Lead generation: 3 steps to a database that sells

If you advertise at all, you are buying one thing, and it is a person who raised a hand: the homeowner who filled out a quote form after seeing your ad, the office manager who asked for a callback, the client who sent a message at nine at night because that was the only quiet hour they had to think about it. Every one of those people is a lead, and every one of them took real money to reach.

Targeted paid traffic is still the quickest way to start building that group of people, mostly because it lets you decide in advance who you want to reach, which problem you want to speak to, and which moment in their week you want to show up in, so the people who respond already have a reason to talk to you. Done well, lead generation hands you a name, a phone number, an email address, and a pretty clear signal that this person cares about what you do.

The trouble is that most businesses stop paying attention right there. The campaign runs, the leads come in, the phone rings for a couple of weeks, and whoever didn’t buy on the first call quietly drifts out of view, which is a strange way to treat something you paid for, because what happens to those people decides whether the ad budget was spent once or invested.

WITHOUT A CRM, LEADS SLIP AWAY QUIETLY

A lead that lives in a spreadsheet, a notebook, or one employee’s phone has a pretty short life expectancy, and nobody ever really decides to lose it: someone changes jobs, a file gets overwritten, a message sits unanswered over a long weekend, and by Monday the contact has simply stopped being anywhere.

Speed makes this worse than it sounds. In a separate study of 1.25 million leads, those same researchers found that firms that reached out within an hour were nearly seven times as likely to qualify the lead as firms that waited even one hour longer,^*1 and a CRM, which is just the system that keeps every contact in one place, is what lets you see who came in, when they came in, and who has followed up since. Without that view, a 42-hour average first response, which is what the audit found among the companies that replied within 30 days, is the sort of delay that goes unnoticed because nobody can see the queue.

The money tends to back this up. Nucleus Research looked at its own published CRM case studies and put the average return at $8.71 for every dollar spent,^*2 and while those were deployments the firm chose to study, so nobody should treat the number as a promise, the general idea holds up well enough: contacts that are organized get used, and contacts that get used turn into revenue.

THREE MOVES FROM THE FIRST CLICK TO THE REPEAT SALE

Here is a simple way to hold all of this in your head, in three moves that follow a lead from the first click to the second purchase.

SEGMENTS TURN HISTORY INTO MESSAGES

As winter gets closer, the customers who bought from you around the same time last year are a natural audience for a reminder, and your CRM knows exactly who they are, so a message that mentions their last purchase and the cold months ahead lands with someone who already has a history with your business, which makes it a very different conversation from a message sent to a cold list.

A customer who hears from you during their birthday month feels remembered, and most people respond well to being remembered, so when you add a discount that lasts until the end of that month, the deadline gives them a reason to act, and some of them will take the offer simply because a bargain with an expiration date is hard to walk past, which is exactly the kind of small impulse that turns into a sale.

Those two examples are really just the start of a long list, since every niche has its own version, built out of the pain points the audience shares, the problems your product or service solves, and the desire attached to the purchase. The retention math is worth keeping in mind while you build it: Reichheld and Schefter reported that keeping 5% more customers can lift profits by 25% to 95%, a range that came out of e-commerce and varies a lot by industry, so it works best as a general direction.^*3

DEMAND YOUR SALES TEAM CAN CLOSE

Put all of that together and the picture gets fairly simple: targeted traffic brings in people who already care about the problem you solve, the CRM keeps each of them on record and builds the history behind every future message, and with that information in hand you can write messages that speak to an experience your audience recognizes, offer something that gives them a reason to act, and send your sales team demand that arrives already warm.

Your commercial team is the one that closes the sale, and everything before that point decides how many conversations they get to have and how good those conversations turn out to be.