20 May 08 What are Automated Leads… and How Do I Create a Lead Gen System

I recently was talking to a prospect about his business. I love talking to folks about their businesses because I get learn about their successes and their failures. This prospect is a financial planner so we talked about how he found new customers and he admitted that he had no organized way to gather, store and nurture new leads. (I was not surprised because many business owners don’t have a system). So I asked him how he found new customers. His response “By luck”.

Now in my mind this was crazy but he went on to explain that his business had thrived for years with this tactic and until recently he had not thought about changing it. We talked further and I suggested he may want to consider creating an automated lead gen system that finds, stores and nurtures clients until they are ready to buy. Here is my non technical criteria for creating a system

Easily implemented across the entire sales process. Sales has many steps and any system created needs to integrate and be easily implemented in every step of the process. Actually any system must seamless integrate and not imped the sales process.
Automated. Any system must allow for the following steps to be done and must be completely automated including

Find new leads. - The system automatically find new leads once it’s created using your existing advertising methods

Store - All leads and lead data needs to be stored in an easily accessible way.

Nurture - Sales and Marketing is a process. The process starts by gathering leads but those leads have to be nurtured basically your system needs to automatically communicate with your leads and move them down the buying cycle.

Easily added on to whatever you’re doing now - the system you create must easily integrate into your existing systems, so there is no (or little) disruption in your business.

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20 May 08 What is Twitter and how can you use it for Business

I just recently got the Twitter bug (http://www.twitter.com/dwightmiller) and I’ve had many people ask how Twitter works and what’s it’s purpose. To help explain Twitter, I found this video and in my next post I’ll tell you if I’ve found any use for it in business.