Writing A Blog To Increase Prospect Leads
There are many ways to increase prospect leads and one of those is to consistently write a company blog post. This can be powerful as it can feed into the company’s search engine optimization results and produce leads from new website traffic.
When you publish a blog post on a company website, at some point search engines will likely scan the blog post and index it. When that happens, they will identify what topics the blog post pertains to and they will basically catalog it. After this point, when someone puts in keyword searches into the search engine that relate to the topic that your post is tied to, your website can come back in the search results and stand to have that prospect sent to your site.
The higher you come back in those search results, the more prospect leads that you will produce and there are some very clear search engine optimization tactics that can be done to help with your ability to rank high. There are also some very clear things to do when producing the actual blog post to improve its effectiveness at getting in front of target prospects.
Identify the Right Keyword Phrase
It is critical to identify the right keyword phrase that you want search engines to label or associate with your blog post. If you are publishing good blog posts but those are not centered around topics that target prospects would search for, your ability to create prospect leads may be limited.
The first step in this would be to identify the overall topics are related to our products and services. But we cannot stop there as we need to look at two other factors before moving forward:
Level of search activity: It is important to identify how much the keyword phrase is being searched. If a blog post is published and tagged with a perfect phrase, but that phrase is rarely searched, new web traffic will not be produced. Although, you do not want to target keyword phrases that also have a volume of searches as those will be more difficult to rank on.
Level of competition: Another parameter to assess is how much competition there is for the keyword phrase. This is essentially the amount of other companies that are trying to rank on the phrase. If the competition is high, it will be difficult to come up high in the prospect’s search result. Try to find phrases that fit well but have little competition to improve prospect leads.
There are tools available that can provide this information and help you to find the right keyword to target.
Keyword Optimization
Once you find the right keyword phrase, you want to have the blog post optimized for that phrase by having it mentioned the right amount of times and in the right places in the blog post. The rules around this change but some experts say to have the keyword phrase mentioned 1% of the total word count. Having the phrase in the title and in the first and last sentence can help to tell the search engines what to label the post as being tied to.
Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Prospect Leads or Sales Coaching.
Building A Prospect List To Improve Sales Prospecting
Having a good prospect list can be a huge factor in the level of success when sales prospecting. What we say during our prospecting or the cold call script that we use has a big impact on how well our conversations go. But if we are not working from a good list of target prospects, our valuable time could be wasted on the wrong prospects. As a result, if we spend some time on building a good target list, we can greatly improve our probability for success.
Identify Ideal Prospect
The first step in building a good target list is to identify what our ideal prospect looks like. While we maybe able to sell our products to a large or very diverse market of prospects, it is likely that our products or services fit best or better with a particular segment.
We should identify what this segment looks like in terms of characteristics and build our prospect list around those as focusing primarily on that segment will yield the best results. This does not mean that we will not sell to the other segments, but from an outbound sales perspective, we should focus on the prospects that fit best as they will be more likely to purchase.
To identify what our ideal prospect looks like, we can look at five characteristics and determine what ideal prospects look like for our products or services.
Geography: We need to think about what geographic area we should focus on. Again, we can likely sell our products and services everywhere or at least in a very large area. But if we focused our effort in one particular area, we can improve sales prospecting results.
Size: Identify what size of company fits best with what we have to offer or identify what size of business will be the easiest to do business with. Identifying a range of either annual revenue or employee count is a good way to narrow this down.
Industry: When building a prospect list, identify what industries fit best with your products or services. Is there one or two industries that gain more business value when consuming your products than others?
Title: Identify the best title or individual that you should connect. There is likely a certain individual in the organization in terms of level and functional department that you should focus on.
Current state: A key thing to identify for your prospect list is the ideal current state for your prospects. This would be details for your prospect’s current environment in the area where your products or services fit.
Build Primary List
Once you know what your ideal prospect looks like, you can begin to build a primary target list. This could be a brain dump of all of the prospects that you know about or already have a relationship with. Think of this as your warm list.
Build Secondary List
Once you have gone through or have identified your warm prospects, you can use different services to build a mass cold list. For example, there are services that allow you to build a list by going online an inputting your ideal prospect characteristics and can produce a list of thousands of target prospects in a matter of minutes.
Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Prospect List or Sales Coaching.
Ignite Social Media To Generate Leads
There are some very clear and practical things that we can do to ignite social media to have positive impact on our ability to generate leads.
Create Accounts
The very first thing that we need to do when trying to improve our use of social media is to create accounts and profiles on the different social media platforms. This step may not be necessary as many of us might already have accounts on outlets like Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter. Although, we need to be sure to have both personal and business profiles.
As a first step, do an inventory of your social media profiles and add any that are missing. Two social media platforms that are often over looked are Youtube and Wikipedia. These are very social communities and good places to have exposure.
Establish Connections
Once we have all of our accounts and profiles created, we need to work on building our network of connections on each platform to ignite social media. This basically involves increasing our total number of connections, followers, or friends. The more people we are connected with, the more likely we will be to generate leads.
One way to go about this is to send requests to everybody you come across on the platforms regardless of whether you know them or not. One tactic to use here is to try to make your requests more tailored and friendly when possible by sharing that you don’t know each other but you want to connect and give a reason why. Another thing you can add to this are any things you have in common like mutual contacts, work experience, common interest, etc.
Post Regular Updates
To fully ignite social media, we need to be active from a posting updates standpoint. These updates can help to let people know that we are out there and help us to stay fresh in peoples mind and this can help to generate leads.
