Does Your Business Already Have What it Takes?

For a traditional business, embracing online marketing techniques can seem like a daunting task. SEO, SEM, Social Media, Landing Pages, Email Marketing, Blogs, Twitter. It can seem all too confusing. Even those who live and breathe the space struggle to keep up with the pace of change.

So what hope is there for the traditional offline business? It’s really no wonder that online budgets don’t reflect the power of the audience that can be reached.

As an industry, we have largely failed to provide offline businesses with a compelling reason to take the plunge and harness the virtually limitless possibilities that the web has to offer.

One, seemingly obvious, concept continues to occur to me. A reality highlighted by my own experience selling face-to-face in offline roles.

Businesses that effectively sell their products and services already know what they need to succeed online. They just may not know it.

So where, in your company, does this expertise lie? Hopefully you already have at least one high-performing sales person on your side. So, what could this person tell you to create online lead generation success? Any top-gun sales person will tell you that sales success occurs as a result of the questions that are asked of your prospect, not a presentation of the features, benefits, price or positioning of your product. Before being asked a series of well-considered questions, your prospect is unlikely to be in a mental space where they are consciously reminded of their needs and pains. Therefore, they are unlikely to be ready to consider a solution for their ills.

By asking your prospects a series of pointed questions relating to their current circumstances, needs and pain points, an effective sales person can lead the individual to a mental clearing where an informed purchase decision is possible.

Your web pages can affect the same result! Your sales teams poignant and well-considered questions can (and should) form the basis of your landing pages or pre-sales questionnaires.

In the case of complex products such as real estate investment, network marketing or solution sales, a survey style questionnaire can save you hours of wading through tyre-kicking suspects on the phone to find genuinely interested prospects. In effect, what you are trying to achieve is a process where tyre-kickers drop out and well-qualified prospects are ready to engage.

The benefits of dynamic coding become apparent when you show and hide questions to different individuals based on their previous responses. For example, a female CEO may go down one path of enquiry while a male retiree may go down another.

Using a questioning process that leads clients to a point where they are motivated to enquire further will allow your company to extract real prospects from, what was previously, the general internet population.

Additionally, your sales staff interacts with well-qualified, genuinely interested prospects. Their morale and productivity will inevitably improve.

Are there still tyre kickers? Sure. But your data should be able to identify them up front. Your staff can decide when, if at all they want to take on these more challenging prospects. Notoriously ineffective cold calling can be a thing of the past.

A few of our clients have built their sales processes entirely around these inbound leads. One of our most recent clients has gone from struggling to get suspects, to a full-time team of 25 sales people converting a steady stream of inbound leads in just 12 days.

Considering the above, you can now provide a prescriptive brief to your web designer.

Despite assertions to the contrary, web design companies rarely know more about how to sell your products than you. The fact that the forum has changed to online does not mean that your prospective clients have changed. It just makes them more accessible.