Short-term planning can harm your lead generation

Short-term planning can harm your lead generation

big clientEvery company wants new customers as soon as possible. Most of those companies do something about it – they generate quality leads and contact the right prospects in the right time. Sometimes, customers find the company by themselves, because of their urgent need for their product or just because they saw some information online.
But this isn’t an everyday occurrence and some companies need to do some outbound lead generation at some point. They use different tools about it – PPC, telemarketing, emails, direct marketing etc. However, success depends on many things – targets, the competition and the market are some of them. The more focused you are, the faster you will succeed.
But not every proposition is a quick sell. Sometimes things need to go slower than normally, so you can achieve more – like with some big potential customers for example. Big companies tend to take their time when choosing a vendor, so you will need to slow down and plan in the long term, if you want to make the big sale.  In such cases, your lead generation requires a number of things to be done in order to achieve success:

  1. Identification of the decision-makers in the organization – you need to identify the sector, the location, the size and the type of organization you are targeting and also the name and position of the decision maker that you want to talk to. It may sound easy, but the latter part will probably take some time. It’s because big companies have more than one decision maker in their roster and you will need to identify the right one for you. This means making a list with all the decision makers, the people you need to talk to in order to contact them, the departments where your offer and product are relevant to and finally – the decision maker that you are looking for;
  2. Challenges and issues of the prospect – the next thing you need to do is find out what challenges the prospect is facing and how you can solve their problems. The thing is, there are not many reasons for a company to switch vendors – end of the contract, dissatisfaction with the provider or a new requirement that the provider cannot fulfill. So if you want to be at your best – find out what happened and try to stay one step ahead. If the previous provider won’t get his contract renewed – have a better offer than his. If the problem is dissatisfaction with the vendor – find out the exact problem and have a solution to it in your offer. If there are new requirements – learn everything about them and how to fulfill them;
  3. Gaining insight – when most big companies decide to work with a vendor, their contract usually run for long periods of time. But this doesn’t mean that your job is done. Now, you need to gain insight on the company – how the processes that your product is part of work, are there any problems that can occur in time. Try to stay on top of things and have a solution for most things that can go wrong. But look for the right timing. Don’t just attack your customer with more and more offers, but plan for some follow-up calls or meetings, where you can explain how your company can be of further help to them;

Working with large organizations and making big sales takes time. Moreover, it takes long term planning. But if you are focused enough and follow your plan closely, you will achieve success, but in order to do this, you need to stop with the short-termism, because good things take good time to happen and some leads are bigger than other leads.

And if you need help with your lead generation, telemarketing or you need a professional team to outsource your customer service to – give us a call, we can help you.