Introduction

Lead generation is a digital marketing action to warm up the company's commercial department and involves everything from reaching more people to collecting contacts and managing them.

Our focus in this article is to clarify what are the ways to sell more when generating qualified leads.

What are leads?

Thinking about a non-digital scenario, let's say you sell real estate and set up a sales stand in a mall. Those who pass by your stand can watch a video of your company's projects, have coffee, see models, take pamphlets with them and, especially, leave your name and telephone number to visit the properties. Leads are exactly those interested people who left their contact for a salesperson.

In the digital scenario, we can think that the mall is where several people like Instagram or Google travel and the stand is your profile or website to promote your company. 

Technically, the lead is a website visitor who agrees to provide their data for the company to contact, whether by email, SMS, call, Whatsapp or another application.

What does it take to generate leads?

We can divide lead generation into 4 moments to understand everything that is needed:

1. Reach people: to find leads, your company needs to be exposed on the internet so that they access your page and fill out the form. Being ahead of Google searches, having quality social profiles and investing in online campaigns and advertising are the most common ways to reach people.

2. Impress: This is a matter of design and quality content/material. People need to be impressed with your company, your perks, and your portfolio. We always comment that the great website impresses the visitor to encourage them to do business with your company.

3. Data collection: despite seeming something simple, most forms on websites barely work and there's no point in impressing the visitor if your contact doesn't arrive. It is necessary to collect the data in a professional way, without the site going down, not working and, mainly, in accordance with the General Data Protection Law to maintain the privacy of the visitor.

4. Processing and use of data: It is recommended to use CRM to work and monitor the evolution of leads until they become customers and even after sales. Once again, the use of data is a serious matter and needs to be stored and used responsibly.

After understanding these visitor-to-lead moments and data usage, we know what it takes to generate leads:

• Website with great positioning on Google;
  
• Modern contact capture tools;
• Web Design that impresses and engages the visitor;
• Quality content to generate trust;
• An application to receive leads via email or Whatsapp;
• Application to manage contact lists, such as CMS, DXP, CRM or ERP;
• Qualified sales team to contact and update the database;

"Leads are always evaluating which company best solves their pain to choose which one to send their contact to."

How to do lead generation?

Once it's clear what it takes to generate leads, we need to think about the steps and processes to make everything work correctly. This involves the technical part and also the daily operations of the people involved with the leads, usually the commercial or customer service department.

We can divide the process of how to generate leads into 7 items:

1. Planning: The first point is to think about your lead generation goals. We can think of the question "Get contacts for _____ " as the first step. For example, a post-construction cleaning company might fill in the question "Get contacts to do post-construction cleaning" and a garage as "Get contacts to sell vehicles". Understanding what you want to do with contacts is the first step to moving forward.

2. Content: The content is the graphic material, photos and texts so that the visitor feels confidence and attraction to send you the contact. Think about the following question to write your content or produce the material: "What does the visitor want to see and read to get in touch?" - focus on your competitive advantages so that the visitor feels that you will solve their problem.

3. Website: The website has a very important role, because it contains the content and the visitor needs to be able to navigate easily and quickly, regardless of the device they are using (cell phone, computer or tablet). And, more importantly, it needs to have what we call CTA (call to action), which are components that invite and allow the visitor to get in touch. The CTA can be an invitation to chat via Whatsapp, a form offering an opportunity, a discount coupon, that is, elements that arouse interest or curiosity to leave the data.

4. Position in Google: Being ahead of Google is also a role of the website and involves SEO (search engine optimzation), which is nothing more than optimization to appear more and better on Google. A search-optimized site reaches people who are searching for what your business sells or does.

5. Being on social networks: It is important that the company has an active positioning on social networks such as Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile, among others. The assiduity in the networks along with a good evaluation increase the credibility of the company. Use the messaging features of each social network and tend to lead the visitor to convert through the website (flow from social networks to the website and get their contact).

6. Invest in online advertising campaigns: The most common paid campaigns are those carried out on Google Ads or Meta Marketplace (Facebook or Instagram), however, there are several other sources of opportunity such as Amazon Ads or Tik Tok For Business. By promoting you reach more people and consequently your website will have more visits and potentially more leads.

7. Table or tool to control leads: It is necessary to control where the leads are arriving, who is answering the leads and the progress of the operation. In simpler situations, leads can be controlled in tables or in the CMS (Panel) of the website. Using a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) allows you to better organize and visualize the situation of each lead, as well as allow connectivity or an API to send leads by application to salespeople, among other features.

In oderm, generating leads can be summarized as: Reach people > get their contacts > sell

Conclusion

Lead generation is a Marketing action that is totally related to Commercial, working together to generate more sales. It is only possible to generate leads by reaching more people and, through a website, getting their contact.

For the commercial department, in general, getting in touch with leads is an excellent opportunity since the lead has already shown an initial interest in the company, facilitating the operation. The more interested the lead, the easier the sale, we call this a "qualified lead".

It's hard to think of a large company that doesn't work at some level with lead generation, so it's practically impossible for a small company to rise without doing this work that involves Marketing, Sales and is totally associated with increasing revenue.