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.