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Unless your product sells itself and people are
lining up to buy it, you will need to have a
regular program to stimulate
demand - or in other words, generate
qualified leads that are ready to go straight to
your sales reps. There are many ways to stimulate demand, which involve
various media and differ greatly in cost and
results.
The quick answer to "I need
more sales leads" or "I need better sales leads"
is
Experience-based telemarketing
If you
are ready to go straight to the right answer,
the link above will take you to our
telemarketing page and tell you about HiQ
telemarketing - KMA's extreme version of
experience-based telemarketing.
If you want a
review of all the
methods of stimulating demand, read on.
Possible ways to
generate
demand:
We have tried many ways to
generate leads for our clients. We talk to
companies of all sizes every day about their
demand-generation challenges - their successes
and failures. Strong messages and trends emerge
from this experience. The biggest trend in the
last ten years is that lead generation has
become significantly harder. More specific
results of this experience are included here as
simplified conclusions.
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Method |
Simple
conclusion for lead generation |
|
Snail
mail |
Doesn't work any more by itself |
|
email |
Foiled by Spam. Complicated by
permission-based marketing. Rarely works for
lead generation if used alone. |
|
Regular telemarketing |
Definition: Traditional telemarketing using
college grads with a few years experience in
business or IT.
This works well for generating
audiences, updating databases and so on. But the
callers usually lack the experience, skill,
sophistication and/or confidence to talk to
decision makers about big-ticket, strategic or
complicated deals. The
results can be lower-level contacts reached and
poor qualification.
Conclusions:
 | Can work well to generate
leads for smaller, simpler solutions. |
| Don't use it for
generating leads for big-ticket,
sophisticated solutions |
|
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Experience-based telemarketing |
Definition: Telemarketing using
callers that have at least as much selling skill
and sophistication as the sales reps who will
receive the leads. This level of skill can
only be obtained by many years of real
experience. This is the best way to generate
quality leads, because experienced callers can
reach more senior contacts,
build the rapport, qualify situations with
accuracy and
provide your sales reps with the best start.
Example: KMA's pool of HiQ
callers have an average of over 25 years of
IT experience.
Conclusion: This is the only way to go if you
want the simplest, quickest way to get high
quality leads.
Even if you are prepared to use longer-term,
more sophisticated multi-touch campaigns,
you should employ experienced-based
telemarketing for the final,
qualification touch. |
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Events |
Face-to-face
seminars were popular and effective in the last
millennium; now they have largely been replaced by the
less costly electronic events like Webinars.
These can be very effective at:
|
Increasing the
awareness of your organization and products |
|
Providing an in-depth dialog with customers or
prospects. |
However, events
don't stand alone. You still need mail and
regular telemarketing to generate the audience
and you still need experience-based
telemarketing to qualify those who show an
interest. KMA has many examples of how our HiQ
telemarketing has generated more qualified leads
from the non-attendees and no shows than came
from the attendees. So, even if you choose to
use events, telemarketing is going to be crucial
to the success of the total program. |
|
Advertising and PR |
This works for
corporate image, awareness, creating markets and
so on. So, if you are a huge organization, it is
important to you. But if you are a small or
medium-sized company, trying to generate sales
leads, advertising and PR have little direct relevance. |
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Learn more on these other pages... |
Design a Campaign
Follow
our 8 step process for designing a lead
generation campaign.
| What are the building
blocks? |
| What are reasonable
expectations? |
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What will it cost for my campaign? |
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Lead generation from KMA
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