“There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza,
There’s a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, a hole…”
Most lead generation strategies have a hole in them. Activity = results. But no more. You make a cold call, you get a response or you don’t. You do a mailshot, you get a response or you don’t. You go to a networking meeting, you meet people…
It’s the way many were taught to generate leads and it’s one of the reasons why so many salespeople experience the dreaded “sales roller-coaster.” They work hard to generate leads but then they stop generating leads to work on those leads and create an inevitable drop off in activity and therefore new leads.
Most traditional sales prospecting and lead generation techniques are not evergreen. But what if you added a few evergreen lead generation strategies to your mix?
“Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, dear Henry,
Then mend it, dear Henry, dear Henry, mend it!”
When I am talking at sales conferences I talk about how you cannot afford to be a one-trick-pony. You need more than one lead generation strategy to your bow. You need a multi-faceted approach. And some of those strategies need to be evergreen.
What is evergreen lead generation?
Evergreen lead generation is creating collateral or campaigns that carry on creating leads for your business for days, weeks, months and years after you create them without requiring any more work or input from you.
Traditional lead generation still has a place and is still an important part of the mix but if you don’t have any evergreen strategies in your mix then you’re selling yourself short.
To get my latest articles straight to your inbox as I write them, join my success newsletter free by following this link.
Hi Gavin,
As Sales Director for my company, your postive and informative content is precisely what I need to continue to take my business forward. I wish to extend my personal thanks for your time and effort to “pay it forward”, by giving such valuable and rewarding advice.
Congratulations on your little daughter and the unique bond you are building. Daddys are the most important thing in a girls life (I have two beautiful daughters) and on the flip side, they become the jewel in your own life crown.
I look forward to spending more time on your site and absorbing the content from previous offerings.
Steve.
Steve. Glad that you enjoy the posts. I am going to be adding a lot more and also rewriting some of the older ones over the coming weeks and I will also be starting a podcast so look out for that in the newsletter and here on the blog.
Thanks for the congratulations too. I know what you mean about Daddies and their daughters. Have a great weekend.
Cheers
Gavin
Hi Gavin
You are so right in what you say
A lot of recruitment and staffing firms are now waking up to this concept and are using evergreen lead generation tools such as
1. LinkedIn PPC
2. Google PPC
3. Automated email marketing
4. Google Remarketing
5. Amazon is also proving highly successful as well
6. There are now Evergreen webinars, whereby you record a webinar and then offer it to your target audience; they can then watch it at a time that is convenient to them. Having used it ourselves we are now making sales over the weekend on auto pilot
Thanks for sharing some informative stuff Gavin…
Cheers Terry. Some great ideas and pointers for any industry, not just recruitment. A lot more to come on this subject from me over the next few weeks as it is an area that most salespeople and businesses are not doing enough of. This is not a case of either / or with current strategies and tactics but AND. When you couple evergreen strategies with standard strategies the end result is far greater than the component parts.
Here’s an example Terry… a blog post on cold calling that I have just revamped to make it as relevant today as it was when I wrote it.
It’s the short term versus the long term debate; sales versus marketing. Sales teams have to follow up every good lead they get before they go cold, meaning lead nurturing can get pushed to the back burner. But when your good leads are done you’ve dug this whole for yourself that takes forever to get out of. But if you spend too long nurturing you might miss the chance to strike when the iron is hot!
Joe. Thanks for dropping by and taking the time to comment. You’re right, of course… many sales and business people find themselves buried up to the neck in holes that they dug themselves having first bought the spade to dig it with, reserved the right to dig in that spot and then fought off competition to do so!
Balancing how you spend your time as a salesperson is often one of the key differentials between good salespeople and great ones. And one of the problems often stems from the narrow definitions of sales and marketing that people seem attached to and how you perceive these two functions. Long-term, evergreen, lead-generation should be an objective of every salesperson.
When you look at Stephen Covey’s Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People what you are talking about is balancing working on important non-urgent tasks versus important and urgent tasks. Far too many salespeople spend far too much time chasing down leads they are never going to close and forget to put in place systems that will create more leads. And even those who do put systems in place often forget evergreen lead generation methods, choosing instead to invest their energy in what they perceive are tasks that will create a quicker return on their efforts.