Build a predictable pipeline of leads

Your sales pipeline drives your business. No matter how you drive new enquiries into your business currently, you’ll have some systems and processes in place for following up and offering your products or services.

It’s all too common to be riding a sales rollercoaster where one month you bring in lots of new contracts and the next you’re delivering the work. So by the time you reach the third month, your business is thirsty for new leads again.

Having a predictable pipeline of leads will bring you peace of mind as a business owner. Putting a lead generation system in place helps you to explode this pipeline and bring in a steady supply of new leads flowing into your business.

Prospects that enter your lead generation system will be nurtured without the need for additional touchpoints. Most importantly, they start to build trust with your business. It’s well-known that people buy from those who they know, like and trust. With your system, you’re building trust with the value that you’re delivering.

In addition, once your lead generation system is in place you can use the data over the first few months to understand how many conversations that you need to have in order to generate a sale. Let’s run through an example:

You have an average of 200 new leads entering your system each month.

Of these new leads 25 are booking in a call with you at the end of the process.

From these calls, you’re generating 5 new customers. This gives you a 2.5% conversion rate.

If each of these new customers was worth £2,000 to your business, that’s £10,000 that is directly attributable to your new system.

What if you were able to increase your conversion rate to 5% or increase the number of new leads to 400? Now you’re at £20,000 in new business for the month.

Knowing and understanding this data is very important for your business as you can take a glance at the number of new leads entering the system at any time and have a good feel for how many of these will end up making an enquiry and hopefully proceeding on to becoming a new customer.

TIP: Look at your current sales pipeline. Do you know what your current conversion rate is? Even if you’re only able to look at the number of enquiries that you’ve received and the number of sales that this has turned into, this is still some valuable data to have as a starting point.

Test, tweak and build some more

This isn’t a whimsical look at what might happen in the future, don’t worry. We’re going to focus on actionable information that you can use for your business.

As we touched upon briefly when talking about your pipeline, it’s important to look at the data from your lead generation system and focus on optimising your offer. We do this by looking at conversion optimisation.

The aim of optimising the content in your lead generation system is to generate more enquiries (and subsequent customers) by making small changes to the copy throughout your system. This could be changing headlines, trying out different emails, even changing the cover on your lead magnet.

When you carry out tests, it’s important to just test 1 or 2 things at a time. If you make lots of changes, you’re never going to be able to track their effectiveness.

TIP: Once you have your lead generation system up and running over the first month, look at the number of people who have signed up to receive your content and how many of these who have made an enquiry. Use this as your base data for future conversion optimisation changes.

After you’ve got your first successful lead generation system in place, you can move onto the next one.

It’s not uncommon for a business to have between 5-10 lead generation systems (or more) in place and driving new leads into the business. Your only limit with new systems will be your ability to handle the new enquiries that it will generate.

In addition, you can also use the problems, questions and great content that you’ve put together for your lead generation system for other purposes. If you have a YouTube video, you can create content that answers the same questions and point users to your landing page in the description.

Do you or your team create blog articles? Great! You can repurpose content and create valuable information that leads users towards your new lead generation system. These can be optimised to rank higher in the search engines too, so they’re another source of traffic for your business.

TIP: Think about how you can repurpose the content that you have created for your lead generation system. The problems that your client has and the questions that they might ask about your product or service can be answered in many ways. The content you create can direct traffic into your lead generation system, helping you educate and nurture more potential new customers.

How it all works

A lead generation system is a process that takes visitors to your website through a series of micro commitments and leads to an end goal. Your goal could be the sale of a product / service or it could be for them to book a consultation call with a member of your team.

A visitor will come to a landing page, which is a special page on your website promoting content that they can sign up to receive. This content is valuable and will help them to achieve a goal related to a specific problem that they have.

After the visitor has opted-in to receive your content, they’ll be taken to a thank you page. Here they can read more about your business and you have the opportunity to share with them some key articles or content that is relevant to your offer.

