Identify and Remove Clogs in Your Sales Pipeline

Lead nurturing is essential for moving dentists through the sales pipeline. With targeted emails, relevant content, and social media interaction, you can encourage dentists to take the next step in the buying process. There's a lot that can go wrong with the sales pipeline, so it's important to find the source of the problem rather than trying to fix its leaks with band-aids. Dental Lab Sales pipeline management isn't a perfect system. Even with a great strategy, your pipeline will get clogged from time to time. When this happens, it's important to identify the cause, find a solution, and prevent the same problem from happening again. In the end, you'll find that you have to do regular maintenance to keep your sales pipeline healthy. 

Keep a healthy pipeline with relevant leads 

The single most important factor in regard to sales pipeline management is lead quality. To attract new customers to your business and move them along through the sales process, you need to market exclusively to your target audience. 

Irrelevant leads are the most common source of sales pipeline clogs. Because these dentists aren't interested in your products, they just sit at the beginning of your pipeline until you remove them. 

This Business 2 Community article explains the process of qualifying prospects. According to the article, it's essential to first identify your target audience:

"Qualifying prospects is at the heart of a healthy lead generation system. First, you need to paint a clear picture of the types of prospects that fit with each of your solutions. Doing so establishes the types of buyers that could flow through your pipeline in the most efficient way. When you know who to target, you qualify by asking questions that allow you to detect whether a buyer fits well into your pipeline."

Lead nurturing tactics won't be effective if you're trying to convert irrelevant leads. In this respect, the first step of the journey is the most important one. 

Align your marketing and sales teams 

It's well-known that marketing and sales teams don't exactly mesh well together. Each team sees itself as the more important counterpart and is therefore unwilling to compromise. 

It's up to lab management to get these teams to understand that they're part of a dynamic duo. A marketing campaign would be ineffective without a sales team, and sales representatives would never have any opportunities without a solid marketing campaign. 

In this light, aligning your marketing and sales teams should be your first priority. According to this Forbes article, you can do this by creating a service level agreement between the two departments: 

"If you haven’t noticed yet, integrating your marketing and sales departments is vital if you want a contribution from your marketers in the sales pipeline. You can encourage these departments by drafting a service level agreement (SLA). The SLA should describe the lead requirements like the target market and interest, the marketing contribution to the sales pipeline, support options, and how data and content will be shared."

It's a give and take. Don't expect perfect coordination overnight, but you also want to nip bad habits from the very start. 

Move Dentists along with lead nurturing 

Once you refocus your lead generation strategy and align your marketing and sales teams, you can move on to other matters in relation to the sales pipeline. At this point, you should at least have a steady stream of dentists coming in. 

While some businesses have a knack for generating leads, it's rare to see a company naturally good at converting them. If you fall into this category, then you should concentrate on lead nurturing. 

For more information visit DentalLabSupport.com or call 1.888.715.9099.

What Digital Marketers Can Learn from the Door-to-Door Salesperson

By David H. Khalili, Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Here’s something you might not know about me: Before I went digital, I spent a couple years working as a door-to-door salesman. I sold my way through dental offices, hitting the pavement, 

Now here’s the weird part: I loved it. Our team met for daily sales training's, swapped tips, and practiced for every possible scenario with role playing. I was constantly picking up new techniques to try on my customers, learning from experience, and getting better. It was live, on the ground A/B testing, and it’s how I cut my teeth in conversion optimization. Make no mistake, door-to-door sales is a high pressure game, and it’s where many successful start-ups catch a break.

Okay, But I’m Not a Door-to-Door Salesperson…

What drives dental lab digital marketing today? What are the most powerful conversion techniques at our disposal? Most of us could probably agree on something like the following:

1. Testing and Analytics
2. Personalization and Targeting
3. Content Marketing
4. Customer Engagement
5. Cross-sell/Recommendations
6. Responsive Experiences

Door-to-door sales offers unique lessons that apply to each of these six areas. And they’ve been tested on real humans, in person, over and over and over again. Isn’t that every CROs dream?

The Extraordinary Salesperson

A door-to-door salesperson stands face-to-face with a prospect and assesses, in the moment, any objections, obstacles, or discomforts that person may have. The salesperson then turns each negative into a positive, putting the prospect at ease, gaining their trust, and helping them find value in the product.

The extraordinary salesperson knows how to weave a personalized story for their customer, drawing them in and forming an emotional connection to the product. The extraordinary salesperson also knows how to create urgency and necessity around the sale—not by being pushy or intimidating, but by adding real value and incentive to close the deal right now.

