Sales lead – what is it and how to obtain it?

What is a sales lead?

It can be an individual or a company, and acquiring it – although it does not guarantee a sale – significantly increases the chance of finalizing the transaction.

You can also say that a sales lead is a sales opportunity – a potential customer has left their contact details (e.g. name and surname, company name, e-mail or website address) on your website, expressing their interest in your products or services. However, they are not yet ready to take advantage of the offer. It depends on your actions and the cooperation proposals you offer the lead whether they will ultimately become your customer.

The key to success, and therefore sales, is the quality of the lead. It determines the level of interest in your offer and the higher it is, the higher the chances of finalizing the transaction. In this context, we often talk about:

• hot leads, i.e. potential customers who are enthusiastic about your offer and are initially interested in it – in their case, you cannot wait and it is worth passing the leads on to sales representatives who will start the sales process;
• warm leads, i.e. people or companies who follow you on social media, are your target and show interest in your offer in various ways, but are not yet ready to buy – this is the most demanding group that you need to fight for in the right way;
• cold leads, i.e. those who are not interested in your offer at the moment and a sales attempt will fail in 99% of cases – this does not mean, however, that they will not become potential customers in the future, which is why it is also worth taking care of such leads.

How to recognize which lead shows sales potential?

Of course, the clearest signal is given by potential customers who have used the newsletter or filled out the contact form on your website – they are the most important group of leads.

In addition to the most obvious leads, there will also be many that need to be “picked out” from a large number of people or companies potentially interested in your offer. To do this, it is worth observing the behavior of leads on the website (how many times they visited it, what products they viewed or how much time they spent on the website), as well as using modern systems to automate sales processes.

How to acquire sales leads?

In the era of the Internet, there are many ways to acquire sales leads. Some of them will be more effective, others less so – a lot depends on the specifics of your industry or the type of offer you have. The most popular methods of generating leads include:

• website positioning, thanks to which a potential customer will come to you directly from the Google search engine – this method requires time and patience, but is extremely profitable, because thanks to it your website will be in high positions in search results;
• Google Ads, i.e. traffic to the website generated from paid search results – it differs from positioning in that you pay for your website (along with an advertisement) to appear at the top of Google results;
• remarketing, aimed at people who have previously visited your website but did not decide to convert – thanks to appropriate actions, your website’s advertisement will be displayed to the user when they browse other websites;
• mailing, i.e. presenting an offer to potential customers by sending them an email – it is not without reason that building or acquiring mailing databases is so popular today;
• content marketing, i.e. encouraging a potential customer to use the offer with attractive content – for this purpose you can use specialist guides, reports, e-books or sales texts that are placed directly on your website.

Of course, that’s not all – if you want to acquire leads, it is also worth using the promotion of the company in social media, Facebook ads, video materials published e.g. on YouTube, etc.

The methods you choose and how you promote your offer will be crucial in the context of future sales.