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0:05 Introduction to Lead Generation
1:04 Lead generation magnets
2:23 How to build lead generation magnets
4:25 How to not be a commodity
6:17 Marketing the magnet
6:44 Building a list of interested prospects.
7:06 Marketing the lead generation magnet: online ads
9:53 Marketing the lead generation magnet: offline ads
11:00 Call your prospects
11:51 Recap of online and offline ads
13:31 Qualification Process and Follow up
16:59 Have interesting follow-up methodologies
17:45 Lifetime customer value
19:34 Tip of the week
Hello everybody! Welcome to the HVAC Business Growth Podcast. I’m your host, Nick Bielawski.
Today’s episode is about lead generation and lead generation is one of the biggest problems in any business. To put it simply, if you don’t have enough leads coming into the business, your business is going to really struggle. So I think today’s episode is super important for a lot of businesses.
Basically, if we have a lot of leads coming into the business, we can filter those leads down and then get some premium high-paying clients or customers.
Everybody wants that right? We all want better customers who pay more money.
So, if lead generation is a bit of a problem in your business, you’re probably left trying to chase down prospects to your products and services. When you’re not practicing this, it gets really frustrating for yourself. It gets frustrating for the sales team and you’re just not going to get the results that your business deserves.
Let’s get stuck into the show…
I feel that when you’re focusing on lead generation, there tends to be a little bit of a strategy change that goes along with the change to lead generation. Instead of being a marketer of your business and its services, you need to take more of a publishing mindset. So, we’re going to discuss this.
Lead magnets
You need to really create some products or I’d like to call them widgets. And what you need to do is to get really good at marketing these particular products or widgets. Instead of going out and marketing your business and the services that it creates, and just basically being the same as everybody else, you put your main focus into marketing these lead generation magnets or these widgets.
We will discuss these magnets or these widgets.
They basically have to solve a problem. Problems tend to work a little bit better than benefits. A good example of a lead generation magnet for heating and cooling business would be: “The 7 Secrets to Reduce Your Heating Bill.”
There are actually dozens of examples that we could use there. We could go down the airconditioning tract; we could talk about specific heating or cooling systems. But that is discussed is a little further.
With this lead generation magnet, we’re in an economy at the moment where we’re going through a recession and people are really focusing on trying to cut costs in their lives. So, running heating and cooling in the home can get a bit expensive. The problem is that heating and cooling costs too much….They’re trying to reduce costs overall in their house. This is quite a big problem for people—people who are unemployed or underemployed and they’re looking for ways to reduce costs. You can actually step in with your widget or lead generation magnet and actually help people in solving a problem.
As to how you do it, you actually do a little bit of research on whatever topic or whatever problem you want to solve. Simply put together a report that might go from 10 to 20 pages or just something pretty basic….. So you put that together.
If you know your subject matter really well, as you should, you can actually get this done and produced in a day. If you want to go a little bit more of a premium-type of approach, you can actually commission something like a research paper where there’s a little bit more research and a little bit more time involved but it will come back with some better-quality information for people. You may also just set this up as an interview. You get one of your staff to interview you about how to cut the cost of heating and cooling in homes.
So, there’s plenty of ways to build this widget, but I just told you to let your imagination run wild a little bit. There are plenty of examples out there in the marketplace. These are just topics off my head right now as a way to start and market it. It could be the:
“7 Secrets of…”, “How to…” , “5 Simple Ways To…”
There are a lot of different topics or headlines that you can use for your lead generation magnet. So, generating ideas shouldn’t be too much of a problem for you. I just feel that this is something that you need to follow through on.
Being unique
I’ll give you a reminder why we should be doing this lead generation practice. I feel that it’s a combination of 2 things. Firstly, it’s about separating your business from the competition. All of your competition is out there selling and marketing their business services and building their brand. You can come in with a lead generation magnet that solves a problem in the marketplace and you can go and market that. It’s a really good way to differentiate yourself and you can set yourself up as a consumer advocate which will look good in the eyes of your prospects.