I don’t think you should quit your desk job and become a door-to-door salesperson. I do think you can take the best techniques from the face-to-face sell and apply to them to your visitor interactions in digital. You can improve every visitor touch point by better understanding what language, behavior, signals, and incentives motivate people to buy (or subscribe, download, share, and engage).

Bringing Offline Sales Techniques Online

That was just the tip of the iceberg for optimization lessons that can be gleaned from the world of door-to-door sales. Look out for my upcoming blog posts on lessons learned from the face-to-face sell and how they apply to your digital marketing strategy. I’m excited to share the techniques and insights I gathered over four years of making daily sales calls and relate them to my current bread-and-butter: conversion rate optimization and digital personalization.

4 Steps to Lead Nurturing: Walking the buying path with your customers

Lead generation can take you on a long hike. The one thing I can guarantee you about the journey is that more is not better if you don’t know how to nurture. The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

That said, I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not putting enough toward progression. Get out your walking shoes, and take a journey with your customers.

I define lead nurturing as consistent and meaningful communication with viable prospects (those that are “a fit” for your solution), regardless of their timing to buy. It’s not “following up” every few months to find out if a prospect is “ready to buy yet.” True nurturing involves a sometimes long and circuitous path, but along the way, you’ll be building long, meaningful and trust-filled relationships with the right people.

Salespeople often struggle with developing nurturing content without support. If you’re wondering what kinds of content helps progress leads further faster, ask your sales team. Start by asking your sales team questions like, “What’s the content you share with leads that helps them convert?” or “What’s the content you use to help take people to the next level?”

The first step on that path to success is to start thinking like a customer.

Step #1: Walk in your potential customers’ shoes to build a customer journey map

Be the customer, and get as you close as you can to their experience by really observing the behaviors of your customer. After you’ve gaining a solid understanding, build your customer journey map.

What is a customer journey map? It tells the story of the customer’s experience: from initial contact, through the process of engagement and into a long-term relationship.

The journey map is about helping you understanding the key interactions that your future customer will have with the organization. What are their motivations? What are their questions with each marketing touch point? Try to understand what they want and the concerns they’ll have along with peers they’re interacting with. The goal of customer journey mapping is to gain customer wisdom.

As you do that, consider the questions that customers have in mind before they make a buying decision:

• How will this product or service help my company?
• We’re doing OK, so why do we need this?
• Is there another company out there that is better?
• Will their solution really work? Can they prove it?
• Is the company credible?
• Can we afford it?

Help prospects find the answers to these questions, and you’ll remind them of the benefits of working with you. You’re creating value by giving them useful information in digestible, bite-sized chunks.

Step #2: Plan your path to create content geared toward progression

Invest as much in forming creative and content for lead progression as you do for lead capture. I’ve seen companies spend most of their budget getting people to raise their hands but not enough toward progression.

The goal of lead nurturing is to help progress leads from initial interest toward purchase intent. It’s about progression.

Read “Content Marketing Tips for Lead Nurturing” for ideas on content to use. Through the combination of all these, you’re providing relevant, educational and thought-leading content. For more ideas, read “Lead Nurturing: 5 tips for creating relevant content.”

It’s worth noting:

• The tactics employed and the frequency of touches will depend on the solutions being sold and the buying cycle of the prospect.
• You need to create different lead nurturing tracks based on demographic criteria, such as size, industry, role in the buying process and more.

Step #3: Walk the path with your customer

In a complex sale, the journey can be long and challenging to help people move from initial interest to purchase intent.

Your only job is to make certain you nourish your customer along the way and guide them with a meaningful compass toward the right and best decision for their needs.

Think of your marketing team as trail guides who will need to point out all the sights along the way that are useful in the decision-making process.

Slow down, and walk at the customer’s pace, even if that means taking the long route with them when it comes to buying your service or product. If you hurry them along, you might end up with an exhausted customer who doesn’t feel good about the journey and won’t turn to you to continue the path to purchase.

“How you sell me is how you will serve me”

Most economic buyers subscribe to the notion that how you sell me indicates how you will serve me. Here’s where that little statistic I mentioned earlier comes in. A study of business-to-business buyers shows that salespeople who become trusted advisors and understood the needs of economic buyers are 69% more likely to come away with a sale.

