Find money making opportunities for online income

While most books on sales training or classes do a good job covering closing a sale, few cover sales leads. Generating the leads is the first part of any sales process, and the more time you spend understanding this important step, the more efficient your business will become.

Are you able to name the number of leads you got over the last month? Most people can answer that question with a handful of leads that have high potential or resulted in a sale, but a large number of potential leads fall out of the process, sacrificing possible sales.

So, what’s the big deal anyway? The more you know about your leads the more successful your business will be, because generating leads is the first step to making sales. And, if you can use your newly found information to either reduce the cost of your marketing or the time that you spend, wouldn’t that be worth it?

Your first action plan is to create a way to track key information about the ways that you generate your leads. Here are a few areas to start analyzing:

1. Where do you first generate your leads from? Before a lead becomes a lead, they are only prospects – someone who visits your website or that you meet at a networking group. Your job is to identify those venues you use to collect your prospects, such as trade shows, meet-up groups, advertising, or your website.

2. Then, answer the question, what specific sources do you get your actual leads from? Pay per click advertising, a specific trade show, someone else’s website, or organic online searches are all examples of a specific source for your leads.

3. Finally, what is the quality value for each of the leads you receive from those general sources and specific sources? The best way I have found to pinpoint this is to assign a percent value to each lead. For example, 10% for a suspect (not even really a lead yet); 25% for someone who is actually interested and you’re talking more; 50% if you’ve issued a proposal and 100% if you closed the sale.

Once you know where your best leads originate, you will find you are able to spend your marketing dollars and your time much more efficiently.

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