1. Free directories: directories are perfect for customers that are searching for a particular topic. What’s great about them is that you only have to post once and they are good for long periods of time. It saves a lot of your time when you don’t have to resubmit your information every week or every month. The bad news is most of your traffic won’t come from here. I still feel it is worth it to get your link out there. Just take one day and set it aside for posting to free directories. You won’t need to do it again for at least 6 months.

2. Classified Ads: These are great for work from home businesses. Think about it. Where do people go when they are looking for a job? That’s right-the classifieds. The only downside to classified ads is that you have to resubmit them quite frequently. Once you find which classifieds bring you the most traffic you can concentrate on them and weed the others out. So it is really more time consuming in the beginning, and doesn’t have to be later on when you get the hang of things.

3. Free article submissions/ezines: The best way to inform others about your product or service is to write an article about it. In your authors resource box, you can tell readers about yourself and where they can go to check out your product or service. This is also an excellent way to get free links to your site if you have one. There are a lot of webmasters out there who are looking for good articles they can post on their site. If they post yours, that is another site that is doing the advertising for you. All for free.

4. URL Submissions: Probably the quickest and easiest thing to do to advertise your site. Just type “Free URL submission” in your search engine. When you get a list just enter the URL you are promoting and click submit. That’s it. It only takes a few seconds and your done. Just set a day aside once every 3 months and do this.

5. Forum Posts: Put your product or service website in your signature file when you sign up on some forums. It will be displayed every time you make a post. Try to look for topics that you have some knowledge on, and can give a relevant answer too. Do not spam anyone, you will get kicked off the forum and you will get a bad reputation. Get involved asking and answering questions that pertain to your area of business. Forums are great because once you make a post it stays there forever. It will get moved to the archives eventually, but someone could still find it if they were searching the archives. Yes, there are many people who do.

6. Traffic Exchanges: Probably the most time consuming way to advertise for free, but definately the most effective. Most forums I have visited have said in many posts that they received a lot of their profit from traffic exchanges. If you don’t want to spend the time surfing for credits, you do have the option of buying them. I would look into a program that lets you surf multiple websites at once like crazy browser. There are others and they are free to download. That way you can just spend one hour a day and get all your surfing in at once.

7. News-groups: Become involved in a group that has to do with your kind of business. You can usually mail the group once per day, but I would encourage you to find something fresh to talk about each day. People will tune you out if they see the same message all the time. Remember to never Spam anyone. Only join groups with the same interests as yours. In other words, don’t sign up for a recipe swapping group when you are advertising shaving cream.

Sales lead management is a business activity that tends to be cast aside when the going gets good. When the current revenue stream is flowing great, sales lead management is the farthest thing from people’s mind. Unfortunately, when marketing activities are put on hold the likelihood that they need to be used increases.

One of the most dangerous things that happens to professional service businesses when they start generating lots of revenue, is that sales lead management suffers. Typically what happens is the owner starts to work more and more hours. This results in lots of billable hours. But, an increase in billable hours often comes with a decrease in marketing hours.

Poor Sales Lead Management Is Poor Business Practice

Sales lead management is neglected when there is less time available. Attending networking events and doing follow-ups and sales calls almost disappear. Phone calls from leads remain unreturned for days, even weeks at a time. Slowly, concern for the business diminishes and is replaced with concern about writing invoices.

This lack of sales lead management is a sure sign of future death. You need to be constantly adding new opportunities to your funnel. Going to more networking events, getting new people in your database, and getting more proposals out there.

Not all sales lead management activities, though, need to be this time intensive. Direct mail is an excellent sales lead management technique that can run on autopilot. It is also financially affordable.

Regardless of what type of sales lead management you use, you need to be spending much of your time on getting people into your funnel. Qualifying leads as prospects. Getting the prospects and getting them signed up for work. You never know when you will need to turn those leads into paying customers. It is much easier to do so when they are already part of your marketing efforts.

The Bottom Line on Sales Lead Management

The type of sales lead management technique you use is not the most important issue. The important factor is that you use sales lead management consistently, regardless of where your business is at in terms of sales and revenue volume. When you have hardly any customers, to when you have more customers than you think you can handle, your sales lead management will make a difference in your long term success.

