By Mike Schultz, Publisher
Editor's Note: The following article is an excerpt from the Wellesley Hills Group white paper Making Lead Generation Work for Professional Services. You can download a complimentary copy on RainToday.com.
When it comes to lead generation, there are three common truths:
- In order to avoid the revenue roller coaster that plagues many professional services businesses, you need to generate a steady stream of leads.
- For most professional services, prospective clients do not make "impulse" buys. Buying has to make it to the top of their to-do lists for any of your sales to happen.
- As much as you (the seller) might like to shorten the sales cycle, buying complex, important, trust-based services takes time. The initial lead will only happen if the buyer thinks of you when a need that floats to the top of the to-do list, (the "elusive time of need").
Unfortunately for service providers, it's nearly impossible to predict when this elusive time of need is going to arise for the buyers.
In the research report, Evaluating the Cost of Sales Calls in Business to Business Markets,† the authors found that it takes an average of 5.12 sales calls to close sales that exceed $35,000.‡ Since 1989, this process has lengthened by at least 20%. More than 75% of the 23,000-plus companies surveyed stated that a combination of direct and indirect marketing and sales efforts were necessary to get to the sale.
To most leaders of professional services firms, this will make immediate sense. Sales cycles are longer. The competition works hard to blanket the best prospects with their messages. Services are becoming viewed as commodities, and it takes longer to convince buyers of value. And lower-priced competitors make price competition more of a factor than ever before, which complicates prospects' buying cycles.
Why This Rule Is So Hard to Follow, and Why It Matters
Professional services businesses fall down most in implementing and sustaining consistent lead generation efforts. The reasons for this tend to be internally-driven:
- "Autonomous collective" decision making at professional services firms (i.e. everyone has to agree) makes decision-making and action either go slowly, or stop completely.
- Firms dig up the lead generation tree by the roots after two weeks, to see if it's growing yet. (This is not a good way to grow a tree.)
- Firms don't put enough energy and resources into the process, and when they don't get the outcomes they (unreasonably) expect, they pull the plug on their lead generation efforts too soon.
- Firms execute lead generation campaigns poorly. Then, when the efforts don't work, the company leaders pronounce, "We tried that, it didn't work. It doesn't work." To us, this is like saying, "I tried to bake a cake, and it didn't rise," and pronouncing that cakes don't rise. Cakes do rise. You just need to bake them the right way.
- Firms assign billable resources to marketing and business development roles. The people assigned either don't do them, don't do them well, do them well and then have to stop to tend to billable work, or get fired because they stop doing any billable work at all.
Despite all these reasons, the truth is that lead generation efforts must be sustained to make them 1) work, and 2) improve over time.
Let's assume that you begin lead generation activities, and you take the following actions:
- You offer value to your prospects, directly in your marketing and selling.
- You create and leverage offers and experiences.
- You use a targeted, integrated, and direct marketing and business development approach.
If you continue these actions for 2 months, you might get some short-term leads. But if you do it over the long-term (and this is important), you'll get not only short-term leads, but also long-term leads and the brand effect you deserve.
Consider the following example of a sustained one-to-one lead generation plan:
- Week 1: Phone call and follow-up white paper
- Week 4: Custom email with new research finding
- Week 8: Targeted direct mail campaign
- Week 11: Email with article on client's business or competitor
- Week 15: Phone call with invitation to seminar or speech
- Week 19: Email with offer to do something for them at no cost
- Week 22: Targeted direct mail campaign highlighting recent client results you've achieved
- Week 26: Outbound phone call; prospect says, "Perfect timing. Was meaning to call you, let's talk…"
Not only can you use this process to create short-term leads, but you can also create affinity for your company, building your prospect's basis for trusting you through your offers and your value. With sustained messages like this, your prospects will want to work with you. What's most important is that when their "elusive time of need" becomes now, they'll remember you.
Sustained Lead Generation Keeps You Top-of-Mind
Ask yourself the following two questions:
- Think about 100 prospects for your services... not people you're currently speaking to, just people who are at the right organizations, at the right levels, that would buy from you. How many of them will proactively seek out services like yours this month?
- Over the next two years, how many of these 100 prospects are likely to have the need for your services and proactively seek out providers in your area, even if they do it quietly, or through their network?
The answer to both questions vary by service specialty, but usually the answer to Question #1 ("this month") is somewhere around "a few" to "a handful".
In contrast, the answer to Question #2 ("over the next two years") is usually something like "20%...45%...80%".
How do you take these 100 prospects into a longer-term lead generation? At its simplest:
- Get these prospects on a clean targeted list.
- Send them direct mail and email value-based offers regularly.
- Pleasantly, but rigorously, maintain value-based telephone contact with them.
Take these steps, and you are much more likely to be remembered by the buyer at their elusive time of need. You're more likely to be one of the handful of service providers they bring in, and you may even be the one they are "itching to work with", because they've been reading your work and paying attention to your communications. And why wouldn't they feel this way, assuming the communications you sent them have been value-based?
†Cahners Research, Evaluating the Cost of Sales Calls in Business to Business Markets, 2001. 23,341 businesses surveyed.
‡For professional services, the appropriate context is to think about the annual value of a client (rather than the "first sale"), which often includes multiple, ongoing sales.
Editor's Note: This article is an excerpt from the Wellesley Hills Group white paper Making Lead Generation Work for Professional Services. You can download a complimentary copy on RainToday.com.
Mike Schultz is the Publisher of RainToday.com and an advisor to service businesses worldwide. He can be reached at mschultz@raintoday.com. You can read his Services Insider Blog at: http://www.whillsgroup.com/blog.cfm.
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