The complex sale requires that your prospect:

• Must be familiar with you and your company and with what you and your company do.
• Must perceive you and your company to be expert in your field.
• Must believe that you and your company understand his or her specific issues and can solve them.­
• Likes you and your company enough to want to work with you.

Remember you can’t automate trust. Trust-building should be the theme of your nurturing efforts.

Building trust

By providing valuable education and information to prospects up front, you become a trusted advisor. You are then perceived to be an expert. You don’t sell; you don’t make pitches. Instead, you provide insights and solutions all within the realm of your expertise and, as a result, become the first company they turn to when there’s a need.

Make your marketing program’s single point of focus be to develop trust, and your business will become more profitable and less reliant on competing on price. Selling, per se, is reduced in the interest of more open and honest conversations with prospects. You win more business on a sole-source basis, and more new business referrals come your way.

Step #4: Keep marching

Startling as it may seem, recent research (and even studies from 20 years ago) shows that longer-term leads (future opportunities), often ignored by salespeople, represent almost 40 to 70% of potential sales. Research compiled by the MarketingSherpa Lead Generation Benchmark Report showed, “marketing departments with a lead nurturing campaign reported a 45% higher ROI than marketing departments that did not utilize a lead nurturing track.”

If inquiries are simply passed on to salespeople, reps, partners or distributors for follow up, beware.  You may be leaving as many as eight out of 10 sales prospects on the sales path for your competitors.

Now, get your compasses out and begin the long-yet-fruitful journey toward an effective lead nurturing program. You’ll be surprised how many potential customers will want to join you along the way.

Dental Lab Tips & Tools For Converting More Prospects To Customers

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

Let's start at the beginning. Let's identify what a real prospect is. When you open a landing page, you will get tire kickers just like any sales establishment online or brick and mortar. If someone walks into your store, say hooray, but that isn't necessarily a prospect. It could be just a person who is curious or even, sometimes, who likes to create needs in themselves.

A true prospect is a person who has a genuine interest in your dental lab and what you are selling. It is a person whose final passage down the sales funnel will depend on product-related decisions. Prospects will get much farther down into the sales funnel than tire kickers. They will make action choices that move close to the closing choice point.

Many Dental Labs are already generating as many prospects as they need. The problem is that too many leave the sales funnel at the late stages before they commit themselves to buying. The inbound marketing problem is not to attract more leads but to convert more to sales.

Even if you get prospective customers into your sales funnel doesn't mean they will automatically buy what you have to offer. We advocate inbound marketing. The methods work but they are not magic. There are many commonly used tips & tools to convert more prospects to customers. Sometimes the sales funnel needs a little boost to turn a nibble into a bite.  Many prospects enter a conflict which makes them vacillate between two alternatives or a conflict pitting the product negatives against the product positives.

1. Ask for the sale in a short follow-up email or phone contact. Simply ask your prospect if he or she is ready to get started. For a certain percentage of prospects, this will tip the conflict scale toward a yes.

 2. After the prospect has left your sales funnel, you can send a "no communication" deadline. These deadlines are "fish or cut bait" statements. It may say something like this: 

"We have not heard from you in 30 days. While this will be our final communication, feel free to contact us in the future if you wish to move forward."

Receiving this kind of statement sometimes gets the attention of a reticent prospect. If nothing happens at least you will not waste any more time and energy on a dead-end.

3. You can also send an e-mail asking a motivating question raises the stakes by asking for active renewal of the contact. You may say something like this:

"If has been over a month since we heard from you. Have you had a chance to go over the specifications for our product and make a decision?

4. You can answer objectives by adding a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) section on your website. Source the most often asked questions in consultation with your sales and marketing team. Send the prospect an e-mail with a link to your FAQ, asking if this information is helpful.

5. Offer a gift or discount as an incentive to tip the scale in favor of a sale. It doesn't have to be a large discount or anything really valuable. The attention and the offer may be enough to move your prospect into the buyer column.

6. A quick follow-up e-mail or phone call, personally asking a prospect if there are any additional questions or concerns, is often enough to bring a lapsed prospect back into the sales column. Many inbound marketers find that quick follow-up phone contacts (within the first 48 to 72 hours of the contact) is the key to many prospect to customer conversions. In many cases, quick phone contact works, but contacts delayed longer than two days do not.

7. Often information is the key. Many marketers believe that buyers are not interested in reading a lot of text about their products. The fact is that most serious prospects want as much information as they can get and need the information to make an informed sales decision. What many prospects are afraid of is marching into the unknown with their investment. They need reassurance, and in-depth information may be exactly what could trigger the buying choice.

