Small Business Growth Strategies: Target Leads With Sales & Marketing" loading="lazy">
As a small business owner, you will understand that as your business begins to take off, the situations you have to trouble-shoot on a daily basis become more and more complicated. Slowly, life seems to present you with problems that you never thought you’d have to face. It is through these difficult times that your creativity and resourcefulness as an entrepreneur will carry you through.
Some of the challenges small business owners out there have to wrangle with every now and then include attracting customers, retaining customers, implementing the right marketing strategy, and attaining a steady cash flow– these among many others.
It is rare for small business owners to have to deal with the bigger problems faced by bigger corporations at the earlier stage of growth. However, the problems they have to face earlier on and the manner by which they resolve these problems contribute to the success or failure of their business. The pain-points a small business owner has can sometimes stretch his patience and resources thin. This is because when sustaining a business, owners have the tendency to throw as many shots as they can into different hoops, forgetting it is sometimes better to focus on one hoop that is closer in range, where they would most likely be able to shoot more successful shots.
For a business to get past the survival stage, it has to attract more customers. To do so will require generation of leads. This leads us to the question: are all leads good?
Of course not. In fact, that is what we’re about to discuss in this article.
In the succeeding sections, you will find out what good-fit leads are, you will learn how to identify good-fit leads, and more importantly, you will understand how targeting the right leads helps your small business.
What are Good-fit Leads?
What exactly are good-fit leads? To answer that, you have to first learn the difference between leads and prospects. A lead is an unqualified contact who may or may not currently be in the marketing process, while a prospect is a qualified contact who has been vetted (or qualified) by the sales team and moved into the sales process (eventually considered an opportunity).
A good-fit lead therefore, is anyone who, after you conduct your research to determine if they can find value in your products/services, can be turned into qualified prospects.
No Idea How to Identify Good-fit leads? Here’s How!
As a small business owner nursing a new business into good fiscal health, your survival depends largely on the number of customers you can attract. This is why conducting lead generation activities regularly is a must. Then again you probably are clueless on how to identify good-fit leads. It’s really not that hard.
The secret on how to identify good-fit leads is RESEARCH.
You do this through a series of steps.
The first being “prospecting”, which is simply the execution of a targeted outreach campaign to build a list of potential prospects who check-off the attributes in criteria you have established.
Next, you initiate communication through connect calls and exploratory calls. Each time educating them and helping them figure out solutions to their particular pain-points until they are ready to talk with your sales team and eventually, become a paying client.
The outcome of these outreach campaigns will dictate the process of how you will initiate contact and later on connect with prospects. More importantly, it is through these acts of research that you qualify a good-fit lead into a prospect.
Now, as a small business owner, you’re probably wondering what good is it knowing all this?
Get ready to be surprised by how targeting the right leads helps your small business.
How Does Targeting the Right Leads Help Your Small Business?
Again, as your business takes off, attracting more customers is crucial to having a steady flow of cash. Attracting customers means employing marketing and lead generation strategies. This can be a bit overwhelming, unless you know exactly what to do.
If this is the circumstance you’re in, we highly suggest, as a small business growth strategy, for you to target the right leads with your sales and marketing efforts.
Think about this. You’re new on the scene. There are billions of people in the world, millions within your city and hundreds just within your block. If you offer your products or services to a random bunch out of all those people, how many will express an interest? What are the chances that none will?
This is how targeting the right leads helps your small business.
Just as we have discussed in the previous paragraphs, you can identify a good-fit lead by figuring out if they’re someone you can turn into a prospect that will most likely become a paying customer/client. Doing so will mean you can focus your time, effort, and resources on these good-fit leads and prospects as they are the ones who will most likely earn you revenue by purchasing your product or availing your services.
Final Take: Good-fit Leads Become Prospects, Prospects Become Paying Customers
A paying customer who can contribute to your sales and your revenue is ultimately your goal. It would be easier to land sales when you know who to spend your energy and resources on.
Keep in mind that as an entrepreneur, you don’t only invest your capital, you also invest your time and your energy, and those are very valuable things. Like all businesses in their beginning stages, your resources can be limited. It is therefore a wise move to invest your limited resources to those whose circumstances make them a good-fit to your business.