Picture the announcer in the middle of the ring broadcasting – “In this corner, wearing the red shorts we have the challenger, weighing 217 pounds, winner of this year’s collegiate championship, introducing Sales Mindset. Defending the long-standing domination of this event, winner of 35 title bouts, defending heavyweight champion, weighing 224 pounds, in the black shorts, please welcome Sales Training.”

Can you imagine two heavy weights like Sales Training and Sales Mindset squaring off in the ring? It might be one exciting sparing match. Both are critical to ensuring sales professionals get to, and remain at the top of their game. Which is most important?

Sales training is a very broad category that includes everything from sales process, product knowledge, dealing with objections, open and closing skills, prospecting, territory management, listening skills, networking, presentation skills, and funnel administration, to name some of the assorted topics. This is not a short list. The sales rep would ignore any of these items at his or her peril. Many would be correct to think sales training would rank right up there, perhaps being the hands-on bet if you were to wager who would win the match.

Sales training provides knowledge around specific topic areas a sales rep needs to be proficient at their job. There is no point going out to sell, not knowing your product, the process to book the sale, how to deal with client concerns, or where you should be going to find a prospect. Most companies invest heavily in sales training, especially with new sales representatives. They can’t afford to despatch the company’s ambassadors poorly equipped. It is in their best interest to train them well.

Sales mindset is perhaps lesser known, less discussed, and a less visible contender. In fact, many sales forces don’t pay much attention to the psychology of selling. Some sales leadership survived their selling careers being told, “Activity is everything”, and when the activity wasn’t there, the sales manager reached for a bigger stick. Times have changed. Today we have a much better understand of the sales psyche. Focus, confidence and motivation are what I refer to as “below the line” subjects, collectively referred to as mindset. Sales mindset development is a specialized area critical for success.

Sales mindset has evolved from cognitive behavioral psychology. It suggests what we are thinking about today will determine our reality tomorrow. Research has found that successful sales people are more likely to engage in constructive thinking while unsuccessful sales people are prone to think in counter-productive ways. The best sales people are effective thinkers. They think in a way that helps them perform at an optimal level.

So will the red shorts or the black shorts win? In the perfect world, our match would end a draw. Let us assume the recruitment and selection process has filtered for sales competencies. The learning and development teams today are right to begin with sales training. The reps need to understand the company’s sales process, the products, and acquire the requisite selling skills.

Once the sales training is covered, the rep has had an opportunity to practice and become proficient. At this point, it is appropriate to turn development efforts to understanding and leveraging sales mindset. Leaning how to become an effective thinker and align ones thinking with the thinking of top performing sales professionals can lead to new levels of sales success.

Professional athletes and sports teams have long understood and valued the concept of leveraging mindset. In any competitive environment, it can be a challenge to stay optimistic, focused, motivated and productive day in and day out. Once they have mastered the skills of their sport, they continue to practice and practice. They complement their physical activity with their mental activity to reach new heights. The same holds true for sales professionals.

In summary, there really isn’t a winner or a loser here. It is more a question of sequencing. It is safe to suggest the new sales representative begin with sales training, and once the basic activities and competencies are mastered, they move onto developing their sales mindset.

Sales training and sales mindset can combine to be powerful allies in sales success.

Completely grasp the power of the Best Buyer Concept and you will double your sales within the next twelve months. The concept is easy to understand, yet powerful: There’s always a smaller number of ideal buyers, compared to all the possible buyers, so ideal buyers are cheaper to market to and yet bring greater rewards.

A magazine used this strategy to double sales in 15 months flat. Here’s what they did:

They took a database of 2200 advertisers and sent promo-pieces to them each month. After learning this
strategy, they did an analysis and found that 167 of those 2200 advertisers bought 95% of the advertising in their competitor’s magazine.

This concept is called “The Dream 100 Sell,” a concept where you go after your “Dream” prospects with a vengeance. This magazine sent the 167 (best buyers) a letter every two weeks and called them four times per month.

Since these were the biggest buyers, the first four months of intensive marketing and selling brought no actual reward. In the fifth month, only ONE of these Dream clients bought advertising in the magazine.

In the sixth month, 28 of the 167 largest advertisers in the country came into the magazine all at once.
And since these are the biggest advertisers, they don’t take quarter pages and fractional ads, they take full pages and full color spreads. These 28 advertisers alone, were enough to double the sales over the previous year. The magazine went from number 15 in the industry to number one in just over a year.

