Lead generation
Lead generation is the process of identifying potential customers and capturing enough contact detail to start a sales conversation. It comes before qualification, scoring and nurturing, and produces the raw material the rest of the sales process works on.
Lead generation is the process of identifying potential customers and capturing enough contact detail to start a sales conversation. It sits before qualification, scoring and nurturing, and it produces the raw material those steps work on. A lead at this stage is only an identified contact with some sign of interest; whether they are a fit, and whether they are buying this year, is not yet known.
Where trade and distribution leads actually come from
For a promotional merchandise distributor or an AV integrator, the channel mix looks very little like the one described in general marketing writing. The largest sources are usually already in the business:
- Repeat and lapsed accounts. A customer who ordered a branded kit for one campaign and has not been contacted since is a warmer lead than any new name, and the list is already sitting in the order history.
- Referrals from customers and from non-competing suppliers - the installer who works alongside you on site, the print supplier who does not decorate.
- Inbound enquiries against a specific product or job type, which arrive by phone and email as often as by web form and are the ones most often lost before anyone records them.
- Tender portals and framework notices, for public sector and larger private work, where the lead is a published opportunity rather than a person.
- Trade shows and sector events, which produce a burst of contacts whose value depends almost entirely on how fast they are followed up.
Whatever the mix, the single measurement that makes it improvable is recording the source on every lead at the moment it arrives, then reading it back against won work rather than against lead volume. A channel that produces many enquiries and few orders is a cost, and it will look like a success on any report that counts leads.
Capture the source at the point of entry
Record how each new lead found you when it arrives, not later. Source data added retrospectively is reconstructed from memory and is usually wrong, and it is the one field that decides where next year's effort goes.
What happens to a lead next
Generation only creates the contact. Lead qualification decides whether the enquiry is worth pricing, which in trade usually means checking the quantity, the required date and whether the specification is one you can actually source. Lead scoring ranks the ones that survive so the quoting time goes to the right ones, since a detailed quotation costs hours of somebody's day.
Zigaflow's leads hold the enquiry, its source and its conversation history on the record that later becomes the quotation, so nothing has to be re-entered when the enquiry turns into a priced job.