Winning new customers does not come naturally to everyone. Many small-business owners struggle with knowing where to focus, overcoming their nerves, or finding the time to spend on their sales funnels.
Compounding the challenge is the fact that not all leads are created equal. Whilst inbound traffic to a business is worthwhile, the wrong enquiries can lead to a relentless groundhog day of wasted time and resources, and diminishing self-confidence.
We too often see businesses focus on lead numbers alone, without recognising the importance of getting a good proportion of ‘wins’ out the other end. Generating 100 leads that close to just 15 sales is not a good use of most people’s time; however, if we could get the same number of wins out of just 50 leads, then we’d be showing better use of time. The obvious way to do this is to get better at the ‘offer’ stage of our sales process, but it is just as impactful to make sure we are talking to the right people from the first interaction.
The good news is that, for any small business, there are opportunities to take control of lead generation activities to generate long-term results. And it does not require a large investment or outsourced support.
So how can we approach this in a repeatable, simple manner?
Let us look at three key levers that small-business owners can use.
Not all potential customers are created equal
Understanding your ideal customer profile is critical. That goes beyond an example of ‘women aged between 20 and 49 who have a family and are time poor’. Without researching the statistics on those numbers, we’re confident this audience is in the millions – certainly in numbers far too high for most businesses to service in their lifetimes.
We can become more targeted by being specific about our best customers’ personas, including not just their age, sex and marital/family status but also where they live, their incomes and hobbies, where they work and their roles. Also consider their education, languages spoken and even their frustrations or motivations. All this information can help us target the consumers who are most engaged with what we offer.
But how can we work this out? The answer often lies in looking back at our previous customers to find similarities that commonly occur. It could be as simple as an income level, suburb profile or method of communication with your business that comes up regularly.
Find these commonalities, bring them together and refine your target market and we instantly have a pool of people who are more engaged than a broad-brush market we may have previously targeted. Without changing anything else in our sales process, we should naturally see ‘win’ rates rise because we are talking to people who more clearly need what our business offers.
What do they need?
If we have reduced our customer pool to a more manageable level, how do we make sure we are putting the right offers in front of them?
The second stage of sharpening our sales process involves understanding the customer:
- What are the problems or opportunities our customers are trying to solve?
- How do we solve them (the value we provide)? And,
- What are the outcomes that come from this?
At a grassroots level, this involves understanding what our customers need, packaging up our offer to be compatible with that need, and then making sure we communicate effectively. Great communication is more than just sharing our features and benefits. It extends to how our product or service can benefit a customer in a more emotive or impactful way.
Sounds simple, but needs a little attention to get right – and we won’t shy away from encouraging everyone who undertakes this exercise to see it as a journey that evolves, rather than a one-off exercise.
The best place to start? Take a blank page, divide it into three sections and fill the first section with the problem you want to solve. The second section can be completed with how you’ll solve the issue. Then fill the third section with the outcomes that can be expected. Get creative, then select the best ideas to work on further.
Let’s look at a mortgage broker. Their service exists to help get people into homes. The way they do this is by finding the best lenders suited to their customers. The outcome they provide is more impactful – a home can change lives, grow families and fulfil dreams. Great mortgage brokers can use their skills to go beyond just securing a 0.2% discount or $2000 annual saving on a mortgage, to enabling a customer to get into their home quickly, in a better location, with a chance to live their dream lifestyle.
So how do we bring these customers to our business?
Here is where we start to spend time focusing on where our customers hang out, the places we are most likely to find more of our ideal customers, more often.
This is not necessarily about creating new lead generation channels, but understanding where our efforts can be most impactful. Do our best customers come from school groups, referrals, webinars, trade shows or our personal network? Or are they repeat business or SEO driven? Once we can identify our best-performing channels, our focus can then shift to how we can get to more of these channels, more often.
If we are simply not sure about where our ideal customers are spending time, there are actions we can take. The most impactful one is to talk to them. Go back to your last 20 customers and ask how they heard about you. Look backwards again to see what has worked in the past. Monitor competitors to see where they are investing their time. These are all great options to explore.
The objective is to devote our finite resources to the most impactful places. Once we get this right, it becomes a process of monitoring progress, looking for areas to improve and then fine tuning. Expect to take 12 weeks to get it right.
What can you do today to have an impact on tomorrow?
Take an hour out of your day and build your framework around the three steps we have described. In this instance, perfection can be the enemy of progress. By starting now, and taking your first steps forward, we would expect you to look back and see progress quickly, even though it may not always feel like it.
Sometimes, by living in a world of possibility, we can be amazed by what we achieve. Happy prospecting.
This article first appeared in issue 46 of the Inside Small Business quarterly magazine