Next, they’ll receive a welcome email with a link to your content. The content here is normally what we call a “lead magnet”. This is a short guide that delivers immediate value to your prospect.

In the following days, the prospect will receive a series of nurture emails. These build on the free content that you’ve provided, adding additional quick wins and expertise for your lead.

Finally, you’ll finish with one of two things. Either a sales email, which leads to a purchasing process or a consultation email, which leads to your prospect booking in a call with your sales team.

This whole process can be setup and run in an automated manner. It’s just like having an extra sales team member, except they don’t need to be paid a salary, because everything is handled automatically.

Your lead generation system creates trust with your prospect by delivering valuable content and quick win items that they can action in their business.

The best way to start your lead generation system is to begin with the product or service that you want to promote. What does your prospect need to know in order to make that purchase from your business?

TIP: Pick one product or service that your business offers and focus on this for your lead generation system. This should be one of your key offerings. Write this down on a piece of paper, as we’ll be diving deeper in this guide.

What is your customers biggest problem?

Your customer is the single most important piece of the lead generation jigsaw.

When selling a product or service the key focus for your content should be the problem that your customer has. This is the problem that your product or service solves.

Think about the key product or service that you’ve written down from the previous page. What problem does your product or service solve? How does this make your prospect feel? After the problem has been solved, how does it make their life better?

Your answers to these questions start to create the content that you should be using in your lead generation system. In fact, this is the type of content that you can use all over your website.

When you talk directly to your prospects and visitors about how you understand their problems, they’ll pay attention. You’re telling them that you have the solution for their problems, they’ll want to know more and to understand what you are offering.

TIP: Thinking about the product or service that you’ve written down previously, write down the biggest problems that your customer has that this resolves. Between 1-3 problems would be ideal here.

Now that you’ve noted your customer’s biggest problems, you need to think about how your product or service provides the solution to these. Can you come up with 5 reasons that your product solves these solutions?

Great! You’re now half-way there to creating your first lead magnet.

You need to take these 5 reasons and extrapolate on them. Focus on benefits, not features. The benefits are the end result for the customer. This is how they feel and the change in their life because you solved their problem.

TIP: Write down 5 reasons why your product or service solves your customer’s biggest problem. With each of these reasons, think of 1 or more questions that your customer would ask in relation to them. Answering these questions is how you will deliver value to your customer. You can take your 5 reasons and the answers to the questions and create a lead magnet. This is a PDF document typically less than 10 pages in length. It answers the questions that your customers have and provides specific action points that deliver value.

Nurture and educate your prospects

As a business owner you’ll know that one of the biggest limiting factors that you have in your sales process is time.

There are only so many new enquiries that you can follow up with and you will sometimes need to be selective to ensure that you don’t waste your precious time. It’s too easy to waste time on prospects who are not a good fit with your business.

The biggest benefit that automation will bring to your business is that it will simply save you time and money. Once your lead generation system is setup, there’s a full process that each lead will follow.

The automation sequence will nurture your prospect, providing education to them and giving them opportunities to gain quick wins for their business that deliver immediate value.

So what goes into your automation sequence?

The first step after creating your lead magnet is to write a welcome email. This email thanks your new subscriber for signing up and provides a link for them to download your lead magnet.

Next, you’ll want to create a nurture sequence. We recommend writing one email for each of the main points in your lead magnet. So if you have 5 main points, you’ll want to send 5 additional nurture emails.

A great nurture email is one that is written in a conversational tone, provides additional education for your prospect and gives them a quick win or action step that they can complete.

At the end of your nurturing sequence, you’ll want to create a Call To Action (CTA) email. This will either be a sales email that leads them directly to your product or a consultation email that leads them to a booking calendar, so they can book a call with your team.

TIP: Start creating the emails for your automation sequence. You should end up with a welcome email, a nurture email sequence (one for each key point in your lead magnet) and your CTA email. As a recommendation, if you’re selling services, the easiest endpoint will be to direct your lead to a consultation page where they can book a call with your team to talk further about your services.