DentalLabSupport.com specializes in the tools to help businesses grow and prosper. Please contact us to learn more.

Dental Lab Support Sponsors:

GuideMia.com - Turn-key Solution For Implant Treatment Planning & Surgical Guides.

How the Emergence of Digital Local Affects Dental Labs in 2016 and Beyond

By David H. Khalili

Founder of DentalLabSupport.com

The philosophy behind dental lab marketing used to be relatively simple. Digital marketing strategies made sense to raise brand awareness, but to get people in your neighborhood, more traditional methods were most reliable. A print ad in a community magazine, sponsoring a local event, or even a telemarketing to get the people around you to pay attention to your products and services.

But increasingly, digital marketing seeks to compete with these traditional methods, creating local advertising possibilities that you should not ignore. As we move into 2016 and beyond, these digital marketing opportunities are becoming increasingly easy to access, meaning you should give them serious thought as a part of your budget in the new year. Let's discuss digital local marketing opportunities relevant to small businesses today.

Local Search

When Google first introduced its Pigeon algorithm update in 2014, it changed the game for local search optimization. Without boring you with the details, the update prioritized local results over national results as appropriate for search queries related to your business.

Today, search is ubiquitous among your audience. Especially thanks to the rise in mobile, a potential customer who is looking for a way to get your product or find out about your opening hours simply pulls up Google and types their query into the search bar. Do you know what shows up when they do?

As it turns out, the search engine actually lets you control the result to some degree, by allowing you to set up and optimize a My Business Profile. If you have not done so yet, you should make it a priority before 2016 or, at the very least, a New Year's Resolution. Potential customers will search for your dental lab, so you want to be sure you can be found easily.

Local Targeting Possibilities

But your opportunities to go local go beyond mere search optimization. Thanks to the in-depth targeting options of many digital channels, particularly on social media, you can now target very specific areas, neighborhoods, and even individual blocks with distinct advertising.

Facebook, for example, allows you to set targeting parameters for its ads to a specific zip code. Google, on the other hand, lets you engage in geo-targeting, even allowing marketers to target based on specific IP and household addresses. This hyper local targeting means you can be sure to reach your audience, no matter how geographically restricted it may be. 

Combining Digital with Traditional

Here, email marketing can come into play. If you use your digital ads as an opportunity to gather leads, or if you request email addresses from customers for post-sale nurturing opportunities, emails can be crucial tools to connect your initial ads and your customer experience. By allowing you to reach out to your target audience in a personalized way, it establishes your dental lab and brand as an important part of your customers' mindset and consideration point for future purchases.

How can email marketing become a part of your local marketing efforts? Contact us to learn more.

DLS Sponsors:   GuideMia.com  your turn key solution for implant treatment planning and surgical guides.

3 Adjustments that will Instantly Build Your Dental Lab's Online Presence

Dental lab marketers who ask the question "what can I do to help my business right now?" are often disappointed. Many strategies, from optimizing your website for search engines to building your social media presence, require dedication and resources, and often take months to bear fruit.

But fear not! As it turns out, you can do a few things that will help you market your business successfully without delay. So instead of wasting more of your valuable time, let's jump right in: here are 3 adjustments that will instantly build your online presence.

1) Write for the Web

Perhaps the single biggest issue dental lab owners face when beginning to market their products or services online is one of which they may not even be aware: adjusting their writing for the web.

Even if you have some experience writing text for local ads or newsletters, make no mistake: writing for the web is an entirely different animal. Just knowing that, and adjusting your writing accordingly, can instant improve your online presence.

As you probably know, Twitter has a character limit of 140 characters on all of its tweets. In fact, that may be the exact reason you've stayed away from the network! But what if we told you that you should treat your Facebook presence as if it had the same limit?

As it turns out, the text in your Facebook posts starts getting cut off after 90 characters depending on your readers' device of choice, so making sure you put the most important, convincing part of your message in those first 90 characters is absolutely crucial.

And that's just one example of the need to adjust your writing. Web users have little patience; they won't stick around to read a paragraph that's longer than 3 or 4 sentences and looks like a "wall of text" on their mobile device. By shortening your sentences and paragraphs, and directing them to "you" text rather than "I" statements, you ensure that a much greater percentage of your users read and share your text, and your online presence grows.

