If You Sell Technology, Are You Getting Enough Quality Leads?

This week, Russell Brunson, Entrepreneur and Founder of Click Funnels gave us some amazing sales insight! If you want to grow sales, keep reading…

Right now I’m sitting in the Denver airport on my way home from the GKIC Info Summit – an annual marketing conference (See Dan Kennedy to the left – still using overheads in his presentation.) Of course, after 4 long but incredible days of marketing education, my flight’s been canceled. American claims they sent me an email months ago telling me about a schedule change, but you know how that goes. I get so many emails, it’s not really possible to read every one, so here I am with an expected arrive of 12:40 am. So enough complaining – on to selling ideas.

7 Things Critical Steps If You Want Leads (in the SMB Market)

I say, SMB (Small Medium Business), because most of this conference was about marketing to smaller businesses. I’m sure many of the principles will apply to the larger F500, but it definitely applies to SMB. So if you’re a reseller (VAR) or MSP – managed services provider, looking for Small or Medium Business clients, there are some things you should be doing right now!

First, stop cold calling – it doesn’t work. To make things worse, your marketing team is probably not giving you tons of leads either, so don’t expect it (if you even have someone dedicated to marketing). But the things Brunson showed us are simple to do. I’m already doing some of what he said, but he showed me an easier way. So easy, sales people can do this without a dedicated marketing person. So if you want leads, you might need a mindset change on what sales people “are supposed to do.” Leads come when you market, not sell.
Next, take a look at your competition. You probably attend channel events, so you probably know lot’s of resellers. Someone out there is generating traffic through online marketing and their website. Chances are when your company website was built, whoever gave the go-ahead to build it was looking for something cool and unique. Big mistake. Why reinvent the wheel just to look different. If someone out there is doing something that is pulling in millions of leads, you might want to do the same thing. Note: I don’t know anyone who is pulling in tons of leads making cold calls. That doesn’t mean you never pick up the phone. It simply means the phone is a poor choice for that initial touch. Brunson gave us several clear examples where he used online tools to figure out who was getting the traffic. Once he found the 800 pound gorilla, he started the “Funnel Hack” process. Simply put, he clicked on their ads – on their website, FaceBook, or wherever they are advertising, to reverse engineer their marketing methods. Then he simply created something very similar. Is this stealing? No! You can’t copyright or patent the things I am talking about here. If prospects like the way a certain ad looks, there’s no reason to do something new.
The “Funnel” refers to the flow – what happens after you click. A strong marketing strategy takes the prospect from an ad, builds rapport, gets an opt-in, and then starts selling. Your website is probably one of the first things to look at. Is there a lead capture ad, above the fold, on the home page? If not, you should change it – if you can. If you can’t you need something else. FaceBook is actually a great place to put ads. One of the speakers week showed us an incredible business, marketing to small business clients exclusively on FaceBook. Can you do this for free? No. But if you are hoping to make big commissions in the coming year, it might be worth spending a few hundreds dollars. If you spend one dollar and two come back, will you be happy? How much is one qualified lead worth?
What happens next is critical. There should be an offer, and it should be a no-brainer to move forward. On my site I offer a free copy of my 2007 book, The House & The Cloud. Every week I get several leads from this one eBook. This is called a lead magnet. The one problem I have is, my lead capture form is not on my home page. Expect to see an updated website in the near future. You too need a lead magnet. It could be a book, CD, video, eBook, etc. But it must be something the average SMB owner is going to want. As soon as they opt-in, there should be another offer. Using the blueprint from my Marketing Success kit, your goal as a technology reseller should be to move them into an educational phone call using something like The House & the Cloud Message (Purchase the book if you don’t know what I’m talking about). This message was designed to show SMB business owners the one BIG mistake just about every one of them is making as they look to leverage new technologies such as Cloud.
The funnel continues – if they will take the call, you set one up. This is where the phone comes in. If you have some basic information online or access to Webinar software, you can actually show them what’s going on without making an onsite visit. The goal is to move into a risk assessment. This should be highly qualified, but pro bono. The purpose of it is to assess the likelihood of a compromise. Given that most SMB companies have poor security, if you look in the right places you are likely to come up with something urgent! Again, I explain all of this in The House & The Cloud.
If they don’t take the meeting, your marketing campaign continues. Use a combination of email, calls, hardcopy mail (like a detailed sales letter), video sales letters, and anything else you can think of. Hit them about 8 times over the next three weeks. If they still don’t budge, put them on a less intense campaign. Perhaps inviting them to a future Lunch & Learn. It takes some people years to ripen, but with enough leads coming in, and an automated drip campaign, you can afford to keep reaching out.
One last thing. One of the most effective things I’ve done in my own business is to invest in experts in different technology, sales, and marketing disciplines. So for instance, if you want to see how to really work FaceBook ads, you could spend hours trying to figure it out, or you could find an expert. Do one of two things. Either hire them to coach you through it, or pay them to do it for you. Obviously getting the coaching is cheaper. Generally in just a few weeks you’ll have what you need to move forward. You will also need some technology such as landing pages. Right now I am using Megaphone, but seriously considering Brunson’s FunnelClicks product.

You don’t need a bunch of marketing things going one…work on one funnel, perfect it, and measure the outcome. Fine tune it so that you have hundreds of new names every quarter.

Make sure you get The House & The Cloud if you want a message that is sure to get you to the next stage in your sales process!