8 Truths of B2B Lead Generation: These are mostly stupid simple and obvious.
#8 is the most important.
Yesterday, I finished up a training series on the phone with a national sales team. VC funded. Kicking butt of better-known competitors. Accelerating what most would consider to be high-growth already. It was our last session so I started with a short summary of strategies. Thought you might benefit from them.
1. Sell the meeting, not the service. Do not skip this step.
You must relate what prospects will discover at their meeting with you, that is worth their time. If you are talking about how great you are and how happy they will be when they hire you, your pitch is weak.
2. It is your process that delivers up opportunities to you, not your scripts.
One participant pointed out that when they could get a top dog to pick up the phone, he could get a meeting and had a great closing rate. So the issue is having conversations. It is your call process…. How often you call, when, your touches, voicemails, gatekeeper interactions, Emails touches and more that you do as part of a process that delivers up those conversations. Focus on the process.
3. Track the essentials. You have to know where you are in relations to where you need to be.
If it doesn’t work on paper, it won’t work in the real world. Many people are working hard and going nowhere yet they don’t know it because they don’t track the essentials. Most people track the wrong stuff, activity stuff like dials and are not on the path to b2b lead gen success. There are only 4 things you need to track.
4. Create your “piles of words.”
What are the different ways you might describe what you do? Why you are credible? Your value? What benefits do companies/individuals get by working with you? How do you ask for meetings? What great “ear candy” might you use? You have to write all this stuff down. How do you know all your component parts are as good as they can be if you don’t write them down? For example, this company I just finished training, we came up with about 4 ways they could describe what they did, more than 50 benefits, multiple ways of conveying credibility but there was one sentence in particular that the group really liked. Your “set the appointment” conversation has component parts. Work on each part.
5. Be consistent.
Key when you need to perfect your prospecting method and get up to steam. You might start out awkward and unsure but be consistent in terms of process, what you do from the time you make your first call to your last. Be consistent in terms of hours spent generating leads. If you stop and start constantly it is very difficult to get into a productive space.
6. If it isn’t working, the likely suspects are….
What is the most likely culprit when you work hard prospecting and yet have little to show with it? By far the most common thing to punch up is value communication. What is the #1 reason why people don’t meet with you? You don’t give them enough reason to meet with you. Almost always you need to go back and punch up your scripts to communicate your value. After that, the problem is the process. You might be calling the wrong people in the wrong way. Change your process. Bottom line: If competitors are out there selling what you have to offer, assuming you have a decent offering, there is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to generate leads. If you are not, punch up your value communication, tweak your process.
7. People do this all the time… so be ruthless….
about aligning yourself with the behaviors of successful B2B appointment setters and lead generators. Don’t talk constantly about what you are not going to do. Be intense about doing exactly what successful B2B lead generators do. If you do what you want to do, what you feel comfortable with, what your coworkers do, what the great unwashed recommends you do…. you will fail. People do this all the time. Do what they do. Period.
8. The main issue usually isn’t knowing what to do. Surprise.
Hang with me on this. They key to pumping up your prospecting results isn’t usually knowing what to do. Yes, knowing winning script formats and process steps are necessary but rarely are they the key to lifting performance. They key is much more about focus and discipline. It’s behavioral. It’s about personal accountability. Most people have the ability to gather the knowledge, skills and experiences to learn how to do this on their own. Many do. This is not rocket science stuff.
EX: One of the participants made the observation on voicemails that if she didn’t hook them within a few seconds she knew her message got deleted. An obvious truth. I teach a voicemail strategy, which puts your name, company name, and phone number at the end of the message. Why? So you can put stuff in the first few seconds that has a shot of hooking your target. Another participant said that makes sense but she found it so hard and it felt so awkward to not start a voicemail with her name and company name. So true and so common. People engage in behaviors that aren’t working yet do it over and over again. When introduced to a common sense behavior that has a greater chance of accomplishing their business objective, they don’t do it because it is different. Different to the masses, but not to successful lead generators.
So be focused and disciplined and be ruthless about aligning your behaviors with the successful B2B lead generators.
Smile when you dial,
Scott Channell