And the great thing about the lead generation magnet is that it’s very topic-specific but it’s also quite broad in a sense that if somebody is interested in cutting cost from their heating and cooling, if we use the example a little bit earlier, or are simply interested in getting heating and cooling system, the lead generation magnet is actually worthwhile for them to get. I don’t know many people out there that wouldn’t like to cut down the cost from their heating and cooling in their family home or in their business.
So the report can be quite specific but also has a quite a wide market appeal. Like I said before, you want to get lots and lots of leads in the front-end and then you can actually filter those leads down. If somebody actually gets the report and they read it, they might not know that they’re after a heating and cooling system or they need a service on their existing unit. You want to present to them a couple of ways that they’ve never ever heard before that can cut down their cost.
Like I said earlier, if you can position yourself as consumer advocate then that it can be a very strong position to have in the eyes of the marketplace—if you’re actually looking for your customers best interest.
Once you’ve got your lead generation magnet built, what you need to do from there is actually transition a lot of your marketing towards this. What I mean is, you need to obviously put this on your website, preferably on the front page or at least on its own dedicated landing page on the website. Also, …..print ads, you can market your widget with this sort of stuff. You can also market this lead generation magnet in the radio or TV.
You can build a list really really fast. You can build a list of hungry buyers. You can build a list of people who might only be nearly interested in your topic. But the systems that you set up in the back-end of this, they can really do a good job of filtering down your prospects. And then your sales team and your sales force only deal with people who are truly interested.
So let’s first talk about running ad. So we’re going to talk about 1 form of an online ad and 1 offline thing that we can do as well and then we can tie those together.
Online ad:
Let’s talk about Google AdWords. That’s been a little bit of a topic in some previous podcasts that we’ve discussed.
We’re going into our AdWords account or speak to somebody who’s managing it for us. Just select some keywords that people tend to be looking at and that’s always going to be relevant to your business.
First, what we’re going to do is go in there and create some ads. Using the topic or the title of the lead generation magnet, we can actually create some ads inside of Google AdWords that really targets this lead generation magnet.
Just imagine for a second: If you are surfing the internet or surfing Google and you’re actually looking for specific heating and cooling unit or you’re looking for a service for your existing heating and cooling system or you might be scanning the page and all of a sudden on the right-hand side of the page, you see an ad that reads: “The 7 Secrets to Reducing Your Heating and Cooling Cost—Free Report” and then the URL. That’s going to get a lot of people’s attention, isn’t it?
You could set up 3 or 5 ads that are similar to that. Just, again, split test a couple of different concepts or a different headline or a different call-to-action. Then, run those ads inside of your Google Adwords account to some specific key phrases then see what happens. You’re going to be driving the traffic to, when you’re doing it with AdWords, a dedicated page that has the free report on there.
So you can actually, on your website or the dedicated landing page, almost sell the lead generation magnet. You might have 500 words or a thousand words or you might put a video of you speaking about this lead generation magnet. You might actually give bits and pieces of lead generation magnet away in your presentation at the start. You might give the first 2 or you might give bits and pieces of the first 3. Think about it as bait. They come to your website and you just want to dangle up just enough bait in front of them for them to say, “Yes, I’m interested”. And when they’re interested, what you want to do is to get as much of their information as possible. Ideally, their name, email address, telephone number, address (mailing address) and what they’re actually interested in.
You can run the same system with your offline ad as well. If you’re doing newspaper advertising in your local newspaper, instead of just putting a general branding ad in there—some people are just saying: “Here’s a 200-dollar voucher on your next heating and cooling service”, they’re actually playing the price game—you can actually run an ad or display ad for your particular widget. So, you might have a quarter-page ad or a half-page ad or even a full-page ad, depending if it’s profitable for you. What you can do is actually have a paper version or a half-copy version almost of the ad that’s on your website. It’s obviously going to be a little bit smaller if it’s in the newspaper.
