Offline Lead Gen

Cold Calling
Cold calling is leveraged in order to get meetings with the decision-makers of your target clients or at a minimum send them a quote and your brochure. In order to start telemarketing, you’ll need at least 500 targeted sales leads. 500 calls will generally net you twenty contacts, sixty voicemails, and twenty calls stopped by a gatekeeper. Of the ten people that you get a hold of, about twenty percent are likely to have any interest whatsoever in your product/service. Those four decision-makers are warm leads!

Direct Mail
Direct mail is an effective way to generate leads if you pair it with cold calling or email. You can’t just send one direct mail piece to all of the people in your sales database and expect warm leads to flood in though. You need to send several rounds of direct mail to your prospects and follow those mailings up with a call.

Networking
Good old fashioned networking remains a critical strategy in lead generation. Don’t be a pushy sales guy though. Just make sure to be personable and mention your company name along the way. Try to provide everybody you meet with a valuable information. Usually they will reciprocate by providing you with potential leads or at least some advice that might be helpful to you.

Trade Shows
Trade shows can be expensive, but if executed properly you can obtain tons of warm leads. Just having a booth will rarely get the job done though. You need to make sure you’ve done plenty of advanced work to have meetings preset before the event even starts. If you can afford to sponsor the event (or at least a party tied into the event), that can be a great way to drive additional awareness for your product or service.

Online Lead Gen

• Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
• Search Engine Marketing (SEM)
• Email Marketing
• Display Advertising (Banner Ads)
• Affiliate Marketing
• Social Media

Define Your Target Market
To define your target market, you need to ask yourself a few questions about what your ideal customers look like.

Buy Leads
If you stick with it, you can imagine your telephone as a slot machine. If you put enough quarters in, sooner or later you’ll score the jackpot. Sticking with that theme, think of the leads you buy as slot machine tokens. Buying leads from one of the major sales leads companies is fairly easy once you’ve identified your target prospects.

Once you have made all of your selections, you’ll be able to purchase leads from your preferred database provider. On the other hand, if you’re not sure which company to buy leads from, you can get 100 free leads to trial one of the leading providers, Info USA.

In order to keep tabs on your prospective clients through the sales process, from the first time you get in touch with the prospect through closing the sale; You’ll be much more efficient if you have a solution that helps you to keep track of the three W’s - Who you’ve reached, when you spoke to them, and what the outcome was. Two of the leading CRM software solutions are ACT! and Salesforce.com. There are many more, including Oracle CRM On demand, Sugar CRM, Microsoft dynamics CRM, Netsuite CRM+, Landslide, Goldmine, and OnContact.com.

Choosing the CRM application that is right for you will depend on the size of your salesforce, the location of your saleforce (whether they are spread out or not), the level of integration with other systems (like Google Analytics) that you require, and several other factors.

Regardless of what CRM tool you choose, you’ll need business leads. If you want to start out with 500 free leads, check out our partners at Info USA Leads!

• Sales Genie
• Go Leads
• USA Data
• Dunn and Bradstreet
• Zap Data
• Jigsaw

In order to get the most out of your sales leads, you’ll need to be as effecient as possible with your tracking and follow-up. So whether you use a free tool like Google Spreadsheets or an enterprise solution, utilizing a CRM application to help you track your sales efforts and schedule future action items is essential to your success in inside sales as well.

In order to maximize the amount of contacts you make, efficiency is vital. A few things every B2B salesperson needs to be efficient are:

• Sales Leads - To get going, you’ll need a list of decision-makers at companies that are likely to use your your company’s solutions. The leading companies in the sales database sector are InfoUSA and Hoover’s. Not every sales person has big bucks to pay for a leads list, so InfoUSA provides 500 free leads as a basic trial of their product.

• CRM Software - In order to keep track of your prospects through the telemarketing process, from the first time you get in touch with the target through closing the sale; You’ll be much more efficient if you have a solution that allows you to keep track of who you’ve contacted, when you reached them, and what the final result was. A few of the tools in the Telemarketing market are ACT! and Frontline Solutions.

Regardless how strong of a sales associate you are, the cold calling process can be long and toilsome, so while you’ll require the items above to get started, you’ll truly need lots of patience and determination to make it past the first day.

Once you have an idea what your target prospects looks like, you need to determine the 2007 NAICS Code category that they fall under. Most lead databases are classified either by NAICS codes or SIC codes. These classification codes are simply structured hierarchies of business types. Once you’ve decided whether you’ll be targeting manufacturers, wholesalers, retailers, construction companies, governmental agencies, or some other industry; you’ll be ready to purchase a sales lead database. But wait! Before you buy any leads, make sure you check out our offer for 100 Free sales leads from InfoUSA!