Remember that time one of your clients bought a complete LiDAR remote sensing system on the spur of the moment? That’s right, they didn’t. BECAUSE NO ONE DOES THAT.
Here in the geo-space, people think pretty damn carefully about the technology they’re going to invest in. It takes time to make a decision. A sales cycle can be looooong. This means that you are very, very rarely pushing the hard sell. Most of the time, you’re generating and nurturing leads, instead.
Considering how much time and effort you need to put into every prospective client to bring them to a sale, you obviously want to avoid adding any duds into the pool. The last thing you want is to find is that you’ve been expending the same amount of energy impressing someone from a company that was, frankly, never going to become a client as you have with someone whose signature-hand is practically hanging over the dotted line from the outset.
To make sure you’re focusing your sales pitch on the right places, and aren’t losing anyone along the way, here are 10 steps to help you absolutely nail your lead generation.
Plot the Customer Journey
First, figure out where and when your ideal customers are likely to come across your brand. What Google searches bring them onto your site? What other platforms do they use to get their information? What logical next questions will they ask at every step, and how will you guide them to the next stepping stone, all the way to a sale?
Turn Your Website into a Honey Trap
You and your team can’t control *every* interaction people have with your brand. Often, people want to have a good old nose through your site and make up their minds about you, without you there to guide them.
That’s why it’s crucial your site represents you properly when you’re not there. Avoid the habit that plagues our industry to fill your site with technical jargon and vague descriptions – talk like a real human instead! Anyone reading your site should get exactly what you do, straight away, without confusion.
Make Your Expectations Clear
That’s the passive stuff covered… but in Geospatial, building personal relationships with your customer base is key. This means that your sales and marketing staff need to know EXACTLY what you want from them. They need to know what success looks like at every step, and they need to be energised and motivated to go above and beyond in building and maintaining relationships with new leads.
Foster Collaboration, Not Competition
Here’s where working in a slow-burn field like geospatial diverges from many other sales roles: you are not pitting your sales team against each other. Considering how long it takes to land a new client, and how much work you may need to do to get there, multiple team members might need to work together to get there. Fostering an environment where people are precious about their leads, refuse to help each other without getting credit, or feel pressured to abandon a long-term goal to bring in a less valuable client is all deeply counter-productive, I’m afraid.
Don’t Allow Shortcuts
On a similar note, you need to encourage your sales team to take the long view with each lead, instead of pushing straight for a sale.
Showing a potential client that you are a fountain of wisdom when it comes to their business area is much more effective than pressuring them to choose fast. Make sure your team has plenty of valuable content to hand, like eBooks or webinars, for example, that they can use to follow up with leads to answer questions and keep them interested, rather than simply chasing them for a decision in every email!
Weed Out the Bad Apples
It sounds harsh, but if you have people in your sales team that refuse to play nice – that pressure clients, use underhand tactics to steal colleagues’ leads or thunder, refuse to collaborate, aren’t taking steps to hit their targets, etc., then you NEED to weed them out. A few bad apples like these can suck the lifeblood out of the whole team.
These six steps are nearly everything you needs to overhaul your lead generation efforts… but there’s one more very important factor here: who you partner with. It is SO important that you work with a marketing company that gets you, your industry, and the specific challenges and opportunities that come with working in Geospatial. Get that right and before long you’ll start reaping in the profits.
Ready to dive right in? Give Elaine a call on +44 (0) 7825 517 850 for an in-depth chat about your geospatial lead generation strategy today.