Sales Lead Generation

A sales lead is basically an identity of an entity or a person who may be interested in purchasing a product or a service, and this sales lead is the first thread of a sales process. Generating a database of such leads or identities or persons is known as Sales Lead Generation.

To generate Sales Leads, a marketing process of trade shows, direct marketing, advertising, internet marketing or cold calling is followed. In order to make a sales lead qualify as a prospective sale, an in-depth analysis is involved to determine whether the particular sales lead can become a sales prospect. You may identify this by questioning the leads product applicability, whether the lead will be able to fund the purchase and what will be the time frames or frequencies of the purchase.

Once a qualified lead exists, additional operations may be performed such as background research on the lead’s employer, general market of the lead, contact information beyond that provided initially or other information useful for contacting and evaluating a lead for elevation to prospect, the next sales step.

To generate a sales lead you need to identify the most likely prospective buyers and qualifying them to check if they will actually buy your product. Once you are certain that they will buy, it is only then that you should allocate further sales resources and individuals who will try to make that sale for you. Sales leads are not generated instantly unless you are willing to buy one from a reliable source. Usually an effective sales lead generation process will take months and involve several individuals who will constantly evaluate the leads.
To generate a sales lead one has to regularly broadcast the product, and this involves communicating to a broad set of people with an expectation of a response which will be fed back to the manufacturer. Secondly you need to do a Concentration, which requires identification and creation of situations that concentrate a well matched candidate. You may do so by doing market segmentation and also by participating in a trade show which are examples of concentration strategies.

A sales lead will eventually purchase if your leads are authentic. You will be make those conversions and close the sales with ease.

Some of the other effective ways of sales lead generation are Direct Mail, events, seminars, training, whitepapers, web marketing, internet media, telemarketing etc.