When was the last time you placed a newspaper ad and received 20 phone calls from that specific ad?

Gone are the days of creating a huge “Brand” for your business. With the advent of the Internet, it is simply to easy to create a business presence that looks like a big brand.

Why is it then that many businesses are not taking advantage of performance based marketing programs?

Not sure what a Performance Based Marketing system is? Let me explain.

When you bought your home the realtor that helped you find the house was paid a fee when you bought. If you didn’t buy a house with them do you know how much they made?

Zero.

That is a performanced based program.

Now take that one step further and let’s talk about marketing with a performance based program.

If you are thinking about getting new carpet and you go to the Internet, you enter “New Carpet” in the search box and click submit, the results that show up are typically based on the rank of that particular company’s website.

Did you know that you can bid a fee to be placed at the top? That’s right, google allows you to bid a fee per click to be placed at the top of the search results. This is called Pay Per Click advertising, where you pay a predetermined fee when someone clicks on your ad.

This person would be directed to a page on your website, where theoretically your marketing information would get them to call you or fill out a form.

That is a pay for performance system. You paid Google a fee for the click that may ultimately lead to someone calling you or visiting your business. It takes many clicks to generate a lead and you are paying per click, but overall this is a good example of pay for performance marketing.

Now let’s take this one step further yet. What if there was a way that you didn’t pay a fee until someone actually contacted you? They would fill out a form or call you on the phone and only then would you pay a fee to the advertising company.

That is truly Pay for performance advertising. You would only pay when a lead is generated for your company.

There is virtually no risk to your company.

That is a No Risk Marketing System™.

Click here to read more about a No Risk Marketing System.

Whether you are a new business or a well established business, you should definitely have some form of performance based marketing built into your marketing plan. It should not be your entire marketing plan, but there should be some form of system in place to take advantage of the no risk aspect of such systems.

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1. Treat people like the humans that they are. Humans like to be understood, appreciate being engaged with, heard, respected, captivated and need space and time in their evaluation and decision process.  Take the time in this busy world to review whether your phone call, text, email or IM follow these guidelines as you communicate with your buyer.

2. Remember to be thoughtful and relevant in your questions. You wouldn’t bombard someone you meet for the first time with every question you wanted to know about. And you certainly wouldn’t want someone to treat you that way. In sales, we do need to develop questions to determine if we can satisfy the needs or wants of the buyer. Subtle balance is critical in finding the answers to qualifying questions throughout your buyer interactions. Be sure your questioning enhances your relationship and brings you closer to helping your client.  For example, find out what impact the buyer’s decision to buy or not buy has on their company.

3. Listening is more helpful than talking. Be patient and attentive in your listening.  As you engage with buyers, listen to their responses. Your buyer’s response may include more helpful information than you asked for, strengthen the process of building your relationship and bring you both closer to a buyer choice and decision.  As your buyer is sharing valuable insight, recording and clarifying what you heard is also a respectful part of the process. In building a relationship people feel comfortable when you remember what you told them and use that information to learn more about them and help them.

Qualification is essential to buying and selling. How you do it affects success.

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Learn more about our No Risk Marketing System here

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Many companies are spending substantial marketing dollars on lead generation via social networking, SEO/SEM, website re-writes, blogging, Google Adwords and PPC, list development etc. When a lead comes in, we need to learn and know how to qualify and identify if that lead is worth spending your precious time and money pursuing it. At some point your going to have to pick up that phone and make the dreaded cold call, don’t assume just because a lead came in via a Twitter Tweet that it can be classified as a ‘warm” lead.

Questioning is a skill that is critical to uncovering a customers needs and your opportunity to do business with a prospect. If you don’t have the courage to ask relevant and meaningful questions, you can burn a good lead in a hurry and in today’s economy we just don’t have any room for error. Many un-skilled reps ask meaningless questions of the wrong people i.e.; “do you have a project?”

There are many attributes that constitute a well organized call containing relevant questioning and interaction with a decision maker. How you plan your strategy for the call, formulate your questions, the style in which you deliver and the order in which you ask questions will determine how effective you are at determining if you are talking to a market-ready buyer.

Asking targeted questions are the keys to understanding their business need, current environment, decision making criteria, time frame and budget. It allows you to uncover what competitors may be there and if they are being serviced properly.

Examples of targeted questions:

‘How old is your home?”

“When was the last time you replaced the roof?”

‘How is the performance of your network, are there any bottlenecks?”

“Could implementing a new solution help you serve your customers better?”

“Would you like to schedule a free consultation or estimate?”

“What is your decision making process and who is involved in those decisions?”

‘What other solutions have you looked at?”

“What seems to be your biggest challenge today?”

And there many more that can be asked. Knowing what questions and when to ask those questions are the keys to knowing what a good quality lead is and will help you to understand where to put your time and energy.

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Take a look at our No Risk Marketing System here

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Effectively generating leads involves zeroing in on your target market and letting them know what you have to offer. Don’t assume that your market is aware that your business even exists. Too many businesses just sit around and hope that potential customers will find them. As such, learning and utilizing good strategies to reach your target market and then converting them to customers is essential to your business’ health.

It is important to understand that not all of your leads are going to result in sales. In other words; not all will become customers. That is why you want to only focus your lead generation efforts on your target market. Some business owners don’t understand this at first and try chasing down every single consumer. The result of this targetless marketing is the loss of time and money.

To avoid falling into the same trap, you must you must know who your target market it. It also helps if you know what a lead is to begin with. Simply put, a lead is merely someone who might be interested in what it is you offer. A prospect, on the other hand, is someone who has expressed an interest in your offer via some kind of action he or she took. However, he or she isn’t a customer though until they actually make that first purchase from you.

Gathering the right leads for your business is veryimportant to its success. You can be sure your competition is doing everything they can to let people know about them and their offers. You certainly don’t want to be put out of business due a lack of fresh leads. To be sure, you should be engaging in various forms of lead generation techniques so this doesn’t happen.

If you sell online, one way you can quickly generate leads is by offering readers of your information the chance to opt in to your mailing list. When implementing this technique, be sure it is very clear what they are opting in to. You can offer a monthly newsletter and even special coupons or promotions. Of course, in exchange for your offer, all they need to do is provide you with their name and email address. This kind of lead is very good because they are already interested in what you have to offer. All you have to do is follow up with them with an email message and convert them to a customer.

When implementing lead gen strategies, take the time to carefully research the various ways there are to get leads. In this way you can pick out the ones you wish to test. Then, once you’ve found a winner, test that winning strategy against another strategy or technique. Whatever you decide, always be sure to test the techniques and strategies you use and see if and how they benefit your business.

There are many different ways in which you can go about generating leads for your business. Some of them will be successful and others won’t. However, you need to be willing to implement and test them so you can measure the results. It is always best to have several strategies in place to generate the leads you want. That way you aren’t relying upon only one to get you the results you want. Then, as you determine which ones work well modify the others so they can be helpful as well.

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Take a look at our No Risk Marketing System here

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