Lead Marketing- How to Work a Lead

From the first day in business, you realize that leads are the lifeblood of your business. So you construct a marketing program to generate leads or you outsource this function and pay for it. Even if your lead generation is successful, unfortunately, this is only half of the story.
What you do with a lead is where the truly successful entrepreneurs differentiate themselves from the masses of the unsuccessful.  The truth is that the lead marketing you do after the lead is received is at least as important - if not more so - than generating the lead itself.

Think about it.  If you're prospective customer, are you going to give your business to the prospector who leaves a sales pitch on your answering machine or the one who calls up and follows up with you to determine what your needs are and how they can best be met?
So what are the important aspects of good lead marketing?

Step #1: SEND something that establishes your credibility.  99% of professionals never do this so rather than having any credibility in the eyes of the prospect, the seller appears as simply a salesman.  Note that sales literature/product literature will not establish your credibility.  To excel at lead marketing, you need an article that you wrote, a book you wrote, a report with your photo and name on the cover  a newspaper article in which you were interviewed.  You probably don't have such an item so you need to develop it or buy it.

Don't expect that the prospect will read the item you send.  That is not important.  If all they do is look at the cover, see your nice photo, name and credentials, they will perceive you as an expert.

Step#2: CALL within 2 days of the prospect receiving your credibility item.  Shocking as it may seem, many entrepreneurs fail in their lead marketing because they fail to follow up in a timely manner.

Step#3: When you call, ASK QUESTIONS. Many people in business cannot sell.  They tell.  The prospect does not want to hear about you and your products.  They want to know that you have interest in them and this is accomplished by asking questions.  Each question goes a little deeper until you uncover the hot button and can close to an appointment.

Another important aspect of your lead marketing system is to figure out what you'll use as a selling point to differentiate yourself from the masses of those selling the same product/service. Why should the prospect meet with YOU?

To a prospect, you are no different than the next person who calls them up and tells them they have the best product for their use.  That is, unless you somehow differentiate yourself from your competitors and come up with what's called a "unique selling point."  You have to find something about you, about your business or about your products that sets you apart from the rest.  If you don't have anything unique, then create it.  Your uniqueness is limited only by your imagination.

One other aspect of a successful lead marketing system is to automate as much of the system as possible.  Automation could mean either using tools like an auto-responder to constantly market to the prospect via email or hiring an assistant to help set prospect meetings and phone calls or using a CRM system to alarm you when you need to follow up on the free report you sent.

Lead marketing is a science requiring a systematic approach.  There's a lot more to just buying or generating the lead.