2) Quality over Quantity

Many dental lab owners mistakenly think that to be successful in the digital realm, they need to push out content as often as possible when in fact, the opposite is true. Yes, Google loves regular content updates, just as regular exposure on social media is important. But that doesn't mean you should emphasize the quantity over quality.

Again, take Facebook as an example. Thanks to its EdgeRank algorithm, the network only shows your posts to a portion of your "likes" who have engaged with past posts of yours. Because your audience is much more likely to engage with posts that it deems interesting and relevant, businesses focusing on quality content reach a much larger audience than those who simply push posts.

The same is true for Google. Increasingly, the search engine seeks out quality content to rank highly, determining its relevancy in a scoring algorithm that continuously updates itself to maximize user satisfaction. If your individual page updates aren't exciting enough for your users to interact with and share, you won't get to take advantage of potential exposure on the search engines.

3) Connect Your Efforts

Finally, you should absolutely encourage your offline consumers to visit your online presence, whether that presence is a website or a social media profile.

Asking for (honest) reviews, administering a survey, or even offering small rewards online that you can promote in your storefront all drives new users to your web. And if, once they're there, they discover the quality content you have developed with your newly-acquired web writing skills, they'll be likely to stick around and ensure that your online presence keeps growing.

BONUS: Capture Your Online Visitors

So if you're beginning to grow your online presence, what's next? Ideally, you should capture your visitors, encouraging them to give you their contact information become leads in exchange for your quality content. Then, you can begin to engage in targeted marketing campaigns which will increase your customer base and benefit everyone involved.

So if you need any help with making sure that your newly-grown online presence turns into actual revenue, contact dentallabsupport.com! We'd love to talk to you about our services and how it helps you move leads toward becoming customers.

10 WAYS TO SUPERCHARGE YOUR DENTAL LAB LEAD GENERATION EFFORTS

By:  David H. Khalili

Founder of dentallabsupport.com

Dental lab lead generation seems to be a mystery to many lab marketers. Just do a search on the topic and you’ll find little that’s helpful.

In my opinion, there are two reasons for this. One – Dental Labs are searching for that one killer lead tactic that will mask all ills or, Two – Dental Labs fail to realize that successful B2B lead generation is made up of activities that are by nature very hard to quantify and pin down.

The latter then leads to plenty of articles spouting the virtues of practices such as inbound marketing and content marketing, but little hard advice on how to make any of it pay.

Here’s my take – the real problem lies in the fact that you don’t simply generate a lead today, you guide it.

You can no longer run an ad that say’s “hey, we’ve got what you’re looking for come and get it” and expect much. Once a prospect actually knows what they are looking for, they’re already looking for a price.

Nope, it’s a process that involves many components working together that just happen to culminate in “a lead or click,” but know this, that click isn’t the thing; it’s merely the vehicle. Don’t get caught in the trap of relying on that kind of measure to show you what’s working.

Proper lead generation – or lead guiding – goes more like this – 1) Hey, here’s the real problem you need to address, 2) hey, here are a couple ways you might start to think about that problem, 3) hey, here’s one specific way to solve that problem and maybe, just maybe, 4) hey, here’s why we might be the right one to help you fix that problem.

This kind of process comes to life in the combination of the right activities delivered at the right time in the customer’s journey. It takes a mindset of consistently calling to action while consistently offering to loop a prospect back into consuming more content.

Below are ten B2B lead generation practices that must be used in some combination to guide the act of building a steady stream of highly qualified leads. No matter if you run a marketing department tasked with generating leads or you’re an individual sales person trying fill the lead gap, this is your plan of action.

1) ANSWER FOCUSED BLOGGING

I know everyone tells you that you must be blogging today, but simply waking up on a Monday and deciding what to say is what leads to immediate blogging burnout. You must blog, but you must do it with intention.

Here’s the easiest way to do that. Go to your sent email folder and find a dozen or so questions you’ve answered from clients and prospective clients.

Now, turn each of those into blog posts.

Then, think about the questions your prospects might be asking or thinking before they ever consider your product or service as a possible solution.

For example, I was speaking to a group of Franchise print shops and asked them to tell me what questions a prospective customer might be asking at the earliest part of the their journey to find a print shop.

As you might have guessed most said things like – can I trust this shop, is there a print shop nearby, what should I print? But here’s the thing – there may be a few that are asking those kinds of question, but most are still asking – “How do I get more sales, how do I find more leads, how do I increase my conversion rates?”

