Aquiring Lead and Converting them to Sale in the Internet World

It used to be; you go out and start calling and knocking on the doors to identify potential leads and then depending on your product or service convert this leads into sale/account. So companies invested on this aspect a lot in terms of sales force, direct mailing campaigns and telesales team. The idea was customers have need that they are actively seeking out yet, just with a little nudge we can convert them to a buyer.

This worked very well for a long time, of course it evolved along the way into different form and format, but essentially the idea remained the same. Push for lead generation & generate pull through advertising on mass media. Still works to some extend but with globalization, internet and changing of demographics the consumer behavior has been changing rapidly. Like so many marketing books say it, consumers don't trust what they hear on the advertisements. Rightly or wrongly they now trust there own online research more and listening to the experience of others they know over marketing campaigns or the PUSH.

So in this information age, the roles and responsibility as marketers have been changing a lot. My first experience on this aspect was some what accidental and out of the circumstance rather than some great plan and knowing what is coming. While we were bootstrapping and growing our 'Outsourced Product Engineering' service business in the early part of 2004 globally, we realized we did not have the resource to do it like the traditional companies. That is to open a office in US and Europe, have a great sales person on the ground who goes about developing network and contacts with big accounts and ultimately get those million dollar sales. For us we just had enough resource to focus on our website, that's one thing I could do myself along with help from my wife who was our webmaster then. Also coming from failed dot com era I knew the importance of Search Engine and SEO, so we invested time on that. Does not mean we did not try some of the other means like sending emails to well researched prospects or calling them up, participating on exhibits etc, but nothing really worked much.

By now you might be thinking so how the heck did we survived and did we grow our business. To our surprise we started bagging a good amount of business year on year and growing from 4 people company to today 110 plus resources and business in over 6 countries from US, to Europe, Asia and Australia and New Zealand.

Today's customers have a very narrow window of interest and time, specially in our business. The technology manager gets his mandate from senior management that 'OK, we will outsource xyz. find some provider'; and he starts looking around, where does he go first, google it, after that ask some friends and contacts what are they doing about there needs. Then probably read some blogs and so called experts what they have to say about this, chances are there will be contradictory opinions and directions according to each experts experience and though it wont be useless the tech manager would come out with more questions and doubts, which he would go about asking to his friends and getting there feel. Parallel to this probably he is searching and sending out mails to possible providers that comes up on his search by target countries that he chose as per popular opinions of what is a good outsourcing destination along with his personal preference as he would probably be going there often to make this work.

The above phase lasts for probably 30 days or so, and then he narrows down to a short list that he starts doing due diligence and negotiations. My point from the above scenario is the window of interest for the buyer representative last for only short period of time and it would be quite a challenge if the seller can target exactly that window. If you contact him before he got the mandate they will drop the phone and say 'another rabbit', as they call all the incoming calls from offshore vendors, that just disturb them during work. And interestingly after they have decided and bought into the service of a vendor they will not be interested again any more for long period of time.

So the lesson from this would be since we invested more on information on our website and SEO, we were like the spider who build a large web and waiting for its food. The key to remember here is when you get a inquiry, to respond to it immediately and professionally, to convert the lead to prospect and sale.

If we generalize the above experience I believe we can learn what today's marketing is moving towards. Its less of PUSH and more of providing information and presence, to make it easy for the ones looking find you. Once they find you, then comes the professional approach on how to handle them, remember they have very little time, patience and several choice. They are not going to wait for you if you don't respond to the first knock, of if the response is not reassuring enough to convince them to commit and risk it with you.

Think about it and let me know if you have something to share on this.

Have a nice day.