We are constantly in search of new leads. Whether that be for hardwood landowners, new green lumber suppliers or hardwood lumber buyers, improving and increasing the amount of qualified inquiries is a major goal of our marketing efforts.
Throughout the Baillie Group we continue to explore ways to enhance the productivity of our sales and procurement teams to help them achieve even better results. We believe in learning from our errors and finding better approaches to bring on new customers and suppliers.
Here are a few lead generation improvements we recently were focused on. Perhaps some of them can assist you as well.
Message around your target audience’s pain points. It’s one thing to promote a particular product or service, highlighting various bells and whistles in the hopes of attracting prospect interest. For us that could be like messaging the specific species, thicknesses and widths of an S4S moulder blank product. But neglecting to fully understand your target audience’s pain points risks that audience’s perception that your business doesn’t “get” what they need. So, it is also important to position the problem these specifics correct.
As Zapier notes, when prospects show interest “in an article, video, or podcast about a specific pain point, there’s a good chance that they’re feeling that pain.” Therefore, in your pursuit of quality sales leads, your efforts “should reference the same themes and stay cohesive with that first pique of interest.”
Leverage your company website. When prospects are interested in your products or services, often the first thing they do is go to your company website. Encourage your sales team to look at your website and help you look at it through a prospect’s eyes. This could help ensure you’re hitting the mark where these prospects are concerned. And the main page should always offer content focusing on the needs and challenges of your target audience.
Appeal to the different stages of the buyer’s journey. It is not secret that prospects encounter your promotional materials at differing stages of their buyer journey. Some are just learning about you for the first time, while others may benefit from more in-depth information on a specific product or service. Still other prospects might be “on the cusp” of making that critical purchasing decision.
To accurately capture them as a qualified lead your team should be nimble enough to adapt to each prospect’s “place” on the buyer’s journey and then act accordingly.
Cooperate and collaborate. It’s essential that your internal teams are completely in sync. Especially your sales and marketing teams! Everyone should know and understand the essence of the promise in your marketing materials and be aligned and prepared to do their part in delivering on it! Furthermore, members of each department should be encouraged to notice new opportunities and foster sales initiatives, based on product upgrades, industry changes, and/or evolving target audience needs whenever possible. When all your internal teams work cohesively the result is often success and customer satisfaction!
If you are like us and in the hardwood lumber industry perhaps some of these approaches will work for you. We have seen positive results in many areas such as increasing our qualified inquiries for hardwood logs, specific kiln dried lumber requests and even special hardwood lumber width sort inquiries for red oak, white oak and even walnut lumber. Hopefully you will too!
The Baillie Group