Foundation Before Funnel: Know the Basics of Lead Generation
“Coffee’s for closers.”
That’s one of the scant suitable-for-print lines of the profanity-laden tirade delivered Alec Baldwin’s brief yet unforgettable appearance in the film “Glengarry Glen Ross.” His (air quotes) motivational speech to the sales staff is meant to serve as inspiration to close on leads, but his management style contains all the subtlety and nuance of a sledgehammer.
More leads!
More leads mean more money!
As a digital marketing veteran, there is something I learned early on: Master the basics, build your foundation, then scale. Many business leaders like to hear they are getting a lot of leads; however, context matters. The devil in the details is the subtlety and nuance that leads to insight and understanding. Leads are nice. Leads are fun. But I encourage them to step back and ask questions that matter.
- What is your lead process?
- Do you know, on average, how long it takes to connect with a lead?
- Do you know your conversion rate to a marketing qualified lead?
- Do you know what your sales close rate is?
- Have you shopped your own website? What happened? Did you get an email? Does it look like something you’d want your business to send?
- What is the average time it takes to close a lead?
If your foundation isn’t right, you have no business asking for more leads. You will convert a few of them to sales — and ruin a lot more on their overall sour experience with your brand. More often than not, we find that most, if not all, of the above questions cannot be easily answered. You are not alone, and today is a good day to identify and implement your lead process.
First and foremost, you should be able to identify the average time it takes for a lead to convert to a customer for your business. Let’s say you find out that it usually takes 180 days for a lead to turn into a customer. Are you going to just let them flail around, hoping they come back to your website? Or stop into your store? Or call you in that time?
At a minimum, a lead process should map out several touchpoints, in multiple channels, for the average time that it takes to convert. In this case, that would be mapping out six months of touchpoints.
Once you have successfully implemented the tools and processes to support the lead process, then you can open the floodgates on lead generation.
M3 Group is perfectly positioned to help you with this process. Our team can audit your processes and tools, deliver a recommendation set, and help implement some of the pieces or all of them, depending on what areas your business requires support. Identifying your customer journey and subsequently mapping your touchpoints to that journey is not something that happens overnight, but it is essential for business growth.
Reach out to M3 Group at m3group.biz to find out more about how we can set a solid foundation for your lead funnel. We’ll put a pot of coffee on for you.
