Gather more leads by being seen and heard

This article was included in the July 26th, 2016 issue of the LACRM Newsletter.

Generating good leads is the cornerstone of every business -- it keeps everything moving and ensures that there are always opportunities around the corner. There are many different ways to amp up lead generation, but what simpler way is there than to just let yourself be seen and heard? Kevin Albrecht, Sales and Marketing Manager at Red Elephant, ensures that his target market knows exactly who he is by making both himself and his company as visible as possible:

“Visibility is one of the most important things for a growing business. By hitting as many networking events as possible, going to places where your audience is, speaking at events and such, you can make sure that people know who you are and how you can help.

We’ve been able to grow our business because we are always speaking at events, hosting webinars, and staying as visible as possible. This comes hand in hand with getting on the phone and following up with all our leads. Because, yes, you can sell at events, but most of your sales come afterwards. So we always make sure we are tracking all the leads we meet at events, taking good notes about what we spoke about, so that we can reference that the next time we connect.”

-Kevin Albrecht, Sales and Marketing Manager at Red Elephant

How can the CRM help?

There is nothing worse than talking to someone that you have surely met before, but cannot remember anything about. No one expects you to remember everything about every person that you’ve met, especially when you are regularly attending large events. But when you do remember what your last conversation was about and know exactly what someone is looking for, that is when you’ve differentiated yourself from your competitors. The good thing is that the CRM is intended to help you with just that. By keeping track of your entire histories with your contacts, you are always able to pull up a record of your last conversation with someone, ensuring that every future discussion is an informed one.

Tip to try: After every event, when you are faced with a stack of business cards, add them all as contacts to the CRM! Imports are not just for setting up your initial database -- you can import spreadsheets as often as you’d like, and it is a quick and easy way to add new batches of leads. There are many business card scanner apps out there (one that some of our users like to use is CamCard) that can turn this pile of cards into an organized spreadsheet. You can then easily import the spreadsheet into your CRM account without having to add everyone in individually!

There are also a number of bulk actions you can take with these imported contacts once they are added to the system. Want to put in a quick note in all of their activity feeds about how you met them? How about adding them all into a group so that you can keep them separate in your database? All of this can be done once your import is complete to help you better organize your CRM. Click here for a tutorial on how you can perform bulk actions on your imported contacts.

Letting your target audience know who you are, and making sure to follow up with them regularly helps you stand out from the pack. The CRM helps ensure that you always know who your audience is, whether it is the first meeting or the fiftieth event. We hope this helps and if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to to contact us!

Note from the editors: As a small business, we’ve also gone through (and are still going through) the motions of lead generation, and a big thing we’ve realized is that networking should be done with your target customers. Networking for the sake of networking takes up a lot of time without giving much back, so it’s important to stay focused on the events and audiences that you actually benefit from being in front of!

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