And you can drive people to your website or to a specific landing page again on your site that dangles a little bit… and if they’re interested, they can put their name, email address, telephone number, physical address and what they’re interested in. Then, they can qualify to get this lead generation magnet.
And what you’ll do is to simply have your sales team send it out to them if you want to send out any information pack. You can also send it out straight after they put their information in. One of your sales team could actually put a telephone call to them.
The goal of the telephone call is to just let them know that you received their information. Then, if possible, you can start a conversation with somebody who’s just been on your website maybe half an hour ago or an hour ago. Have your salesman give a little bit of care and thought into the conversation and not try to sell or anything. Just basically have a conversation with the prospect and see where it leads from there. I think you’ll find that you conversions will go up quite a bit if you can practice this.
We’ve just discussed in detail 2 different ad versions that you could actually use. We talked about Google AdWords and then we talked about using display ads or newspaper ads.
So, you can actually transition this into most of your marketing if you want to. If you’re doing Facebook advertising, if you’re doing direct mail, if you’re doing trade shows, if you’re doing shopping center displays—you can market and give away these lead generation magnets that solve problem for people.
Get their details and then set-up a marketing sequence behind the lead generation magnet. Then just work the system from there. And then it all turns into a numbers game from there. If you get a thousand people visiting your website, because the ad was so specific, you might get some really good conversions. You might get 50 or 70% conversion or maybe even better.
So let’s just say a 50% conversion. That’s 500 people requesting information or requesting this lead generation magnet. Out of this 500 people, we call all of them. Let’s just say, we managed to secure maybe 10% into a consultation or a visitation from a sales member. So that’s 50 sales calls you’ve got. Now what does your business convert from 50 sales calls or 50 visitations? …… from many businesses that it’s as high as, maybe, 75% –when a sales person can actually go to somebody’s house and have a visitation, have a consultation and then work on converting that customer into a client or into a sale.
So let’s talk about the qualification process and then we’re going to talk about the follow up with your sales team. This lead generation system is actually designed to make your prospects hold up their hand and identify themselves—they want some advice or they want some extra attention. Lead generation is fantastic in doing that. You need to qualify these people a little bit further … You can get some people coming in to the front-end and just wanting your report and then really build a relationship from there.
After they opt-in or after you get their details, you can set it up in a few different ways. You can set it up so you can have a sales member call in. You can set it up so you will have an email that goes out to them straight away or shortly after. You can set up a recorded message that’s basically programmed to call them so you might have a particular message that you want to send out. It might just be: “Hi! I’m Nick from company X. I just want to really thank you for giving us your details. I just want to let you know that we’re going to send out the lead generation magnet that you requested really soon. You should have it in 3-5 days. It’s going to be sent by a particular mail service (whatever that is). Thank you! I hope to speak with you shortly.”
You can actually run some recorded messages that will call your prospects just to let them know that they’re going to get the lead generation magnet in the mail really soon. So there are plenty of things that you can do to further qualify your prospects. Just try to think about it as though, I think the most important thing is that it’s not a one-shot type of deal.
It’s been said that your sales team can probably tell you that it takes at least 7 follow ups to actually connect with the prospect and make a sale. We’re not looking to make a sale for a 10-dollar item here in your business. It could be thousands and thousands of dollars. You’re not looking to ask somebody to marry you the first time you speak to them or the first time you actually get their information. It can take a little bit of nurturing and it can take a lot of follow up.
So the most important thing that you can do is to stay in touch even if somebody identifies that they don’t want to buy from you if one of your sales team actually calls them up at the start. You may set them up on a once-a-month email type of thing. You just send them a newsletter; you just tell them what’s happening in your business or if you’ve got any sales on a particular item or whether you have some sort of promotion or you might just want to let them know what’s happening inside of your business. That would be a great way to stay in touch with people.
If you actually think about it for a second, if you ring somebody up that shows an interest in a heating and cooling system—depending on where they’re at in the buying cycle and what is the chances of them actually wanting to buy the moment that you make contact with them. From when the thought actually enters their head, they want to save money on a system or whether they want a particular heating unit or a cooling unit. That could be a process that takes months or even years for them to figure out and actually can even make the decision. There aren’t so many people out there that make multi-thousand dollar decisions at just the drop of the hat and buy things straight away. The follow-up process is vitally important.
