Leads (from the English. Lead - "attract") - these are the so-called potential customers of the company. Of course, representatives of trade primarily want to find such customers.
What are sales leads?
Some organizations, in particular Russian ones, use slightly different terminology. Leads are usually called potential buyers or customers. What are sales leads? These are clients who have shown a certain interest in the offered goods and services.
Usually, after the discovery of such "sympathy", the company tries to identify the "compliance" of the client with some criteria: he has a fairly strong need to purchase a product (service); solvency. This happens before the sale process.
What is lead generation?
Lead generation (or lead generation) is all the activity of a marketer, aimed at finding contact details of potential consumers of goods and services of a company. After the search, the marketer transfers the collected data to the sales department, then continues to engage in customer acquisition.
To one degree or another, the process of lead generation is present in almost all firms. However, this type of activity does not have a clear work structure. Not always employees of the organization consider it necessary to look for potential customers. There is a reason for this - only a small percentage of all leads leads into real buyers. Therefore, often the sales department prefers to work with regular customers.
Lead Generation Functions
Lead generation is necessary for companies that want to increase sales volumes and optimize their business.
In this regard, it is important for every marketing specialist to master the marketing technologies of finding potential customers. In addition, it is necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of marketing costs in terms of sales growth.
Lead generation becomes effective when searching for a narrow target audience. If you work on finding potential customers, you can partially stabilize sales and reduce costs, for example, on some types of advertising, which are not always practical and productive.
The target audience
The target audience is those potential and real buyers who share some common attributes. It is for them that the implementation of almost all the actions of the marketing department employees is designed. For example, the target audience of the cosmetics and perfumery store is likely to be young girls, as well as middle-aged women who are interested in looking attractive. It is unlikely that such a store will try to attract the male half of customers as customers.
Target Audience Criteria
Real and potential buyers, as a rule, have common features:
• location (where they live or work);
• social status: age category, what they are doing, marital and financial status;
• psychological component: what a person is interested in in life, what character traits, etc.
• how they behave when searching and purchasing the necessary goods or services.
It is worth remembering that potential buyers are not only individuals, but also legal entities. Therefore, there are separate criteria for organizations:
• just as in the first case, location is important;
• a commercial or budget organization;
• type of activity or industry;
• the scale of the company (production capacity, personnel component);
• which employee decides to purchase.
Sales process
The most accurate way to describe the process of buying and selling goods is with the help of the so-called sales funnel, leads are directly involved in it:
- At the first stage, a large mass of people are notified about any offers of the company. This includes any type of advertising and marketing activities of the organization. At the initial stage, it may seem that attracting a large mass of people will not succeed. But still it succeeds.
- The second stage involves just the formation of leads. Among the "notified" appear potential customers interested in buying a particular product. Having collected information about customers (such as name, contact details), you can begin to carry out marketing moves, personalizing offers based on the interests of a potential client.
- Next, you need to qualify leads in sales. What is lead qualification? Of all the attracted customers, you should choose exactly those who really have a high need to purchase goods, as well as solvent consumers. The sales department is actively entering the work.
- Finally, a deal is made and the buyer moves from potential customers to real ones. In practice, most organizations strive to work with regular customers - this is more effective. However, the creation of a new customer base also contributes to the development of the organization.
Of course, all these actions require some costs.
Ways to increase sales
There are many ways to find and attract potential customers. Three main groups are distinguished among them: interaction with a potential client (business meeting, holding conferences and various marketing research); mailing with the help of mail, SMS, reclamation flyers; Internet marketing (store sites, placement of advertising records in search engines, groups in social networks, targeted mailings). Knowing what sales leads are, you can easily attract future buyers.
To increase the volume of sales, and not the number of leads, you need to interact with customers. This direction is more developed, as it affects not only customer acquisition, but also direct sales, which, in fact, is what any company seeks. After all, a potential buyer can not always turn into a real one.
Work with the buyer includes a competent presentation of the goods, tastings, distribution of samplers, information booklets, promotions and discounts.
No less important is the work with the staff of the sales department. Sales and, accordingly, profits of the company directly depend on the qualified work of personnel. Employees must be able to sell the product, know all its characteristics, as well as the intricacies of communication with customers. To realize all this in practice is obtained from employees interested in sales growth.
conclusions
Any marketing activity, including lead management, is paying off. They are expressed by an increase in sales. In an emerging market it is very important to understand what leads are in sales and how to classify them correctly. The more accurately the results of this qualification are obtained, the more consumer demand develops and the image of the company increases. Therefore, sales and lead generation are closely related.
Lead generation is aimed at attracting people who are interested in the company's products. The collection of information and the compilation of the client base greatly helps to increase the number of customers and increase sales volumes.
If the company has clearly established lead generation, the head of the sales department will know exactly how much effort, time and money the company spends on searching for each potential customer, as well as which of the marketing moves turned out to be the most appropriate and how many leads turned into the number of real customers.
Thus, with the help of lead generation, a company can manage the number of customers and sales volumes. And when profits grow steadily along with the image of the company, you can safely think about expanding activities.