Leads are the lifeblood of the modern sales professional. What happens when the well runs dry?
Ask any sales professional to describe his/her ideal working environment and among the top responses (after every deal is a whopper and it always closes) is an endless supply of sales qualified leads.
Why? Because leads are to a sales pro as oxygen is to a human being. Without new clients or prospects to pursue, death is imminent.
Maybe not death, but certainly a rapidly declining revenue stream… And the spectre of job loss.
While some sales professionals are fortunate to work in an environment that provides a continuous lead supply, others must create their own opportunities.
Regardless of whether you are a hunter or a farmer, it’s important to have at least rudimentary lead generation skills in your sales tool kit.
And given the behavior of today’s buyer, savvy sales professionals increasingly turn to social media as a healthy source of potential prospects – fishing where the fish are.
The largest prospecting pond is LinkedIn – it’s the center of the Social Selling ecosystem and a great place to begin.
Sales professionals can produce lists containing thousands of viable prospects in mere seconds from simple searches based upon geography, job function, or any aspect of their target buyer persona.
Often overlooked, an internal audit of your existing process is another area to address.
Perhaps you are prospecting on the wrong social sites (fishing for salt water fish in a fresh water pond), or your target persona is incorrect (trying to catch sharks, when you should fish for guppies instead).
Of course, since content has the most profound effect upon buyer conversion, ensuring that your content is aligned with your buyer’s needs and is specific to each stage of the buying process is paramount.
Content that does not resonate with your prospective buyer needs updating – and fast. Failure to act risks the loss of untold potential leads.
To learn more this and other Social Selling secrets, we hosted a new edition of our weekly #S4LSocial Twitter chat, which continues every Wednesday at 12 p.m. ET.
