Resources

The wealth of information available to us all in the modern digital world can be overwhelming. If you are given the task to research potential customers or to grow your client base, it can feel difficult to know where to begin. Here are some ideas of potential sources of sales leads for you to start qualifying and eventually targeting, with a view to hopefully increasing your commercial success.

Sales Leads from Press Articles

By monitoring press articles, you can often find the name of companies in your industry that may be of interest to you. It may be news about investment or a piece of advertorial where a company writes in a publication about their products or services. These articles may sometimes contain the names of commercial members of staff who may be a good fit for you as a sales lead.

Sales Leads from Social Media

Social media provides a huge amount of information to help uncover sales leads. Depending on your industry or region, you should think about where relevant people spend their time online. This may be Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram or any other social channels.

Once you’ve decided where best to use your time, create a profile on each selected channel and start to build your network there. Ensure that your presence adds value to the network of people you are trying to connect with. You can do this by providing comments of value, writing useful guides or sharing tips on how to solve problems that may resonate with your desired buyer.

Sales Leads from Referrals

Your existing business network is one of the best sources of new sales leads and prospects. If you have a good relationship with a longstanding client, you could ask them if they know of anyone who may be looking for help or advice in your area of expertise. This could then provide a ‘warm’ introduction to that person, which is often a very powerful way to start a sales dialogue. It’s worth bearing in mind that sometimes it is not appropriate to ask customers for referrals to others, as they may be their competition in some areas of business activity! As always, common sense must be used, and it all depends on the type of relationship you have with that client. What is appropriate for some may not be suitable for others – use your judgment.

The chances are that a polite question along with an offer to reciprocate may open many doors for you commercially and connect you with more sales leads.

Sales Leads from Direct Enquiries

The gold standard of sales leads would be a direct enquiry from an interested person. They may have seen your presence on social media or visited your website and then got in touch afterwards.

These leads are ‘warm’ and can be very appealing. However, time must be taken to qualify and grade these leads like any other, in order to ensure that you are not wasting your time or the time of your prospect – they must have a clear need and demand for your help.

Sales Leads from External Information Sources

There are some companies who specialise in providing commercially useful information to others. This can be a really good source of sales leads to turbocharge your commercial efforts. However, caution should be exercised to make sure that the data is pre-qualified and cleansed as much as possible. Many companies have purchased ‘database’-style lists of contacts only to find that many individuals or companies listed are no longer at the company or in business! The quality and accuracy of leads is more important than their quantity, so exercise due diligence in researching any company from which you are considering purchasing sales leads.

It is also vital to have a plan for following up on external information, as the quantities involved can easily be overwhelming for commercial staff, making it hard for them to know where to start.

At Protel, our sales leads take the form of meticulously researched and curated investment opportunities, tracking real capex plans of hundreds of companies in the main process manufacturing sectors. As such, much of the burden of qualification and cleansing is removed – our industry experts track the projects through their life cycle to ensure you know the right time to get involved, when the demand is highest, depending on your product or service. Further, we check the involvement of all parties in a project to make sure you know who to contact and their role in the project in question.

Remember, identifying a lead is only the start of the process. Leads must be qualified, graded and targeted to translate into new orders for your business. Not all sales leads are created equal, so make sure you have a diverse range of high-quality information coming into your sales pipeline and have a clear plan and strategy to target and convert that information into prospects and potentially new sales.

At Protel, we help our clients to develop a highly targeted and effective sales strategy to support their business goals. Get in touch to find out how our curated capex project sales leads can boost your sales pipeline and help you achieve your commercial targets.

A project sales lead is a piece of information that a business development or sales person can use to target and try to win new business with an existing or a new contact. This could be as simple as a name and an email address, or in the case of Protel, a full project report including key decision makers and a detailed scope of supply.

This sales lead could be time based and may expire after a certain amount of time or may be more relationship based, where work is done to secure a long-term supplier relationship with a new or existing company.

MyProtel is our project search engine system where all of Protel Projects’ subscriber information is accessed. It has many functions to help busy process industry professionals target the best opportunities to win new business by accessing relevant project sales leads. You can read more information on the MyProtel page by clicking here.

At Protel Projects, we often start covering capex project schemes, such as new build manufacturing facilities, very early in their project life-cycle. This means it is important to track the changes in each project’s status, scope and personnel over the course of its concept, planning and implementation. The only way to time an initial approach correctly is to keep up with the latest updates on any capex project. A well-timed initial approach will mean a higher chance of success in securing new business.

Protel Projects reports on capex projects the main process manufacturing sectors. This includes:

• Food
• Drink
• Pharmaceutical, Life Sciences, Biotech
• Chemical
• Energy
• Gas

For a full description of what is included in our coverage you can head to our sectors page.

At Protel Projects, we provide the details of many different types of project contacts who are relevant to a particular capex project. However, they may or may not be the best person for you to speak to, depending on your product or service and the timing of your approach.

Some things to consider are:

• Who do you usually have the best success in discussing your product and service with?
• Who is likely to be facing challenges or problems that your product/service can help with?
• Does an individual make purchasing decisions, or is this handled via a central procurement route?

This leads into the wider subject of buyer personas, which are an important consideration for commercial activities including sales and marketing. Creating a buyer persona essentially involves sitting down and writing out who your usual buyer is, and who is the perfect person for your commercial staff to be talking to. Consider:

• What is their job title?
• What is their job function?
• Where do they ‘spend time’ in a work context – is it online, at events or travelling?
• What are their challenges?
• What are their needs?

Some of this may seem overly complex, so it is important to tailor a persona just to the information that is actionable and relevant for you.