What Leads Are and How To Use Them to Your Advantage

What Are Leads?

Leads are arguably one of the most important tools your business can use to increase sales, stay in contact with customers, and improve your overall sales strategy. A ‘Lead’ can be defined as any individual or organization that expresses interest in your product or service.   To wrap it up in a neat little bow for you; Leads are your potential customers.

In order to assure that your leads are qualified, your marketing strategy should take steps to ensure that your leads are eligible buyers. In other words, you need to make sure your leads are capable of purchasing your product or service. Otherwise, your sales team will not return great results. In fact, you may even severe a chance at selling to a customer simply because their lead wasn’t qualified. What’s more annoying than going to the store without money? Being asked to buy something when your wallet is empty.   That’s why it’s incredibly important to generate qualified leads. Qualified leads make sales and opportunities.

 

How Do You Get Qualified Leads?

            A qualified lead comes from creating a quality lead magnet (advertisement, e-letter, handout, etc).   Creating a quality lead is harder than it looks, though. There are a few things you should take into consideration before trying to create your own:

Do You Know Who Your Customer Is? Who would want to buy your product? What are their interests? What would they use it for?

Who Can Afford Your Product? If someone cannot afford your product, the you should not consider them a lead.   It’s okay to disqualify people from becoming a potential lead. Chances are, they won’t be ineligible forever.

How Are You Going To Generate Leads? Take a look at your business. Where do consumers interact with your product most? If the answer is social media, then the best decision would be to advertise your lead magnet through Facebook, Twitter, and other accounts your customers interact with.

Another great perk to generating leads: Your business is given the opportunity to create a customer relationship. Customer relationships increase the probability of your lead buying from you again, and your ability to further your reach to other potential leads. If they personally enjoyed your product or service, they will tell their friends. In many cases, it’s wise to incentivize your customers to share your business with their friends in order to receive coupons or future benefits.

Altogether, generating and maintaining leads is something your business cannot afford to skip-out on. Even if business is good now, what will you do when your current customer pool has run out? You won’t.   Thats why it’s so important to continuously generate and gather leads for your product or service.