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The two biggest mistakes that companies make when it comes to lead generation are first that they tend to rely more on intuition and gut instinct rather than raw data, and second, that they generally take a shotgun approach to leads, on the thinking that their approach will hit something and bring home a few leads. Unfortunately, these errors tend to magnify each other, making them worse together than they are on their own. Your instinct tells you to fire a shot in one direction, so you turn and pull the trigger. Maybe you hit something and maybe you don’t, but you’re likely to keep firing anyway, because that’s what’s worked in the past.

There’s a better way. Here’s how to take your lead generation to the next level.

Audit Your Campaigns

This has got to be a first. Take a look at what you’re doing, and evaluate the campaigns next to each other. Pitch your lowest performing campaigns over the side, and focus on the ones that actually seem to be working. The rest of the steps that follow will be all geared toward improving the results of your surviving campaigns, and you’ll have both the time and the resources to devote to that by getting rid of the campaigns that are delivering underwhelming responses.

Data Driven

Ultimately, we’re going to be talking about lead scoring, but in order to do that, we’ve got to get away from gut-scoring. Any scoring that is to be done must be done on the basis of hard data, and that data must be fresh. You need to conduct a current customer demographics study, then begin systematically capturing that data with every sale you make so that the demographics data updates itself, going forward.

Come To A Consensus On Lead Scoring

Whatever CRM you’re using, if you don’t come to a firm, clear consensus on how to score leads, then your people are going to revert straight back to going with their gut instinct the moment you take your hand of the tiller. See that this doesn’t happen by getting them to agree with what, precisely, makes a high scoring lead.

Iterative

Your scoring system cannot be a one and done process. It has to be an iterative, ongoing operation because in the first place, you’re not going to get it right on the first try, and in the second, your customer demographics information will be changing and evolving over time. As it does, your lead scoring needs to be adaptive enough to accommodate those incremental changes and whatever that evolving data reveals needs to be reflected in the actions your sales team takes.

The end result of these changes will be a focus on quality over quantity. You will likely wind up generating fewer leads, but as you refine your system, you will see an increasing percentage of them result in sales, which is ultimately the goal. If you’re in the business of collecting lots of low quality, non converting leads, by all means, stay your present course. On the other hand, if you’re in the business to sell your product, focus on quality, not quantity.

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