HOT LEADS AND HOW TO GENERATE THEM

In Sales & Marketing parley, you must have often heard  people going on and on about ‘leads’. What are these leads in the first place? Leads are discrete packages of information, which if handled right, can make the sale. It’s a FACT that whatever you are selling, there are people in your sales area at any moment of time who need to buy the item or has a problem for which, the item you are selling is  the solution. What we have here is a genuine case of demand and supply. What has to be done is to find out where the demand exists and to whom you have to meet to do so. The hardest part is this 'finding out part'.

Let us hypothetically consider a case study of a is A who is selling 'b' goods/services. At the same time we have a customer C who either wants to buy b outright or will buy b, once it is explained to him how b will fulfill his need. Here, your cue is to interrupt saying “so what’s the big deal?” the big deal is that both A and C are unaware of each other’s presence in the planet. Unless A is aware that C needs his product, he cannot make a sales call to C. Forget the demand in C’s company, A doesn’t even know that there is a person called C who is capable of taking a decision regarding purchase of b and thereby he can make an easy sale. (When I say easy sale, I do not mean a con game. I mean that C is knowledgeable about B and/or really requires B).

Now let us suppose that all such information are packed into small boxes and kept separately, in an organized manner. Whenever a sales-person wants to make a sale, he just collects a box, opens it, reads the info inside, says “Aha!” and off he goes to a buyer(whose information was there in the box), makes the sale and everyone is happy. This box is therefore the lead. Leads are indispensable little boxes of information, which will escape your attention maybe 8 times out of 10.  But these simple leads and your rate of generation of them, can make all the difference between a successful salesperson and a failure.

This is all the more true today as the rate of change in today's world is very high. Time is at a premium and there is no time for practice or 'dummy-runs'. Trying your best is just not good enough. This is very important so let me explain it again with the help of an analogy. Say you are a soccer player in the EPL. Now, maybe you are so skilled that you can bamboozle all defenders and kept the ball in the opponent’s penalty area for 30 minutes. But until you shoot and the ball bulges the netting, your soccer skills are of no good. So, working hard but failing to get orders due to ignorance about lead generation, is not going to get you a raise. And if you repeat all that hard work without sales for a few months, chances are more that you’ll get the pink slip. Today, in the sales bus, there is no room for passengers.

Now that we have clarified about LEADS, we will talk about how to generate them next time. Till then, its love from


BILBO