The point is that to make blogging pay as a lead generation source you’ve first got to start answering those kinds of questions.

Dig up as many of those types of questions and put them on an editorial calendar for your blogging efforts for the next six months.

Once you get good at that you can turn a series of relevant posts into other forms of content such as videos and eBooks.

2) SOCIAL RELATIONSHIP BUILDING

Many B2B businesses are looking for a few dozen good clients, so I find it odd that they get sucked into the friends, likes and followers trap.

Social media as a lead generation tool is simply a really powerful way to build and nurture relationships. Stop using it as a broadcast tool and start thinking about influencing and adding value around 50 or 100 prospects.

Go to LinkedIn and leave all those industry and job title related groups you signed up for and find two or three groups where your actual prospects hang out and look for advice. Start asking and answering questions in these groups. Start building targeted prospect lists in these groups using LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator tool.

Start building trusted relationships based on your expertise and your network, start referring others and connecting these people to the tools, answers and resources they need and you’ll start to generation the right leads in social media.

3) SEMINARS AND WEBINARS

For many B2B lead generation environments, the most effective tactic involves in person education through events like seminars and webinars.

When a prospect gets to see and hear that you provide valuable advice, that you seem like a nice enough sort and that you have an answer or two for the precise challenges they are struggling with at the moment, some instant magic can occur.

Never mind that from a content creation stand point the ongoing series you create can also be turned into a powerful trust building asset or even a product in itself.

Here are some examples created by DentalLabSupport.com Marketing Consultants Sal Radi & David H. Khalili.

Like so many of the tactics in this post, this one relies on integration and follow-up via one or more of the tactics listed here.

4) SPONSOR AND BE SPONSORED

We all want referrals, right? There’s no question that the best form of lead generation is the right kind of referral ushered to your door. And yet, few people actively promote this very form of lead generation – if it happens, it happens by accident.

I’ve built the bulk of my consulting and speaking business on the sponsor and be sponsored concept.

Here’s how it works.

Create an information rich, education focused eBook and/or webinar and reach out to other related businesses and ask them if they would like to cobrand the eBook or offer the webinar to their network free of charge.

Many know that they should be offering this kind of information, but haven’t gotten around to it so they will see your offer as a blessing and you’ll receive the benefit of essentially being referred to their entire network.

I’ve used this idea in tandem to great effect as well.

An organization will ask me to speak to their members and I’ll double up by allowing them to use an eBook I’ve created related to the topic. This way I reach the members in attendance, but I’ll also gain awareness throughout the group and give those that heard me speak deeper insight into how they could work with me.

But, you don’t have to stop there.

Go out and find someone else’s great eBook or webinar and arrange to cobrand that content as a lead generation magnet for yourself. One of the more popular lead capture options I have on my site is an eBook on Fee Based Selling written by my friends at FreshBooks.

Slideshare is a great site for finding people that might be great webinar guests and a search on Google for “yourtopic” filetype:pdf will turn up nothing but eBook related to the topics you choose.

5) SEQUENTIAL LEAD MAGNETS

I went fly fishing recently and I found this clear deep hole in the river where fish were actively rising to the top to eat. Things had been pretty slow to that point so I put some dry flies on and cast right on their noses.

Immediately my targeted fish rose, took a look and swam away. I kept at it, offering new casts and new flies and eventually after a number of presentations I would catch the fish.

Few things generate quality leads like a series of sequential offers that lead prospects deeper and deeper into your educational grip.

By setting up a process that by nature moves your prospect along, exposes them to increasingly valuable content and opportunities to get to know your approach better you set up relationship where it begins to feel as though you are working with a client as opposed to nurturing a lead.

You can accomplish this process through a sequential series of videos or even a series of checklists, each offering more pieces to the puzzle. One of the keys to this approach is that you sell the value of the series and set the expectation that your prospect is going on a journey of value.

6) SMALL BATCH DIRECT MAIL

I return once again to the idea of smaller is better. I know we all want to do that blast thing and have it rain leads, but the more personal you can get the better.

You will receive far greater results targeting 50 or 100 ideal prospects a month and reaching out with a personalized letter outlining one highly actionable idea than any other form of mass communication out there.

For example, imagine getting a personal letter that included a statement like this: “We’ve found over the years that our customers want to know how to generate more leads. We’ve also found that one of the most effective ways to actually do this is [fill in your killer tactic here]” If you would like to receive more tips like this or learn how to more fully employ this idea please visit our video series here [your URL].”

