6 Most Effective Lead Generation Strategies and a FREE TOOL for Small and Medium Businesses

Lead generation is the primary and the most significant stage of a sales cycle. In fact, it can be called as the “sales engine” of any business. Lead generation strategies followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the lead that has been generated is not of superior quality, which means in other words, if they do not fit your brand’s ‘ideal customer profile’, your sales funnel and pipeline could end up to be extremely weak and vulnerable for a drop in sales revenue. As a procedure, lead generation helps to move focused prospects into your sales funnel whereby you can target those leads for nurturing and eventually generate a sale. Here are a few low budget lead generation ideas for small and medium businesses, which we found interesting enough to share for the growth of SMBs.

Lead generation is the primary and the most significant stage of a sales cycle. In fact, it can be called as the “sales engine” of any business. Lead generation strategies followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the lead that has been generated is not of superior quality, which means in other words, if they do not fit your brand’s ‘ideal customer profile’, your sales funnel and pipeline could end up to be extremely weak and vulnerable for a drop in sales revenue.

Lead generation includes the technique of collecting a database of potential leads with their contact information. Since, small and medium businesses’ strategies circles around the principals of spending less and gaining more, lead generation tactics should never become an uneasy overhead for your company.

84% of consumers trust the recommendations made by their family and friends.- Nielsen Survey (2017) Click To Tweet

As a procedure, lead generation helps to move focused prospects into your sales funnel whereby you can target those leads for nurturing and eventually generate a sale.

Here are a few low budget lead generation ideas for small and medium businesses, which we found interesting enough to share for the growth of SMBs:

#1.  Exit intent popup

Creating an exit intent popup for your website hardly requires 15 minutes. Exit intent popup helps businesses to track the movement of the website and mobile application users by offering an opt-in form when they leave your website.

Once you find your website visitor is leaving your site, by creating exit intent pop-up, without acting on a CTA (Click to Action) button like registering or buying, you can interrupt your visitor and re-direct them to take a specific action.

Several large organizations have been using this technique since long and have achieved exemplary results by implementing this as a part of their marketing strategy.

You can use exit intent popup when people are leaving your pricing page, landing page, or abandoning your shopping cart, because these parts of your website allow people to make the most important decision before buying your products and services.

#2. Add call-to-action button

Popularly known as CTA, call-to-action buttons are used for drawing people to use a particular product, application, or service. CTA is meant for provoking instant responses. For example, they provide the consumers with compelling reasons to make an immediate purchase with click-bait verbiage like- “This offer expires in 3 hours”.

You can include call-to-action buttons in your digital brochures, catalogs, emails and others. Hence, a CTA needs to be designed in an effective manner that incorporates click-worthy contents. For instance, you can include in your CTA content what your product or service can offer and how the consumer can actually sign-up and use it for free.

Always make sure that your “Sign up for Free” CTA button should be jazzy enough to stands out predominantly over everything else on the web-page.

#3. Share best practices or success stories

Most of your consumers would always like to know if your product or service really stands up for what you say or can it deliver the solution your consumers are looking for.

The best way to answer this question is to showcase what your brand did for your customers, and how their business benefitted by purchasing your products or services.

Therefore, while sharing your success stories, write a small compelling introduction, with a CTA that requires your prospects to fill in their details, once they want to download them.

This way, you will understand that your prospects are trying to find a solution to the challenges you noted in your story and might be interested in purchasing your products or services for solving their issues.

#4. Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a roundabout way for generating leads. Blogging as a guest on other’s websites increases your web traffic and thereby introduces prospects to your solutions, by using back-links within the blog contents to redirect traffic to your website.

Guest blogs are mostly published on websites that attracts very high traffic.

However, before you start blogging here are a few things that you need to remember:

  • Provide compelling contents that are focused on your niche
  • Post contents only on those websites where the audience fits your niche
  • Be sure that the owner of the blog is active on social media websites

#5. Add testimonials

Testimonials are similar to success stories but while success stories are written from your end, testimonials are provided directly by your customers, in their own words.

You shall often find customers who reach out on social media to appreciate your product, customer support endeavors, or even your organization. You can always leverage these testimonials and publish them on your website.

