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Episode Transcript
Alex Chan | Paul O’Donohue
Our question for the day is, if you are a business owner or CEO, are you recession ready? Now, we’ve been posing that question at the start of every video in the series. And each episode in the series is to help you to answer. Yes, I am. Recession ready? This particular session focuses on a key strategic move, which is how to improve your lead generation. And to help us to discuss this is our CEO and founder of SalesStar, Paul O’Donohue. Now Paul, you were saying to me offline that you get this question a lot. You were saying that it’s the lead generation, which people are asking you about all the time. This is the broken piece, right?
A lot of our clients are stuck on this one. Leads are the lifeblood of our sales organization. Now everything starts to flow from lead generation. And in fact, think about this. Sales effectiveness starts from the start of the buyer’s journey. Now, if we can have a full system and sense of a sales process that meets our ideal future prospect at the start of the buyer journey, which 95% of that is online, it can dramatically improve our sales effectiveness, especially if we can meet them with an event to trigger event that gets them engaged digitally online. We can nurture them and build a relationship and by the time they reach out to us, they feel like they know us, they feel like they trust us. They’ve indoctrinated with our ideas or product. What does it do to your sales cycles? What does that do to your conversion rates? So conversion rates usually increase, sales cycles reduce. So the right lead generation can lead to a massive improvement in sales effectiveness. Now, it’s not a one trick pony and it’s not a silver bullet for generating leads because there are just like marketing lead generation is a mix of things, right? I just gave reference to a digital strategy which I absolutely loved. You know what I love about digital sales lead generation Alex with that. It data driven.
And so you can measure everything.
You can measure everything. This is no B.S. It’s it’s test and measure. Test and measure. Iterate, refine, improve. It’s all about getting in front of your ideal future client. How do you do that in a digital world? Well, you can do that by Google Search. You can do that by targeting on LinkedIn very, very precisely. You can like on LinkedIn, you can search for your ideal target audience, which I would recommend you think about that through the one page sales plan. And you really define as you can only choose one target market and one target audience. Who would that be? But through LinkedIn, you’re able to take that out and those that Avatar, those industries, and you’re able to look at the size of the addressable market, which is important. There’s no point picking a niche that has a very small market that isn’t hungry. You know, the bigger the market, the hungrier they are, the more attractive that market is. So we can find these things out by using digital platforms like LinkedIn, LinkedIn should be a staple product that modern day sales people will use to prospect. So, for example, navigation LinkedIn navigator. You’re able to search and build lists, you’re able to outreach on those those messages you get from your inbox, they actually get read a lot more than messages in your email box. So having the right message and is important and there’s some key strategies around that you can’t sell straight off the bat. It’s just like you would meet someone in a social networking event that’s a live event. You don’t walk up to them and start trying to sell to them. It’s just about building a conversation, you know, taking interest and conversations are the new leads. Right. So we need to have lots of conversations and build that trust before you start selling to them. And listing traditional methods. Alex, what’s your favorite form of lead generation?
Well, I find one of the lowest cost forms of lead generation is referral prospecting. I mean, you know, how many of us have got customers who are happy? I hope we can open up our hands. And if we do have happy customers, what prevents us from adding referrals or requests for referrals into our sales process? I think that I think that our viewers might be delightfully surprised if they haven’t tried this to the full potential possible, if they went and simply asked them, could they maybe introduce them to another person who might need our products or our services, our solutions?
Alex It’s the best form of marketing is word of mouth. I’ve grown this business, as you know, through referrals. My first year I hustled to get five clients. I asked for three referrals from each client. I went from 5 to 15 clients in my first year very rapidly. And my 10th year, as you know, Alex, 82% of our new business was referred business. And that’s a wonderful thing in terms of bringing your cost of sale down and really dramatically growing your business.
Yeah. And what a lot of our viewers may or may not realize is that there’s different kinds of referrals. I mean, there’s the traditional referral where they refer you to an external source, somebody in another business. But you know what? There’s also things like internal referrals, maybe they’ve got multiple divisions, maybe they’ve got multiple branch locations. Those are the easiest referrals of all to get internally referred or maybe even internally referred by another department in your company.
So Alex’s referrals is the best form of marketing. Why do most companies not have it as a process or strategy?
Well, I think that they should. So Paul the old ways of lead generation with a good old cold call and go through multiple prospects and and slowly try to whittle them down. Getting absolutely nowhere. You’ve just talked about making it more efficient. You’ve talked about digital. You’ve talked about LinkedIn. We’ve talked about referrals. Is there something that our viewers could do to really improve their lead generation process and to get these leads reigning in.
Look, the things that are talked about today. Referrals. If you don’t have a good referral system, reach out to your coach. If you’re working with one or reach out to us and we’ll show you how that process should effectively work in your business. And I think most importantly, we need to start thinking about transitioning from traditional sales methods and processes to a world which is digital sales, right? So part of selling and modern times is to digitalize your offer. So if you want to improve sales effectiveness, you’ve got to have a really good digital sales strategy and process. Now what I would suggest is we have a team of experts around that we’ve actually started a completely new company, which is SalesStar Digital. They’re experts in anything digital, whether it’s LinkedIn, Google, Websites but it’s all designed to get your lead generation at low cost, but high quality leads to improve sales effectiveness. And remember this Alex. One of my favorite quotes is you can’t sell a secret. So if you’re not in the digital world, you’re nowhere.
Okay, so that’s a great invitation to reach out to SalesStar Digital. And remember, to our viewers, if you want to have more advice, reach out to a SalesStar a high performance coach because they are there to help you. So please continue to follow the series to make sure that you are recession ready. And we continue our discussion on key strategic moves in a recessionary climate. Thanks for joining us. We’ll see you at the next session.
