Know your customer. Solve their problem. Make the sale.

Sounds simple enough?

But what kind of customer do you want your lead generation efforts to attract? The paying kind for sure, but what other qualities are going to make for a successful marketing campaign? How about customers who are ready to buy and have already been pre-sold.

This is not a new revelation in marketing, but for those business owners who haven’t taken the time - You now are being given permission to take 10 minutes out of your day and seriously think about if your lead generation efforts are really bringing you quality prospects that add value to your business.

• Have leads become prospects before they speak to a sales rep?
• Have prospects already educated themselves about the advantages of your product or service?
• Are prospects ready to buy when they speak to a sales associate or visit an order page?

Having a system in place that produces these high quality prospects can be the difference in making a plan for growth or just making payroll.

The Internet allows businesses (small, medium, large, and super-size?) to leverage technology creating a 24 hour lead generation machine that starts the sales process from the first contact. This allows impersonal technology to do the heavy lifting of mining those quality prospects that turn into paying customers.

The most basic technology to perform this task is - email. Contrary to many opinions, email is far from dead as a lead generation technique. Don’t believe it? How many business related emails did you read today? How many had some kind of offer in them?

The up-front costs of putting this lead generation strategy in place are:

• Creating an email follow up series
• Setting up an autoresponder service
• Adding an opt-in form to a web page

Yes, this is a simplified list - but these are the basic costs. Costs that if are managed well bring exactly the kind of prospects you want: pre-sold leads that become paying customers.

To make lead generation systematic, eventually there should be predictable results - a target ROI that can be consistently achieved. Attracting the right kind of leads will produce these results. The challenge is dedicating resources to work through the initial start up phase and get the system in place.

I’ve had several clients truly grasp this idea, but then don’t dedicate the resources to make it produce the results they’re hunting for. Usually, it’s coming up with the follow up emails. If someone in-house is not going to have ownership of it, out source it to a copy writer and move on.

And when the ROI is predictable, it just keeps paying off.