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The first thing in building lead generation system is finding places. Where are located our leads? As we write in the previous part the leads are everywhere around us. We never know who can be interested about our product and services and because of that we must look everywhere around us to find possible leads for our business. Before starting to note the places where leads are you must ask yourself what the business sell and where is persons that want to buy that products and services. For the existing business, it is important to take into considerations the current way of doing things about collecting leads.
What are places for lead generation purposes? First the places are where your possible leads are. But, your business doesn’t need every type of leads. You can have a very big list of leads, but if they don’t buy from your business, or they are not interested in your products and services the purpose of that list will be missed. Your business needs targeted leads. Targeted leads is persons that probably want to buy your products and services, or they have need or interest of your products and services. That is persons that have some type of problem that your business can solve him. Maybe the biggest problem in building lead generation system is to find right persons. Because of that you must brainstormed every possible place where your leads can be.
Brainstorming Places
Preparing for the Brainstorming Possible Places for Lead Generation
This preparation means answering of some crucial questions about the business that will help us in better brainstorming the ideas for possible places:
- What is the type of our business? This is an important question because in many case places where we can find leads for our business depend on the business type. You cannot find leads in the internet marketing forum if your business is a retail store that doesn’t sell products on the web.
- To who serve our business? The second question is about customers that we want our business to serve. If we exactly know our current and potential customers we will know where they are.
- What is the type of customers that we want to serve? The third question is also about customers but this is about desired customers or customers that we want our business to serve. If we want customers that don’t care about prices but only on the quality of products and service, we will target that customers, and they are on different places and with different habits from customers who care only about price.
- What is the type of problems that our business solves? Where are the problems that our business solves, there will be the possible customers.
- Where we will seek for a solution of the problem if we have the same problem? This is the question that will consider our behavior if we have same or similar problems.
- Where are competitors looking for lead generation? The good strategy is to look close to the competitors to find the ways where they generate the leads for their businesses. We can use the same places because it is possible that they find the best and most important places for their lead generation system. We don’t must reinvent the wheel. We can copy and paste success of our competitors.
- How we are finding our current customers? Another possible way is already proven tactics that we use to find our current customers because that already work. Why we don’t improve that?
Now, when we have noted answers of these questions we are on half way to brainstorm possible places where our potential customers are.
Start Brainstorming
Brainstorming is a technique for generating ideas where it is not matter the quality of the idea but only the quantity. The more ideas the better session of brainstorming. In our case, we want to brainstorm as much as more ideas where to find leads for our business. Until now we have some roadmap from answering previous questions, and we can start using this technique.
As first there can be two possible groups of places that we can use as a starting point of our brainstorming session: offline and online places. Online businesses use some of the offline places and offline businesses use some of the online places to generate as much as more leads to generate for their businesses. Because of that for every type of business these two subgroups of places are proper. The free tool that can help with this is Free Mind software. As an example of brainstorming of ideas about places is given in the image bellows:
As you can see we use different colors for different type of ideas that can help us in improvement of the process of brainstorming. This is only as an example. The purpose of this step is to generate as much as more ideas of possible places where you can find leads for your business. Don’t think about the quality of the places, only generate possible places.
Choosing Most Appropriate Places as a Part of Strategy
When we have on the paper or in Free Mind software all of brainstormed ideas the next step is to choose what will be most appropriate for our business. We cannot be on all places in same time, but we must be in the most important places that will give us the best results. Our purpose is to find targeted leads that can be transformed into our customers. It is better to choose only 20% of brainstormed ideas and receive 80% of quality leads then to place your efforts on all places and not be focused on real targeted leads. This is 80/20 rule also known as a Pareto Principle.
In this step, we can evaluate the brainstormed places with three important criteria:
- Potential of the chosen place to generate leads.
- Number of potential leads that will be generated.
- The quality of the possible leads that will be generated.
We can utilize the same Free Mind software to note our thinking with the different markers on it. Now our mind mapping chart will look like this:
As we have our places that can be used for lead generation we can move on another step in building lead generation system to find possible ways how to collect contact details. In the next articles, we will continue with building that system:
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