Testimonials are a highly effective way of demonstrating your success that helps your potential customers to decide on making a purchase.

#6. Add social proof

According to Nielsen Survey: “84% of consumers trust the recommendations made by their family and friends.”

Therefore, word of mouth marketing on social media is one of the best ways for generating leads. There are several portals that allow you to get connected to your potential leads. One such portal is LinkedIn.

Once you are connected with the leads and understand the level of interest, you can initiate conversation with the prospect or even create LinkedIn Groups, which allows people with similar taste and interests to comment or react to your postings on the group.

Takeaway

As an add-on, here is a link to the CONVERGEHUB LEAD GENERATOR, which is a free tool that lets you visit anyone’s social media page (like LinkedIn, Facebook, Yelp etc.) and capture all information instantly without any manual typing.

Using this free tool you can save qualified leads from social media, other sites and even Gmail with one click of the mouse. It even lets you create notes and follow up tasks to get a head start with that lead.

You can save the captured leads in the Lead Generator itself or save them in the ConvergeHub CRM for even more sales power.

Did we miss on any other lead generation strategies for SMBs, on a low budget?

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In such a case, please comment and let us know about it in the comment box below.

4 Ways Dirty CRM Database Can Hurt Your Marketing Efforts

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all? Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database. And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. Here are how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them.

Like it or not, are you spending your marketing budget on programs that bring poor or no results at all?
Researchers have revealed that on an average 15% of a business’s annual profits are spend (read misspent) owing to bad data residing in their CRM database.

And it is not just the money that gets us worried. Dirty data in the CRM database, like duplicate information, often results in erroneous lead scoring. For when scores are shared between duplicate leads, it implies that neither of the records gets a high enough score to proceed down the sales pipeline.

15% of a business’s annual profits are misspent owing to bad data residing in their CRM database as CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. - Gartner Click To Tweet

Additionally, pitiable marketing results along with time wasted following up with the wrong lead drastically lower marketing and sales productivity, increase CRM’s and other marketing software costs, and finally damages the reputation of the company.

Here are 4 how dirty CRM database is hurting your marketing efforts and what you can do to fix them:

#1. Duplication

Data of the customers are gathered through several sources, which includes tradeshow lists, web forms, webinars or other third party sources.  Hence, duplicates of records end up on most marketing lists.

Cloud-based CRM system and marketing software charges are most often based on the amount of data that is stored in its database. Therefore, retaining too many duplicates in your system inflates the cost of storage. Duplicate records stored in the CRM database also skew performance reports, making it complicated to base critical business decisions on inaccurate results.

The Fix:

  • Boost the performance of your system with CRM database duplication prevention tools.
  • Make sure that the likely places for duplicate entry, like manual data entry and data import, are duly covered.
  • Create a duplicate-free workflow for all teams in your organization, not just for marketing and sales departments in your company.

#2. Lead Scoring

There are several prospects who often use more than one email addresses or interact with your business in different ways (downloads, trail requests, email opens etc.) causing the CRM system or other marketing automation tools to create innumerable duplicates.

Duplicate entries in the CRM database affects lead scoring by:

  • Score sharing between duplicate leads, whereby neither of the leads scores high enough points to qualify either of the leads.
  • By treating each and every email addresses as a unique record in the CRM system, a score actually referring to the same lead can be split between two different emails of the same entity.
  • Shared email addresses, when they are shared between different members of the organization, all the addresses are saved to one unique lead.

The Fix:

  • Assess the quality of your CRM database and persistently track down all new duplicate records in the database.
  • Be thorough in cleaning your bad data and make sure that no duplicate records are left behind on a recurring basis.

#3. Inaccuracy

It has been found that CRM data degrades at a rate of 30% per annum. Hence, remember your CRM database’s quality always changes over time.

Outdated contact information, organizational changes, errors during entry, and also external data sources affects the quality of your existing CRM database.

Bad data unnecessarily stored in the CRM database, escalates storage costs, which results in creating a devastating effect on your marketing plans. This is because; multiple communications with the same prospect or lead and wrong targeting can have a crucial effect on the reputation of your brand.

The Fix:

  • Verify and then enrich all customer data.
  • Verify all third party data sources before adding the contacts or other related information in the CRM database.