Lesson learned: Market to your best buyers

Now you’re probably thinking to yourself, who are my best buyers? If you sell to the business-to-consumer market, chances are, your best buyers live in the best neighborhoods.If you are a dentist, accountant, chiropractor, R.E. Broker, financial advisor, restaurant, or even a MLM professional you should consistently go after the folks who live in the best neighborhoods.

They are the wealthiest buyers who have the money and the greatest sphere of influence. If you send them an offer every single month without fail, within a year, you’ll have a great reputation among the very wealthy.

If you sell to the business-to-business market, it’s usually fairly clear that your best buyers are the biggest companies. So what are you doing, every other week, no matter what, to let these companies know who you are?

There’s no one you can’t get to as long as you constantly market to them, especially after they say they’re not interested. People will not only begin to respect your perseverance, they will actually begin to feel obligated.

This doesn’t happen right away, but even the most hard-bitten and cynical executive or prospect begins to respect you when you refuse to give up. The publication I mentioned earlier went on to double sales two more years in a row. They consistently marketed to the best buyers and much more aggressively than they did to the rest of the buyers.

A company selling to manufacturer’s used this strategy to target the 100 biggest manufacturers in the country. For the first three months no one responded to any of the calling or phoning.

But after three months executives started saying: “I just have to meet you. I’ve never had anyone continue to call me so many times after I said no.” Within 6 months they had gotten in to
see 54% of those they targeted.

The secret is to NEVER give up.

Just keep going after those companies again and again. Or if you sell to consumers, commit to sending a promotional piece every single month to those wealthy neighborhoods. Eventually, all the wealthy people in your area will know exactly who you are.

Now the question is: Who are your DREAM prospects and how committed are you to getting them as clients?

When we make a sale, or take one step closer to meeting our goal, we are overcome with a felling of achievement which motivates us to sell more.

I’m sure that anybody who is reading this article has been in the situation where they may have been given unobtainable goals from one of their bosses, sales manager’s, or some higher up somewhere in the company.

When goals are given that are unrealistic, the mission is doomed from the beginning. It immediately gives a feeling of despair to the sales team, which can be devastating to morale.

The sales team will do their duty and work as hard as they can to obtain the goals, but when they fall short, they will have feelings of failure, and will be reluctant to move on.

Simply stated, unrealistic goals, take the fun out of selling.

A personal story . . .

During my years in the banking industry, I managed a sales team in a small branch inside of a grocery store. This is what is known as In-store banking. It was estimated that seven thousand people came through the grocery store where my branch was located on a weekly basis.

With that statistic, my sales team was given a goal of opening up six checking accounts per day, among other things.

This would be a monthly goal of one hundred and eighty checking accounts per month. To me and my team, this was highly unrealistic.

Then, In-store banking was brand new to the banking industry, and these goals were being handed down by people who never once stepped foot in an in-store branch.

Please understand, I am not bitter about this, I am just stating the facts, and believe this to be an on going problem with companies.

This problem works both ways. Sometimes the goals being handed down are not enough, and a sales team will fall short of what their potential could be.

Needless to say, my sales team never met their daily, weekly, or monthly goals. We did however, fight the good fight and manage to hold our own. But morale was never what it should have been.

Every six months my team and I would attend the semiannual sales rally, where we would sit and watch as the other branches so proudly accepted their awards for meeting their goals. It pained me to watch my team walk away empty handed knowing that they worked so hard.

My point is, when goals are being set, they need to be realistic and obtainable. The more you or your team reach their goal the more motivated they will be.

Once you are reaching your goal at a steady pace, challenge yourself or your team, and raise the bar. Challenge them to reach higher on a daily basis

Keep in mind, when you raise the bar, keep this new goal realistic as well, you don’t want to become over confident and put your goals out of reach.

One last thing . . .

The goals that are being set, should be put in place by a person or people who know you, your staff, and your demographics. Not by somebody in an ivory tower.

If they are not being put into place by the appropriate people, suggest this idea to someone in your organization that you can trust.

This article may be reproduced by anyone at any time, as long as the authors name and reference links are kept in tact and active.