28 Sep Where Have All The Leads Gone
Sometimes I think the most creative people are those that lack common sense. How so? There are a lot of very creative people in the mortgage technology space today that have created very innovative products yet they wonder why they don’t have any leads. Maybe I’m missing something, but it still amazes me that as I talk to executives at these leading technology vendors I hear these creative people say they had to cut their marketing budget because of hard times, but just don’t understand why their competitors that have a lesser product and bigger marketing budget seem to keep the leads coming.
The old saying goes: You have to pay to play. The same applies in this scenario. You have to have a lead generation strategy in order to be successful. Most executives are traveling all around the country and responding to RFIs left, right and center, but they don’t have a strategy to proactively get leads. That strategy does not set up the company for success, but here’s a strategy that will get you that needed success.
How do you get those leads? You have to have a strategy to reach out to prospects proactively. Too often I see vendors fall into what I would call a roller coaster cycle where sales reps work hard to deal with the leads they’re dealing with and then that dries up and you go into a valley and have to scramble to get more leads. That leads to a whole lot of ups and downs.
So how do you get leads? You can go to trade shows, write white papers, do pubic relations, advertising and social media. The best companies will combine several of these elements into one systematic approach. You can’t rest your hat on just one of these strategies and expect to get tons of leads.
Simply put, you can’t have tunnel vision when you’re talking leads. What do I mean by tunnel vision? Just because you ran an ad you can’t expect leads to come in right away. You can’t get one press release picked up and expect leads to come in that way either. You have to do all these things in tandem to get the leads coming in the door.
Make no mistake, it’s tough out there. It’s competitive. You have to step up. One way you can step up even if you don’t have many leads is to follow up with existing leads regularly. For every lead that you get, the salesperson needs to have the tools to respond. From there they need to get that into an active pipeline and work it.
It’s time to create a holistic strategy to getting leads and remember it doesn’t end there. Where does it end? It ends when the deal is signed. However, every closed deal starts with a lead, so let’s come together as an industry and do a better job of getting those leads and turning them around.