With these insights in mind, this week's lesson teaches you how to turn measures into better customer acquisition. Marketing and sales executives alike will want to pay close attention to this issue in their lead generation efforts.
With the next issue, you'll significantly influence your lead generation efforts with what you've learned here over the last couple of months.
With a strong understanding of how to measure customer behavior, you will reveal certain indicators that improve your ability to attract new customers. Missing the transition from analytical study to customer acquisition will leave your company wasting time and effort. You can avoid failure with these measures of customer behavior that create tangible results in lead generation:
Identify what motivates buyers to action. All customer behavior measures should bring you to a better understanding of what motivates a purchase. Take into consideration everything customers experiences before their initial contact with your organization, product, or even before they seek any solution. With these details, you can insert your message early in a prospects selection process.
Measures should identify additional decision makers. If the prospect has multiple decision makers with different concerns, your marketing materials must address each of these concerns individually. Sales professionals need to be aware of other decision makers who might require information beyond the scope of the average sales call.
Use measures to indicate movement in a buying process. Your prospects have a certain way they select solutions for their organization, look for indicators that a prospect is moving closer to a buy. These insights will help you pre-qualify inquires before passing them along to sales as a lead. Spend more time with those closest to becoming to customers.
Measure what matters to improving customer acquisitions. Lead generation is usually the first opportunity for future customers to learn more about the solutions you offer. However, a high volume of leads doesn't guarantee more sales. Measure lead value by revenue produced later down the sales cycle, take measures that improve acquisition, not lead volume.
Acquisition is a sequential process modeled around how buyers solve problems. Your measures should indicate an inquiries state within this acquisition process as they move towards a solution. Areas to consider include qualification characteristics, certain experiences of prospects, or results from assessments.
Identify measures that move leads along a clear revenue generating process. Throw away the old single focus sales process for a more long-term Marketing-Sales-Service Funnel. Every new lead moves through a marketing process designed to qualify buyers, before passing these leads to sales. After the sale, successfully serving customers is just as important as lead generation.
Use measures that attract more like your best customers. Segments of your customer base are more desirable than others are, so focus your sales and marketing efforts on profitable customers. These segments are more likely to enter a long-term and profitable relationship with your organization.
Focus on leads easy for sales to convert to profitable customers. Marketing is wasting the time of sales if they aren't keenly aware of ideal buyer characteristics. Conversion to a profitable sale is important because a company can't survive on leads that don't (or take forever to) become customers. Find an optimal balance through the collaboration of sales and marketing.
Focus lead generation campaigns around specific revenue objectives. The number of leads per channel is often the only measure company's use for lead generation success. It doesn't matter how many leads you get as much as how many sales you close from those leads. Your best measure of lead generation is lead quality and value.
Go beyond the number of leads as a performance indicator to look at revenue measures. Easy sales aren't always the best sales in terms of value. Marketing needs to look for prospects who add significant revenue to your organization.
Every measure in every part of your company should seek prospects that look like high value customers.Because lead generation feeds sales efforts, it plays a major role in your company's fiscal well being. Use what you know about customer behavior to improve customer acquisition.
Justin Hitt is a strategic relations consultant and the author of "How to Get more Profits by Cultivating Your Best Customers". Clients include business owners and executives of medium to large companies worldwide. He can be reached at https://iunctura.com/