Three tools to develop business leads that generate sales
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For just a quick minute, stop thinking about immediately getting leads (qualified or not) that take you right to an appointment and consider the way you add leads into the top of your sales funnel.
 
And let me clarify that by “top of the funnel” I don’t mean an appointment. In today’s environment, potential clients should be coming into your funnel much sooner because they do research on their options way before they pick up the phone or fill out a contact form.
 
The best clients are the ones you’ve been communicating with for months.
 
And according to over 95 percent of the people I talk to during my presentations, their favorite way to generate profitable business is via referrals. Yet most just count on the goodwill of happy clients and an occasional survey, perhaps an email request, to actually get those referrals. And shy of tracking the number of completed surveys, they don’t track much else.
 
There’s a better way. Go digital. Get yourself and your team engaged in social platforms with a good strategy and you’ll see a big difference.  Referrals are warm leads and often bring more joy and more profit with their projects. 
 
Going digital involves many tools, the most dominant being social media platforms.
 
Don’t cringe. Your excuses are just creating blocks to your success.
 
You need to be “feeding” your network. Or creating one. You feed it by creating useful or entertaining content. That “news flash” has probably gone in one of your ears and out the other a hundred times by now. 
 
So let me add a new insight here.
 
Every time you publish content you have the opportunity to lose reach or to gain reach because you will be penalized not just for the mediocre content that you just published, but for future content. Send out a boring announcement and platforms will utilize their algorithms to show your future content to less people because they did not engage with your last piece of content.
 
Good content isn’t typically about you and your business. Announcing that you just won an award isn’t really good content. It provides me (a member of your network) with minimal, if any, benefit. You have to walk in the shoes of your potential clients. What would help THEM? What would THEY enjoy? It’s not about what YOU want to say.
 
And before you can post great content, you have to understand the platform and how it lives and breathes - not just use it as a tool. And using it as a tool is what I see lots of in this industry because we all use tools everyday all day long. You hear that Instagram is all the rage so you get someone to post some stuff on Instagram for you. Stop doing that.
 
Good content creates a desirable behavior. These desirable behaviors include:
 
Clicks
Traffic 
Shares, which increase reach
Subscriptions - to your feed, to your email, to your platforms.
 
Content is fire. Social media is gasoline. Apply social to winning content to amplify it.
 
Does this prompt a question or two? I hope so. Because I’ve got a place for you to ask that question and get it answered.
 
Join me and Christian Smedberg (Vice President Osborne Wood Products) for a live session - “3 Ways to Get More People Into Your Sales Funnel”. We’re fired up to share insights on:
 
  • Ways you can get current clients to sing your praises in trackable ways
  • Getting and handling customer reviews - the good, the bad and the ugly
  • SWAG - how to use giveaways to create brand awareness and loyalty
 

Have something to say? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below.

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About the author
Denise Butchko

Denise Butchko is a design and marketing expert who teaches these concepts with the intention of helping people grow their businesses (particularly those in the design/build industries). She’s been a contributor to Closets magazine since 2003 and is a judge for the closet industries “Top Shelf” Design Competition. She's also a member of the first graduating class of Registered Storage Designers. Her design work has been featured in national publications like “Better Homes & Gardens” and The Chicago Tribune and she works with some of the top interior design firms in the country. She’s helped cabinet companies launch closet product lines and trained sales professionals in both design and marketing, including ways to leverage social media and design to increase opportunities and brand themselves as the “go to expert”. If you want to have fun while you learn and bring your “A” game to your business, Denise is the one to partner with to make that happen. You can find her at denisebutchko.com or at the above links.