7) RELEVANT WARM CALLING

I would never advocate cold calling, although plenty of people still do it. The problem is that the notion of cold implies dumb calling. I still get calls today from people who start off by saying that they would like to come by and spend 30 minutes of my time learning what I do to see if there are any synergies.

First off, let me say that if you use the word synergies you probably aren’t going sell me anything, but further, let me say that it is nearly impossible to not know what my business does – heck, you wouldn’t have to work that hard to have my family medical history and some knowledge of my music and food choices, so no call should ever be cold.

Picking up the phone and connecting after thoroughly researching relevant and personalized discussion topics is how you create warm calls.

Let’s back up to the previous point concerning small batch direct mail. A powerful way to up the response of said small batch mail is to claim in that letter that you intend to call the recipient next Tuesday to talk about several more ways they can increase their sales.

Very affordable technology exists today that would let you know which of the letter recipients visited the link in your letter and might just be ready for a call. Most marketing automation tools such as those from Marketo, Infusionsoft and Salesforce incorporate this kind of technology.

You can begin to inject this idea into other lead generation elements as well. If you have a webinar sign up form start asking for phone numbers. You don’t have to make it mandatory, but try reaching out to a few that provide the number simply as a way to make sure they have what they need, offer to answer questions about the event or even send them a tool for note taking.

You don’t have to be a pest when you call people, in fact, don’t sell, just be useful. Even useful voice message follow ups will let people know you are human and aren’t going to hard sell anything.

Reaching out via the telephone in a useful manner will help build trust for your other lead generation initiatives.

8) SMART NETWORKING

My friend Derek Coburn has written a tremendous book on networking called –Networking Is Not Working. If you have not read it highly recommend.

Coburn debunks the value of the traditional meet and dump kind of networking that people tend to waste their time doing.

If you want to make networking pay you have to look at it as a tool for connecting others rather than getting connected.

Here’s the difference – instead of reaching into LinkedIn to see who you can connect with, reach into your existing network and find a handful of people that need to meet some shining stars in your network.

In fact, start looking to connect with more and more people who can help your connections instead of help you.

When you view networking as your opportunity to build bridges that help others – guess what happens – you become a lead magnet.

Yes this takes time and effort and it can be hard to quantify right off the bat, but building lead momentum isn’t for those who are afraid of work.

9) INTERVIEW IDEAL CLIENTS

I intentionally stayed away from the word podcast because so many people don’t want to be podcasters. Here’s the thing though, I don’t want you be a podcaster any more than I want you to be a blogger – but you absolutely must have a blog!

Here’s what I want you to do. Create a podcast so you can gain access to your ideal clients in a highly leveraged way.

If you want to work with CEOs of mid size manufacturing companies then create a show where you interview successful CEOs of mid size manufacturing companies who just happen to be happy to share their journey to success with your listeners.

Okay, maybe you don’t have any listeners, but your guests don’t need to know that and while you are building your following you’ll be getting some awesome content that helps you build authority in the space you work and just might land you in a conversation with a prime prospect.

Podcasting is not as complicated as it might sound and there are plenty of resources, such as The Podcast Answer Man, to help teach you what you need to know to turn this into a lead generation play.

10) PAID TRAFFIC

I’ve placed advertising as the final piece of the B2B lead generation list not because I don’t think it has much value, but because it’s so much more effective when you are doing many of the other elements prior to buying ads.

Ironically advertising is the easiest tactic – anyone with some cash can throw up ads and generate a few clicks and maybe even leads with very little effort. The only problem is that the leads are often uneducated and unqualified.

The way to create the highest quality leads is to invest in teaching them how to be ideal clients. When you employ many of the previous tactics you can use your advertising to drive prospects to any number of educational opportunities, such as video tips, webinars, eBooks, and, now that you have one, your podcast, knowing that the traffic you send to these elements will do the proper job of educating and ultimately selling.

Here’s some of my favorite plays for paid traffic

• Facebook look alike audiences – check out Jon Loomer’s great explanation of this fairly new Facebook advertising option
• Syndicated content – My get sponsored tactic above is a form of syndication but paid options such as Outbrain can be effective ways to get your owned media assets and content in from of targeted leads. Neil Patel of QuickSprout has agreat tutorial on Content Syndication
• Pay per click and retargeting – Check out Wordstream’s PPC Uninversity –  andAdSpringr

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