Talking with several of my customers, I’ve noticed a trend. Many don’t know where to start when growing their sales pipeline. To fix this pain point, I’ve created the, Grow Your Sales Pipeline Series, which will help the entrepreneur, marketing and sales director (or associate) who is looking for different ways to fill up their sales pipeline.

How to target customers
How to communicate with potential customers
How to not sell potential customers (coming soon)
How to land potential customers (coming soon)

In today’s message, I will be going over four ways to reach out to those you have recently met or may be associated with to grow your sales pipeline, categorized in these 4 elements.

I: Business Cards

II: Social

III: Email campaigns

: Make it super easy to say yes

Business Cards. So who do you have already in your existing network? Take an inventory of who you want to target and then breakup into separate groups. Only keep the ones who you can grow immediately in front of you. This way you don’t waste you time by reaching out to people that you already don’t think will convert. Under the business card inventory also look through your other online networks that you have relationships on. For example, I have found that my friendships on Facebook can convert higher than my followers on twitter so I will communicate more on Facebook.

Be sure to make a record of the data you are researching, I typically create a spreadsheet and add columns such as name, email and how I know this person. This way, when I reach out to them, I can get a tab on specific encounters, to keep me up to date on communication with them.

The goal for this is to pinpoint those potential customers you have so when you communicate with them, you have divided them into relationships and opportunities. Example, if you are selling web marketing, you wouldn’t want to ask another web marketing company for work, rather if they ever have overfilled their pipeline, that you may have some bandwidth to help out.

Remember everything is about relationships.

Example of communicating with similar firms: ‘Hey, I see you have been growing your business since 1995 and I think what you have created in awesome. I’d love to take you to lunch to learn more about how you were able to do so.”

 

Make each of these conversations about educating yourself or potential customers.

 

Use SOCIAL to your advantage. You have a network of people that you are friends with or follow and are likely to engage with you when you provide them with something of interest or education. For example, post an image of a related topic on your page, give some background and then a link (CTA) and repeat with more content for best results.

Problem: You need to grow your pipeline, but you’re stuck on how

Solution: Increase your network by learning from others who have already done so

Goal: To grow an email list, that you will be able to communicate with. Create an effective Call-To-Action, and email campaign that you can ask your network to join plus those who share the campaign or are lead generated from an opt-in from your site.

According to Wikipedia, A call to action, or CTA, is a banner, button, or some type of graphic or text on a website meant to prompt a user to click it and continue down a conversion funnel.

The higher converted CTA’s are ones that typically given information out (whitepaper, book or discount) for a piece of data in return (email, phone number, etc), with the goal to create enough ‘deal flow’ or interest that you can leverage this list to create education campaigns around and through several layers of discussion, become an authority and trusted enough, that these visitors or viewers will buy what you are selling. But not by selling immediately.

If you are selling online, which many of you are, the thought process must be changed. The world is filled with noise; billboards and ads everywhere we look. From the bumper of your car, laptop all the way to the stick of gum you chew. Many look at this noise and immediately turn the other way. This is exactly what you are trying to stay away from. You cannot expect to sell on your first interaction, instead, educate your potential customers and then hard sell at a later time. Typically six interactions later.

Example: My local shopping mall charges up-words of 7X’s more for retail space than other spaces not in the mall. Why? #1, because they can but more importantly, #2 the psychology behind a patron in a shopping mall is one that is ready to buy.

You are not a shopping mall, so don’t act like it!

‘But Zack, this process takes to long!’ Yea, sales suck and isn’t always immediate. So you have to convince your visitors that you are 1. trustworthy 2. credible and 3. the best damn product in the world that they can buy! All while not doing this immediately.

Collecting the email. What information are you willing to give up in return for your visitor’s email?  That’s the easy part, if you don’t regularly communicate with current customers or peruse the web, you can ask questions to your networks or check out LinkedIn Groups to see what is discussed regularly. Then compile the findings into a report and create a catchy phrase to exchange data for data. 

In Norfolk, Kevin is looking to launch a developer conference and before he starts doing all the hard work, he is looking to validate and grow his pipeline with potential attendees. He simply asks visitors to sign up and in return, he will keep them posted. After I signed up for this list, I received an email

How easy have you made it for visitors to 1. Find You 2. Give You Data in Exchange for Data 3. Understand who you are and what you do?

Make your content easy to understand to those, not in your field. Example, don’t talk acronyms and accounting terms if you aren’t talking to an accounting firm. Instead, create a targeted landing page for those types of visitors. In Carry Norfolk’s case, they deliver goods via bicycle and have begun branching out to deliver other items such as office supplies and documents. When talking with potential customers, Ian (Carry Norfolk’s founder) noticed he was sending visitors to his main page, which was confusing to understand if you were not ordering food. He instead built a custom landing page for document deliveries with text that was centered around the delivery of tax and legal documents.

To recap, take an inventory of your entire network, begin communicating and educating around your product, but without directly selling your product, rather exchanging data for data (email). And finally, be sure to make it beyond easy to sign up, understand what you are and how they can communicate with you.