My advice to you would be to actually vary your follow-up methodology or the medium that you actually use. So, if you’ve just been relying on phone calls a lot, change it up. You can use the phone call still but then you can also use email, you can use recorded messages, you can use follow-up videos, you can send out postcards, you can send out direct mail. Be interesting. Change things up for people. People get sick and tired of receiving the same catalogue in the mail all the time. They get sick and tired of boring solicitation. But emails, postcards and direct mails are all different medium and all different ways that you can use to get in front of your prospects.
So you can imagine how cheap it is to send out postcards to people. And again, we’ve spoken about this in the previous podcast, think about the lifetime customer value. If you acquire somebody through a lead generation magnet, would you be prepared to send out 10 postcards to somebody? By the time the postcard is produced and something’s written on it and the stamp’s put on it …..I’m probably rounding this up, it might cost a dollar everytime that you actually do that.
Are you prepared to send out 10 postcards or send 10 direct mail pieces. That’s 10 dollars per person. But try to convert that person into a sale. And you know what? If your follow up is sincere and genuine and it’s actually good enough, that $10 or that follow-up sequence might not pay-off straight away. But in 5 years time or 10 years time, if your business is still around and you’ve been keeping in contact with people using automated systems or emails or postcards or whatever it is, then they’re most likely to go with your business because they have a relationship with your business already.
And if we apply a little bit of lateral thinking for a second, you might be trying to nurture this person through the sales process and they might not be interested in getting a heating and cooling system. But you know what? Maybe a family member or a friend is. And you might find that you’ll get recommendations or referrals more often from people if you’re following this lead-nurturing type of approach and you’re staying in contact with people.
So the general rule of thumb of a lot of sales gurus out there is that the more you follow-up, the more sales you make. So, there’s no need to be aggressive. Just take a lead-nurturing type of approach. Just nurture your person or your prospect towards the sale and I think you’ll get some really good results from it.
Tip of the week – the follow up sequence
Now it’s time for our HVAC Business Growth tip of the week. This week’s tip of the week is really about staying on top of follow-up and the lead-nurturing side of things, as I discussed earlier, is really really important.
What I want you to do is to actually get a quite a large of piece of paper, an 8×3 size or ideally if you have a white board, that’s fantastic. Then, what I want you to do is map out a follow-up sequence. You’ve got your lead generation piece or your lead generation magnet that we discussed earlier. And then I just want you to map up a follow-up sequence behind that.
Who calls the prospects? When to call them? Do you use postcards? Do you use email? Do you use direct mail? Do you use catalogs? Just map this out.
The idea is to be quite strong with the follow-up in the first 30 days. But then after maybe 60 days have expired, then you could drop people back to a once-a-month type of thing. So you might just send them a newsletter. But it’s really important to keep this follow up really really regular.
If you’re using email as the last piece in your follow-up sequence, until somebody might actually picks up the phone and call you, it is very very inexpensive to use. If you want an email plan for your business, you might have a 50-dollar a month-type of arrangement where email is free for that $50/month. You may get unlimited emails.
Follow up with somebody after a 60-day mark. It doesn’t really cost anything extra to have them on your list if that’s the way your email provider is actually set up.
So just a bit of recap, get a large paper or a whiteboard and actually map out the follow-up sequence that you’re going to employ. I want you to map out and actually implement it into your business. Get the sales team around, let them know what you’re doing and get them to follow this procedure.
Like I said, big focus on the first 30 to 60 days with the follow-up and then just put them on semi-regular follow-up after that. If you implement this in your business, I think you’ll be really surprised at how well you start converting.
So, that’s all we’ve got time for today. Thanks for listening.
This was the lead generation show. I’m Nick Bielawski for hvacbusinessgrowth.com. See you next time!