We want people to see our updates and at the same time we do not want to do is annoy the people we are connected with. To help avoid this, we can focus on four factors:
1. Timing
We are likely connected with people that are located in different parts of the globe. In addition, we all have different routines so we are viewing social media at different times of the day. As a result, we want to post updates at different times of the day so that we can increase our odds of reaching more people.
2. Frequency
It can help to spread out our post updates, not only to help with reaching more people, but also to minimize the possibility of bugging any of our connections.
3. Quantity
There is no correct answer for how many posts are too many as each social media platform is different as is the tolerance for each connection. But we need to figure out what quantity of posts per day makes sense and stick to it.
4. Content
To ignite social media, we need to be strategic in the content that we share in our updates. We don’t want to just post updates about ourselves and our products as that is a very self-absorbed approach. Instead, we want to make the posts primarily about our connections and to do that, we can post updates that inform, help, and entertain our connections.
Interact
The power from using social media can really come in when we increase our level of interactions. This can be accomplished by contributing and communicating inside of groups, commenting and liking update posts, and sending any direct messages when it is appropriate.
Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Ignite Social Media or Sales Coaching.
Compartmentalize Your Life When Building Your Business
Building your business could be one of the most challenging things that you take on in your life. One way to deal with this challenge and improve the probability of success is to compartmentalize your life.
When working as a business owner, there are many different hats that you have to wear. In some cases, you have to wear all of the hats – you might be in charge of sales, HR, legal, operations, marketing, accounting, finance, etc. On top of all that, you have a life to live and might have responsibilities in the family department as well as personal interests.
This can be a heavy load and one way to deal with this is to break down the week into different compartments where we focus primarily in one area that we have responsibility over and minimize our thoughts and attention in the other areas during that time. This is explained more as we talk about some of the main compartments that can be built, but this concept cannot only improve focus and effectiveness, it can also decrease stress.
Accounting
Who really enjoys accounting? It could be debated whether many accountants really enjoy accounting. Yet, there are tremendous accounting needs that need to be taken care of when building your business. There is a decent amount of accounting work that needs to be done when getting a business going and there is always a decent amount of work that needs to be done each week and month on an ongoing basis.
One way to not only keep the books straight and clean, but to also decrease some stress that can be created by this area, is to set aside some time each week where everything else is shut down and the focus is put on the accounting work that needs to be completed.
Sales
Sales is likely something that you need to do everyday and all day when building your business as you likely always need to be out there meeting prospects in order to be successful. But even if you are always selling in some way or another, it can help to block out some time that is dedicated primarily to sales. Especially if cold calling can help with your sales, setting aside time that is to be spent solely on picking up the phone can greatly help.
Marketing
Two key marketing tactics for building your business might be search engine optimization and social media. While these two tactics can be highly effective, they can also be extremely time consuming. Setting time aside side specifically for blogging, improving the website, and ignite social media can help to make sure enough time gets spent in this area.
Physical Fitness
A personal compartment that is very important and helpful is to have one for physical fitness. Building a business can sometimes mean working everyday and sometimes all day. When this is the case, this can take a toll on both your mind and your body. To help with this, you can set time aside to turn everything off and focus on working on you and your body.
Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Building your Business or Sales Coaching.
Four Keys To Getting An Appointment Set
When working as a sales professional, it is likely that some time will be spent making cold calls to try to get an appointment set. While this can often seem like a difficult thing to do, there are some clear and practical things that we can do to improve our success with appointment making.
1. Focus on the Right Goal
One of the first things that we can focus on to improve results is to focus on the right goal while cold calling prospects. This is important because we can naturally fall into the trap of trying to sell our products and services while on a cold call. While our ultimate goal is to sell our products, this actually might not be the best goal for us to work on during a cold call as it in some ways is too ambitious for a cold call.
A cold call should only last between two to five minutes and with that being the case, we can benefit from focusing on a goal that fits well with that amount of time. Since we cannot completely and effectively sell our products during a cold call, a good goal to focus on is one of getting the prospect interested in and committed to a conversation. In other words, a good goal to stay focused on is getting the appointment set.
2. Build Rapport
It is very important to build rapport with prospects. Not only is this important due to the fact that people buy from people they like, but also because prospects are more likely to agree to taking an appointment with someone that they have a decent level of rapport with.
A cold call does not present at tremendous amount of time to build rapport, but there is enough time to use a few tactics to start to establish rapport. By doing some things like respecting the prospects time, showing that we understand the prospect, listening, disqualifying, and qualifying, we can take some minor steps toward building rapport.
3. Qualify the Prospect
Spending time and energy in the area of qualifying the prospect will have some noticeable impacts on getting the appointment set. At first, qualifying will actually have a negative impact on our number of appointments that we get confirmed as we will be becoming more selective of the appointments we make by asking performing more thorough qualifying. This is not a bad thing as it can decrease time wasted on unqualified prospects.
But by qualifying prospects during cold calls, we will actually create much better conversations with prospects as we will be asking questions and making prospects more interested and engaged in what we are calling about. Without qualifying questions, a cold call can be very one way in terms of information sharing and those are the type of conversations that make a prospect’s guard go up and can make them shut down.
4. Build Interest
Before we try to get the appointment set, we need to build interest. It is similar to trying to reel in a fish. When a fish has a hook in its mouth, we need to get it to bite down before we can try to reel in. With scheduling appointments, we need to get the prospect to bite down when we try to get commitment to move forward.
Michael Halper is an ICF certified coach that works with businesses to help increase sales by improving their cold calling. For more information on how Halper does this, please, please visit Launch Pad where you can read more about Appointment Set or Sales Coaching.