6 Ideas to Get More Sales Leads in Q4

The final three months of the year are here and you're probably feeling the pressure to finish Q4 on a high. Sales are the ultimate measure of those efforts, but leads are right behind... the more you have in the pipeline, the more opportunities to add to your bottom line! So what can you do as the mad holiday rush approaches, where lead generation typically takes a back seat to handling demand and customer service? We've already covered holiday marketing tips in the past, so today we'll focus on quick tips to get more sales leads, even when time isn't on your side.

6 Tips to Get More Sales Leads in Q4

When you need to get your sales pipeline flowing again, these six areas should be your first focus:  

Expand Industry Referrals

One of the quickest ways to get more sales leads is, of course, to pay for them. Some referral sources are far more direct and cost-effective than others, however, so it's important to pick your channels carefully. This is especially true when you're in a hurry to fill your sales funnel. If you haven't experimented with online directories in your industry, now is the time to try them out. Well targeted ads in web spaces that your prospective customers frequent are one of the quickest ways to jump the queue and find qualified leads. Start off with a low spend across multiple referral sites, utilizing either promoted listings or display ads, and review the quality of leads generated after a few weeks. From there, you can pick the most successful platforms and fine-tune your listings there to make the most of your ad spend.  

Expand Your Calls to Action

It's not always possible to spend more money on lead generation, especially at the end of the year when your marketing budget might be running low. When that's the case, it's time to optimize what you already have to work with. The calls to action (CTA) on your site, social media, and marketing materials, are the most immediate elements you can adjust to experiment and find more sales leads. These can be links, buttons, phone numbers, contact forms, e-mail subscription pop-ups, website URLs, or anything else that tells the customer how to take the next step on their purchase journey. Try adjusting the way you phrase these elements first, to see how your customers respond to different words. From there, you can play with positioning, repetition, colors, and anything else that you think might make a CTA more appealing. For more ideas, check out these ideas to upgrade your CTAs.  

Ask Your 10 Best Customers for an Introduction

Even with all of the digital channels and marketing tools available to us nowadays, most business owners will tell you that word-of-mouth referrals remain one of their top sources of new business. That's because, as consumers, we trust personal recommendations more than anything else. Knowing this, it's surprising how long some businesses go before calling on their best customers to help generate more sales leads. No-one phrases it that way, of course, but every company should know its top ten customers and we should all be confident enough to ask them for a helping hand. You can pull your list of 10 to 20 repeat customers right now, based on average spend or how often they visit. Take this list and get together with your marketing team to think about the best way to engage them as brand advocates. It could be asking for reviews on prominent sites like Yelp and Google, sharing your organization on social media, or simply calling them to see if they can facilitate an introduction. Whatever you choose, having a third-party promote your work simply because they love what you do is quick and has no real downside!  

Make Contact Points More Memorable

In a similar vein as calls to action, your contact points - website address, phone number(s), and social media URLs - need to be easy to recall. While your site URL is often set in stone, there are ways to enhance your phone number and social media with vanity numbers and vanity URLs. First, take an audit of all your social media platforms and make sure you've claimed the custom URL available on all that offer it. From there, you can enhance your marketing materials by adding the icon of the social network and simply adding a forward slash and the vanity name after it. This makes it easier for customers to follow up, connect with your company, and establish a new prospect online, even when your ads are offline or on-the-go. The same idea applies to a more memorable number, although the results are quicker because most people have a mobile device now. That ability to call at the next available moment, combined with a number they can easily remember, gets more leads into your pipeline and helps to prevents prospect loss to competitors when a potential customer goes to Google your contact details. [search-tag]  

Work With Others to Reach a New Audience

When you feel like your own marketing reach has come as far as it can without new investment or initiatives, it might be time to tap into the networks that others have built. Cross promotion and joint marketing efforts are effective ways to access new audiences without committing to a completely new direction. Find individuals and businesses whose services and products complement your own. By highlighting the common interests of your audiences, you can come up with ideas that will be valuable to each of them and both reach new sets of consumers who might not previously have considered your services. Common examples of cross-marketing to get more sales leads include:

• Exchanging guest blog articles,
• Holding a joint interview or panel to create live streaming content and information videos,
• Writing jointly-branded how-to guides and white papers,
• Offer a discounted set of services for existing customers of those you partner with.

 

Attend More Events

Although this requires a personal presence, be it yourself or a member of your sales team, attending more industry and networking events is undeniably an immediate boost to your lead generation activities. Adding more events to your sales calendar doesn't have to cost a lot, either. While there are trade shows and industry events that have high prices to attend, you might make just as valuable connections at smaller networking sessions. You could even put on your own event, especially as the holidays approach, and use the host status to simultaneously connect with new faces and pull existing prospects further down your sales pipeline. If it's been a while, consider these 12 event networking tips to prepare for your next session. Even with less than a quarter of the year remaining and the holidays looming large, there's still time to get more sales leads into your Q4 funnel. Pick the quickest ideas above that you can act upon and get to work. You'll be pleasantly surprised how many potential new customers you can uncover as a result!