What Do You Do With Your Leads?

“People are not ready to buy when you are ready to sell”

-Zig Zigglar

Studies show that only 3% of any market is ready to buy, yes pull the trigger, at any given time. No wonder our interruptive advertising, direct mail, email blast only garner a <1 font="font" rate.="rate." response="response">

Here is the other dilemma that is working against your marketing/sales program – the leads we get from our efforts are not followed up. We, all of us, tend to follow up once or twice, if they are not ready to buy or can’t tell us when they will be ready we put them in a pile and never contact them again.

Studies prove this.

To summarize my favorite one:

• 80% of the sales are made between the 5^th and 12^th contact
• Only 10% of companies follow up  more than 3 times

I think you see the big disconnect. These “leads” that many call “tire kickers”, because they aren’t ready to buy right now will buy at some point in the future. They are doing research, looking around or they would not have said “yes” to your offer or call to action, searched your website or dropped by the store.

If we are not top of mind when they are ready to buy then they will buy from someone else.

Thus a really effective marketing plan includes a Marketing Machine, an automated follow up, nurturing system to make sure we stay in front of these leads so when the time comes they will think of us. We will have built the trust necessary for them to buy from us.

How do we do that? Via what I call “TIPS”. These can be short emails with videos, text, audios, etc . that are bits of relevant information that address their pains and fears. Simple, but informative.

(Like you are reading right now)

Absolutely no sales. I mean no sales, no offers, no coupons, no calls to action. The minute they see a hint of this they will never read one again. Remember we are trying to build trust here and stay “ top of mind” with these people over a long period of time. That means stick to serving them with good, relevant information they can use.

Here is an example of one of my client's TIPS – the template is easy to build in Constant Contact. Then, over time, begin writing the TIPS and put them in a queue to go out in a consistent interval like weekly, bi weekly, monthly. You don’t have to build them all at once do one a week and soon you will have a whole queue built.

Be there when people are ready to buy, not just when you are trying to sell. Nurture your leads.

Rick Wallace