How to Get Cheap Sales Leads and What to do With Them

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Today I would like to expand on the information concerning hiring telemarketers which was published yesterday.  Please make sure you read that article before continuing; it contains a lot of helpful information.  Let’s further discuss hiring and managing a telemarketer to generate inexpensive sales leads.  Also, I’d like to help you make the best use of the leads which you get.

To be most productive in this endeavor, you must have a very specific strategy.  I highly recommend you either use a survey idea to go after small business owners in general, or have a very specific idea which goes after a specific vertical.

For instance, you may have a survey which targets pizza shop owners.  Your survey might be similar to the following:

“I’m starting to work on the Poynt terminal and will probably offer it in the near future.  It has some very unique value propositions.  Before I begin selling it, I want to get ideas from you as a pizza shop owner to know whether Poynt would be a good solution for pizza shops.  Could you spare five minutes for me?  I’m developing my local, small business just as you are and want to get some advice from you concerning this venture.”

Have your telemarketer call with this idea and say, “Hey, I’m calling from the office of James Shepherd.  We have a local business here in town which offers a lot of technology solutions.  James is looking for some local pizza shop owners to sit down for a very quick survey with about five questions.  He is trying to decide if this particular solution is a good fit for the market place before we start carrying it.”  Using this idea will get the low-cost leads which you need to build your business.

As I mentioned yesterday, you can expect to pay a telemarketer $25 to $50 per lead, depending on how good your strategy is and how easy the pitch is going to be to get a lead.  You want to maximize the number of leads.  In addition to the pay per appointment, you might also pay one to three dollars for every email address collected by the telemarketer.

If you took my suggestion to do several hours of calling yourself before hiring a telemarketer, you probably found there are people who will say “no” in spite of an excellent presentation on the part of the caller.  However, other than the all-important rebuttal which must be done in these cases, try to collect an email address to give you an inroad for future use.  Use the phrase “at least” in a pitch before closing the conversation.  “Let me at least do this for you, Mr. Jones.  May I just email some free information about the Poynt terminal (or whatever you’re pitching)?”  Often permission will be granted.  Then your telemarketer will say, “Great!  What is your email address?”  He/she will write that down and get an extra one to three dollars.  This is a super cheap sales lead!

Now, are you wondering what benefit that email address offers you?  There are two extremely powerful things to do with it.

1. First, send an introductory email which might say, “My name is James Shepherd. I just want to personally thank you for spending a few minutes on the phone with my assistant, so and so, today.  (Refer to your telemarketer as your assistant.)  I really appreciate that and am going to send you valuable information as it becomes available.”  Then put that prospect into a weekly email drip marketing campaign.  Enter the email address into Mail Chimp at mailchimp.com.  You can have 2,000 subscribers for free.  They offer great templates which look very professional.  Send your weekly email from this site.  Send business owners a quick update about your business and/or the Poynt terminal with a clear call to action.  The call to action might be in the form of a “click here to contact me or reply to this email, etc.”
2. Use the email addresses on Facebook. Here are two productive actions you can take using that platform.

• Do a custom audience. You can import your Mail Chimp list into Facebook.  Google “Facebook Mailchimp custom audience” to get instructions.  Doing this is very simple.  After importing the address as a custom audience, you can show an ad that has the Poynt terminal on it.  By doing this, the business owner who has given you an email address can see the same offer again literally the next day.  That will help you nurture those leads.  Then your email will be another point of contact which will begin to familiarize the business owner with you.

• Another quick tip for using Facebook is to create a mirrored audience. If you have some money to spend and want to invest to get leads, create a nice landing page.  Then you can ask Facebook, “find me other people like these other 100 email addresses that I have.”  Facebook will be able to do that!

So, there you have some strategies and ideas for you to get cheap sales leads from a telemarketer and what to do with them.  Nurture them on Facebook.  Nurture them with email marketing.  Then walk in their door or call them and say, “Hey, I just wanted to talk to you directly because I know you’ve been seeing our Facebook stuff, and I’m sure you’ve been seeing our emails.”  That will really grab their attention and allow you to get cheap leads, close those leads, and make them into sales.

My name is James Shepherd.  I hope you got some value from today’s article.

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