The Secret to Lead Generation- It's All About the List

When attempting to generate sales in a technology consulting and service business, you need to market your business. Directly going for the kill is not going to work unless you get a call from someone that says "I need help now and I want you to do it".

Of course that happens here and there as you are an established (well positioned) player in a particular niche, but it's not a normal occurrence. The typical sale is made by marketing your business, getting prospects into your marketing funnel and then leading them into your sales process.



Unfortunately the skill of lead generation escapes many technology businesses or seems like a very difficult process to get right. But just like any other skill and process, it takes learning and testing to get it right and keep it working. That's how this particular necessary business operation works.

But the real secret to low cost and effective lead generation is in the list. What you are marketing and the medium in which you are doing it are best served with a targeted and segmented list. Any other way is usually a dissapointment to say the least.

Let me explain. A targeted list represents only prospects that fit the same criteria that make up your best customers. That means the same industry, size, revenues, operations structure, etc.

A segmented list takes this targeted list and breaks it down into like parts. This is how you get a message to market match as you get much better results tweaking your marketing to fit exactly who you are talking to. If you are doing a marketing piece on a service (and you really should only talk about 1 thing per piece) you are going to get much better response by talking to each segment directly.

For example if your marketing piece (direct mail, telemarketing call, particular web page, PPC ad, etc) is selling Service A, you will get much more traction by making your content talk directly to Small Construction Companies and change things up to make more sense to Large Manufacturing Facilities That's matching your message to the market.

So now you're probably thinking "where exactly am I getting these list from". In my book there are 3 ways. You buy them, you joint venture with someone whose list matches your segment(s), or you generate your own.

Since that's a post of its own, come back next week for that explanation. (You can get to Part 2 right here.)

If you would like to discuss building a targeted list, just follow this link to set up a free 30 minute session http://consultantscoach.com/FreeStrategySession.php.



To Your Business Success-

George Sierchio
The Consultant's Coach