It Starts with Lead Generation

You cannot grow revenue and earn high profits without first becoming great at lead generation. If you aspire to be in the business fast lane, lead generation is your fuel.
What’s the key to lead generation? Every business is unique, so it’s a question you must find the answer to yourself. It’s a challenging task, to be sure, but it’s imperative. For some, a key component is the physical location. The signage and “look” that get the right prospects in the door. For almost all types of businesses, it’s about figuring out which types of campaigns are most effective.
Once leads are being consistently generated in sufficient quality and quantity to support revenue levels that will allow profitable operation of the business, the task turns to lead conversion. Fuel alone won’t get you motoring down the road. You need a lead conversion machine. An efficient machine that maximizes the revenue derived from the investment you make in lead generation.
Finally, a business must satisfactorily deliver the purchased product or service if it hopes to endure. Deliver in a manner that garners return business. And so business, in its essence, is simply:

• Lead generation
• Lead conversion
• Product or service delivery

Are you giving enough attention to A and B above? Do you realize how critical C is to your repeat business?

Lead Generation

The only way to figure out the most cost-effective means for generating quality leads is trial and error. To be sure, you can learn a lot from your peers. The best place to do this is at trade shows and conferences. But in the end you must try, try and try again. Better yet, test, test and test gain. It’s a game of keeping track of each effort, tracking the results and then trying different combinations and nuances to find an even more successful campaign. Finding one great campaign might do the trick for a while, but you should never stop experimenting and tracking the results. It’s expensive. It’s an investment. It’s the only way to build a business that has enduring success.
What will it take? At least one full-time person dedicated to running, and building, your lead generation machine.

Lead Conversion

Leads have no value unless converted to cash. Turing them to cash is an entirely different process from lead generation. But similar to lead generation, the process should be handled by a dedicated person, or staff. A specialist, or specialists, whose one task is converting leads into clients.
Again, the appropriate and optimal process differs for each business. For a retailer, it’s about how walk-in traffic is greeted, how the inventory is presented or arranged, how their questions are answered, and how they’re “checked out.” McDonald’s has it down pat, of course. “Would you like to try one of our new premium smoothies today?”
Similar to lead generation, lead conversion is a process of testing and comparing results. A process of continually replaced inferior techniques with higher-yielding ones. Do in-person visits with free mock-ups, for example, yield a higher ROI than phone sales with samples of work performed for other customers?

Product or Service Delivery

What’s better than turning a lead into cash? Well, turning a lead into a stream of cash, of course. Returning customers are more profitable than new ones because:

• They do not require an investment in lead generation.
• They do not require the same level of service, i.e., persuading, teaching, selling, system/database setup, post-purchase assistance, etc.

Companies that enjoy a high level of repeat customers are almost always very profitable. You want to have a very profitable company, right? You must execute. Your execution effort is your third critical business process. You should have at least one full-time person in charge of product and/or service delivery and customer satisfaction. Customers return when they’re satisfied with their prior purchases and then they send their friends.
Developing a highly profitable business is not easy, of course, but when we boil down the complexity and see clearly the key processes that can lead us to success, our task becomes easier. Just three processes must be mastered. Becoming “decent” at all three is probably enough to put yourself in the top 20 percent. That’s where the spoils are.