Lead Generation

In these modern days information is available to us in abundance and by many various sources. When a customer needs something, they rely on search engines to show them where to get it. Via LinkedIn they get a clear insight of what we, companies, are up to these days, our Facebook pages shows them the more human side of our businesses and Twitter gives them daily, short and clear messages. Our products and services and perhaps even our going rates can be found on our websites. If that still does not provide them with adequate answers they will find a contact page and/or email addresses for a more personal solution.

Therefore, most professionals believe that calling new prospects, or cold calling if you prefer, is something of the past. They say that in this day and age, customers know where to find you and will find you all by themselves and that you don’t need to bother them with telemarketing or cold calling but make no difference between the two. They propose different alternatives which salespeople can use to generate leads. We know all of them and use quite a few ourselves. For instance:  

• The right people are targeted on social media, as in users who fit our buyer profile.
• We share interesting content to build up a personal following, which gives us a natural flow of prospects to our services.
• We blog.
• We make introduction movies about our products.
• We track our clients and we notice that they reward our services by referring us to other companies.

We agree to a certain point. We see telemarketing as randomly calling everybody and anybody, without even knowing, who you are calling. This is in no way something we promote! But we at A-Knowledge tend to disagree that cold calling is the same as telemarketing.

We believe that with the right research, we can make every call count, by direct human contact followed by a more detailed overview on mail. Always relevant and uber-informed, we gain permission to follow-up with helpful information. Our e-mail will not be deleted together with the 1000 others. Our prospects know of and are awaiting this email. Our prospects had time to ask their more detailed questions. We help them see in which individual part of their own processes and/or services we could be helpful. And maybe sometimes we see that we are not the right choice for them, but that as well is a plus for us, we didn’t waste our time nor the customer’s. And maybe they will tell a colleague about us.

So, for us human contact is always the better choice! And we will not stop to call the world and let them know we are out there. Talk to you soon?