop a technology tracking strategy so you "know" your new leads even before you know who they are.
When they finally fill out a website form and formally identify themselves, you'll gain the contact information matched to crucial data that shows this particular prospect is very interested in- say- stock and stock option investing but not interested in currencies, funds or gold. The comparable data-blind competitor might send them some promotions keying on currency, fund or gold investing because they don't have any insights about them and thus must resort to guessing.
You would have the added intelligence to push the prospects hot button interests right on your first try. Similarly, such tracking might reveal that the bulk of your prospects are really much more narrowly focused on only- say- stock & stock options which could encourage you to allocate more of your marketing budget towards other sources of those kinds of prospects and
put less of that budget toward pursuing pools that don't yield much revenue for your business. The profit possibilities are endless when you leverage technology to arm yourself in these kinds of ways.
Another technology channel that should be demanding your attention is the mobile market. Owners of devices like iPads, iPhones, iPods, Android-based phones & tablet devices and many others are willing buyers of software apps or services facilitated through mobile apps. Can anything you offer be packaged in a mobile app? We can help you do it all right:
- fleshing out your app concept,
- recommending & managing outsourced programmers and
- doing all of the pre-launch, launch and post-launch marketing to drive success.
That market is now 2 BILLION people and STILL rapidly growing. Are you selling to them through that channel? If not, why not? The cost of a good mobile app is relatively low. Getting only a fractional slice of 2 Billion may be more new customers than your existing model yields over this entire year.
Go ahead and do a little math. Multiply 2 billion by fractions of only 1% or 2%. How poor do conversions have to get to make this opportunity yield a smaller volume of sales than the existing model? Think about that tiny fraction you just calculated. Does that seem to be a monumental hurdle to leap?
Like many companies, yours probably has challenging growth and stretch goals to earn company bonuses. How many average-size transactions do you need to hit stretch? What slice of the gigantic smart mobile market would it take to cover that ENTIRE goal? Here's a simple real-time calculator to try some numbers...
It defaults to a 5 Million transaction assumption. If that perfectly matched your target, you would need to sell only one quarter of 1% of the mobile market to earn that bigger bonus. Alter that transactions number to project different percentage slices. For example, if your business needs 1M transactions to reach stretch, replace 5M with 1000000.
When selling to a massive pool like this, even fractional market slices can be bountiful!
Most companies own only a few percentage points of their market at best and thrive for decades for doing so. What would selling a bit more than a fraction of 1% to a 2 BILLION-person market yield?
| LARGER BITES OF THAT PIE | |||||
| SHARE | 1% | 2% | 3% | 5% | 7% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ADDITIONAL ORDERS |
20M | 40M | 60M | 100M | 140M |
Sell only 2% of that market for an additional 40 MILLION orders. Sell 5% for 100 MILLION. Unless you typically do many BILLIONS of transactions from existing sources, up to 140M NEW transactions times your average order revenue should offer a big lift to total sales.
EVEN MORE LEAD STREAM DISCOVERIES
Are there more than these 7 catalysts for new lead discoveries? Of course, THERE ARE MANY MORE. Listing and describing them ALL here may- at worst- crash the Internet... or could- at least- undermine how we make our livings. In the interests of saving the Internet and/or paying our broadband bill, we'll stop here knowing that some of those just shared can certainly help ANY business... and others are readily available to you... along with a catered recipe for the specific combinations that would best fit YOUR particular business.
Yes, you could try and dig up the others and attempt a DIY recipe, but fresh eyes & minds tend to be a massive contributor in this very important work. If only there was a very capable team (hint, hint) who already knows these and many other proven tactics, and how best to apply them...
with track records of success uncovering lucrative new lead streams for clients. There must be 'big innovative' talent of that nature somewhere online. Assuming so, you could hire such experts and task THEM with helping you and your team uncover a new lead stream... or two. Perhaps a rub of our magic logo might offer THE best solution?
Discovering a quality new lead stream is a blend of art & science, creativity & keen observation, diligent research and objective processing of the results, plus open-minded strategic management, hard work and a dash of luck. You'll be best served to engage at least some external talent like ours to help you take on this far-reaching, highest-impact, moon shot. Success can drive even short-term revenue to all-time records.
We love to help clients break records. Try us.
