Two years ago, I published a blog entitled "The Lead Generation Tool Box". My finer points, in 2014, addressed pipeline and sales reports, proper follow-through for delayed opportunities, need for rich content, and lead generation. While much stays the same, I can also report that my world has changed. What I think is most affected is that social media is on steroids and it affects lead generation and sales. I can recall some potential clients I visited a year ago saying, "we don't do social media" or "social media is not for our company". I just saw a statistic that says by 2020, 50% of our workforce will be made of millennials. As we all know, they are glued to mobile devices reading social media. These are some of the people who are making decisions or influencing processes in companies we target for business. Also, email campaigns were always the no 1 tool for lead gen but it was just moved to no 2 behind social media reported by Buffer.
We do a lot of email campaigns at Sales-Link. We have a lead gen system that plays with a database of over 500k well-maintained contacts. We have however, this year, brought back the infamous cold calls using information in our database for outbound calls. I report great results calling leaders in the industry. Truly, the 4-5 pm call range provides sweet success many times.
Blogs are no longer a nice to have but a must-have. I think I figured out the formula for success on this one. If we do social media the right way, we will be educating the readers and ourselves. In order to write effective blogs, research is required. It forces you, as a marketer, to become knowledgeable of the statistics and competition. Isn't that a sales 101 tip from long ago? Sure is.
Visuals are really important accordingly to a recent report mentioned in my blog earlier this month. Tools such as Canva or Pablo are helping to make this task easier. It can be a hit or miss but when you find a winner, it becomes a rebuffer and a time-saver.
So to sum up here, our lead generation tool box has expanded. A lot of help is provided using our collaborative application Slack. Don't wait to get started. It doesn't have to be as massive an undertaking to get started.