On Friday I had the privilege to be part of a Café IF session on lead generation. This is an event organized by the Innovation Factory that takes place a couple times a month and focuses on a number of different topics. For our session on February 10, we had a full house with about 20 participants all wanting to find out about how they can sell more. The highlights of the session included the following.
The Best B2B Social Network Tool is LinkedIn
I use LinkedIn in every day. It helps to organize business relationships, get to second connections through good relationships with 1st connections, great tool for research, great information through status updates and groups, and it can be a great source of inbound traffic and leads to your web site.
Use Lead Generation Methods That Best Match Your Target Prospects
Social media can be a great tool for lead generation, but if your target prospects do not use it then you need to find other ways to connect with them. That may mean more traditional lead generation activities that may include things like direct mail. My co-worker, Steve Gruber wrote a blog on this recently
Free Tools Can Help With Lead Generation
There are some great tools that can be leveraged to help with the sales effort including Twitter, Linkedin, CRM software like Zoho, and Jigsaw. We recently published a blog highlighting these tools.
Focus on Your Benefits
The decision makers at your prospects don’t care about features and functions, they care about how you will help their business. For B2B sales that means talking about helping them increase revenue, decrease costs, improve productivity, or avoid something bad (this includes things like legal action or bad PR).
There are many options, try a few. There is no one way to get leads. Pick a few methods that could include networking, cold calling, direct mail, social media, referrals, blogs, email, newsletters, and having a great website.
These lead generation tips can help to drive more sales. For a good monthly summary sign-up for the VA Partners newsletter full of Sales, Marketing, and Social Media tips. Our connection of the month for February, just happened to be the Innovation Factory.
