Generating profitable business leads is time-consuming work. From collecting data to verifying contact information, creating a solid database consisting of people who are genuinely interested in purchasing your goods and services requires patience and experience. So when hiring a VA to help you increase your flow of business leads, it’s important to find a person with brilliant people skills and extensive Internet research experience.
Common Business Lead Generation Tasks
Chances are, you utilize various methods for gathering business leads already – from online surveys and direct mail to website landing pages and cold calling, and you know full well that handling every aspect of lead generation can easily be a full-time job in itself. So instead of trying to manage all of these tasks yourself, why not hire a VA to do most of the leg work for you?
An experienced VA can manage your email lists, respond to comments and queries on your social media pages, create marketing materials and send them out, and contact prospective clients and customers directly by email and/or phone.
To make business lead generation even easier for your VA, create a list of specific tasks with deadlines or timelines. For example, dedicate three days per month to cold calling customers. Ask your VA to monitor social media and other online content at the beginning of each day to ensure a quick response. Send email correspondence once a week. Creating a well-defined lead generation schedule helps you and your VA maintain a positive relationship with new and existing clients/customers, now and into the future.
Research New Leads
What’s the point of having a hundred new leads if most of them don’t result in new business? Before spending time and money courting potential clients and customers, ask your VA to conduct online research to determine how interested they are in potentially purchasing goods and services.
Knowing more about a lead – such as the industry or company they work for, rank within a company, and known business associates can usually tell you if the lead is worth pursuing, or not.
Build a Contact Database
To make regular contact with clients and customers as easy as possible, ask your VA to build a lead contact database complete with full names, phone numbers, email addresses, business websites, and even physical business addresses. Your VA can do the same with your email lists, which can be great for sending mass emails in a more personalized way.
As additional leads come in, your VA can simply update these databases. Your VA can also go through the database periodically to delete or update contact information, as necessary.
Create Marketing Materials
In addition to following up on leads that come from your website, social media pages, or from face-to-face meetings and other interactions, your VA can also help create marketing materials, edit journal articles, post blog entries, and update webpages to generate interest in your business.
Depending on the specific skills and experience your VA has, they may even be able to design webpages or graphics, create business apps and offer suggestions for other ways to generate leads.
Maintain Regular Contact with Your Leads
It’s important to maintain regular contact with viable leads so your business remains at the forefront of their thoughts whenever actively considering your area of expertise. Create a quarterly marketing and communication plan for your VA to follow so you can keep these valuable business relationships intact. A combination of email, phone, and direct mail marketing on a quarterly basis is typically more than enough to keep new and existing clients and customers aware of your business.
For most online businesses though, a sequential “stacking” or “stacked” email loyalty campaign along with monthly newsletters and more random personal/promotional emails does the job of maintaining a close connection with your leads quite well too, and once again a VA with the right skills can set this all up for you.