#4. Limited Visibility

Most businesses depend on several systems for gathering their customer data, where CRM is just one of these sources marketers use in building the customer profiles that help them in targeting.

To access the customer information across, on-premise, cloud and also third-party systems, marketers need to be capable of finding data easily and quickly, regardless of errors or differences in form (like acronyms, nicknames, or misspellings).

The Fix:

  • Find a 360-degree view of your customers using a Converged CRM (like ConvergeHub) for creating more personalized campaigns resulting in better targeting of your customers.
  • Integrate every customer-based data into a unique workflow.
  • No matter where it resides, make data easy to be located in your sales, marketing, and support teams.

Conclusion

Are your campaign rates dropping?
Evaluate the current state of your CRM database with data quality report of your database from professional CRM data cleaning services in your city.

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Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what your biggest takeaway was!

CRM Productivity Hacks For Saving Time And Money Using ConvergeHub

Talking about CRM Productivity Hacks, in all businesses be it large or small, owners are often challenged to maintain the difficult balance between trying to get the maximum out of their workforce while keeping their employees happy. Hence, to make your employees work smarter and not harder, instead of micromanaging, let us try to find other ways to streamline your office process that can make your employees’ job easier.

Talking about CRM Productivity Hacks, in all businesses be it large or small, owners are often challenged to maintain the difficult balance between trying to get the maximum out of their workforce while keeping their employees happy.

Hence, to make your employees work smarter and not harder, instead of micromanaging, let us try to find other ways to streamline your office process that can make your employees’ job easier.

In this article, we will highlight and take a closer look at what many successful companies have already found about increasing productivity that has helped them to grow their bottom-line.

Break Up Big Projects For Better Delegation

Large-scale assignments can be fearsome, especially when a small group of employees is carrying the weight on their shoulders.

However,  to foster a collaborative environment using an all-hands-on deck approach not only helps your employees to spend more time on solving problems but also save time and money for productivity as they can see the big-picture before deciding their next move.

Hence, it is necessary that you must grant your employees true autonomy, by setting small goals and expectations and providing them the liberty to control their budget for getting things done.

It is true that you pay your most experienced and talented employees enhanced salaries for a reason. Therefore, instead of letting them spend their time on minor details of the project, you can rather devise a system whereby less experienced employees can take care of the project’s grunt works.

Prioritize Tasks and Set Up Workflows

Teamwork is capable of expediting a project, but it is also necessary that we must stay organized. Hence, setting up objective benchmarks for all individuals ensures that your team forges ahead seamlessly.

For example, if you are setting up a house, you cannot start working on the framework unless you have laid its foundation. Therefore, you should always plan ahead and chart out all the details of the project and then set up deadlines and schedules that help in keeping your employees accountable and productive.

One best method for doing this is to list task in order of importance and set up weekly and monthly goals to help the most essentials works get done first. If you know what is CRM, you can also use this platform for automatic task creation by using marketing automation which can act as an unique CRM productivity hack for enhancing your project management skills.

What would be a good ironsmith without his tools? Similarly, it is necessary to keep your desk area clean and organized so that you can maximize your productivity.

Providing necessary tools that your project team needs to accomplish their tasks always helps you to get the project completed in time.

Organizing is the key to smooth running of your workplace. While delivering a project as it is important that you must have enough supplies on hand, it is also vital that you should not waste precious operational funds on overstocking items unnecessarily.

Keep the Office Organized to Accelerate Performance

Many project management teams in small business benefits with CRM platform by letting the system monitor their usage. This helps them to understand what and when they need to order their supplies for delivering their projects in time.

For instance, if you are using ConvergeHub CRM for SMB, you can use QuickBooks for accounting, Google Drive for taking care of your file management and DocuSign for facilitating electronic exchanges of contracts and signed documents. All these applications can be easily integrated into the CRM system for better management of your projects.

Put A Check On Work-Life Balance

Lastly, while your business and work may be the central focus in your life, it is even more necessary that you must create the right type of work environment that keeps your employees happy, which is important for your company’s long-term growth.

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Hence, before you hire someone new, be certain that you are getting the maximum output from your existing team, which can be only monitored through an effective organizing software, like a CRM, which helps you to make your office work like a well-oiled machine.