A good marketing plan is critical to business success. Every business must have a good marketing plan and use it as a road map to sell goods or services. If you rely on sales, repeat sales, and referrals, you can supplement your marketing plan with calculated steps to find customers. These steps help you find and contact people who will become the customers that will buy your products or services. Salespeople call this lead generation.

Lead generation is contact list generation. It is a combination of prospecting and marketing. Lead generation requires you to constantly look for contacts, and you must get out of your office and go where your customers are. You must put yourself in opportunitys way. Lead generation is not a part-time job. If lead generation is important to building your customer base, you must make it a way of life.

Lead generation requires you to develop a contact database that works for you. The more leads you generate, the more sales you will have. Lead generation requires a systematic method of contacting the people on your contact list. Every day you must ask yourself: 1) Who will I contact today? 2) Why will I contact that person? and 3) How will I make the contact?

In order to generate leads, contacts, and sales, you must develop a contact database that is functional and easy for you to use. There is good database software available. Your database must include names, addresses, phone numbers, e-mail addresses, and your comments or notes. Lead generation is about building relationships, and you must stay in close communication with the people in your database.

You can create a lead generation blueprint by determining how many leads you must generate in order to create the desired number of customers. Your industry will have a general conversion ratio that determines the number of leads you must generate and the number of contacts you must make in order to have a desired number of customers. Generally, you make the calculations over a one year time frame, but you break the calculations down into monthly, weekly, and daily contacts.

You must decide how you will make the contacts, and you need to vary your contact methods regularly. It is estimated that it takes 5 to 9 contacts to turn someone into your customers. Your results will depend upon whether you stick to the blueprint you created. You will experience emotional frustration, because these systems take time to produce results. As with many things in life, persistence is the key to your success.

Lead generation is just another part of your marketing plan, and the basic concepts still apply. You must know who your customers are so that you know who to contact and enter into your database. You also must know what is important to your customers. You must know why these people will want to buy from you. You must know your unique selling proposition and be able to articulate it clearly and succinctly.

Jo Ann Joy, Esq., MBA, CEO Copyright 2006 Indigo Business Solutions. All rights reserved.

You may contact Jo Ann by phone at (602) 663-7007, by fax at (602) 324-7582, by email at joannjoy@Indigo Business Solutions.net, and by mail at 2313 East Ocotillo Rd., Phoenix, AZ 85016. Contact Jo Ann for free copies of any of her articles.

Copyright 2006. Indigo Business Solutions is a registered trade name. The future of your business starts here!