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submitted: Aug 21st 2008 | by: DavidB.Ascot | Total views: 1 | Word Count: 683 | |

If you have your own business, no doubt you know that one of the biggest problems you face is attracting the right kind of customer who can become a lifelong client. Someone like this can then not only make repeat purchases from you, but can also refer others to you. Therefore, you need to understand how to attract these kinds of clients, the right kinds of clients. The biggest constraint to most businesses is attracting the right kind of prospects that can be converted into lifelong clients. Of course, for your success, you need to know how to attract these kinds of clients. Here is a brief discussion of just how you can set up a high-performance lead generation process for your Internet business.

Let's look at these four things:

1. What's Your Selling Philosophy?

2. What's a Lead?

3. How Do You Generate Leads?

4. How Do You Test and Track?

Define Your Selling Philosophy
When it comes to defining your selling philosophy, it's not as easy as it sounds. Let's figure it out by asking a few questions. Why are you in business? How do you specifically engage with both prospective customers and those who are already clients? How do you convince these people of the value of what you offer? What's your role as it relates to customers and prospective customers? These can be rather weighty questions, but what this is meant to do is to define your corporate philosophy, why and how you do what you do. This is the driving force behind the execution of your lead generation strategy.

Determine a Lead Definition
Now, let's talk about what a lead is and isn't within your organisation. It might seem obvious to you what a lead is, but it's not quite that simple. You need to take the time to define in detail what a qualified lead is; if you do this, you're going to be able to attract more of them.

One of the most common problems is when your sales team is provided with too many non-sales ready leads which saps people's time and lets genuine sales-ready opportunities slip through the cracks.

Your Lead Generation Map
Your lead generation map describes everything that happens in your sales process, from "Hello" to 'money in your pocket'. Dr. Marc Dussault calls this your Pathway to Profits.

Developing an effective lead generation map is one of the key strategic goals of designing an enhanced lead generation process and the more complex the sales process and lead definition the more nodes you need on the map to convert raw "just-looking" visitors into new business.

A typical lead generation map might start with traffic generation, followed by generating an opt-in into a white paper or special report. Next, you could follow-up with automated messages, designed to educate and inform prospects while overcoming common objections and disqualifying non-clients. This is obviously a simple example, and there are many other permutations that can apply.

Test and Track
Because you're on the Internet, you have a previously impossible ability to "read" the minds of your website visitors as they go through your particular process for lead generation. Minimally, of course, you'll need the ability to track your website visitors in detail, using web analytics. A good tool for this is Google Analytics, because it's free and powerful.

Another thing you'll need to be able to do is to track your expenditures and efforts in marketing, whether they pertain to online methods like e-mail marketing and online advertising, or off-line methods like mass media advertising or print media. You need to track everything on your website; if you don't, you could be losing out on a major leverage source and leaving cash in your wake.

Remember the lead generation process map from a few minutes ago? Well, when you have analytics correctly installed on your site, you can establish benchmarks for all of the nodes on your map, such as opt-in and enquiry rates. Once you have real numbers for all the key points in your process, the next step is to deploy optimisation strategies in the right area at the right time to ramp up your results.

About the Author

About the author: David B. Ascot shares valuable information about online lead generation that is available to you by checking out the expert opinions on lead generation strategies.

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