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Now listener in the words of Bob Dylan “The times, they are changing”… and especially when it comes to lead generation for your recruitment company. A couple of weeks ago Sharon and I delivered a training day at a ‘closed door’ event for a group of recruitment business owners.
At the event we talked about various parts of marketing; specifically branding and lead generation. Today I want to share with you some of the key principles around lead generation that are working now; because things have changed.
I am going to split this subject into two so then it’s a little bit easier to digest. Similarly, we did this with the content marketing podcast that we created a couple of months ago. What I want to cover today is a number of areas.
1) 80/20 rule and how this plays out and a lot of people miss this when it comes to lead generation. That is fundamentally where they start to fall down.
2) The buyer’s adoption cycle and why leads that come to you are more likely to convert.
3) Seven points of contact theory
Let’s start at the beginning and with the 80/20 rule known as Pareto’s Principle. Fundamentally that says that 80% of anything you do comes from 20% of the activities that you implement.
From the business context; 20% of the marketing that you do, will create around about 80% of the results that you get. My suspicion is if you were to look at your client database, that you are getting probably close to 80% of your revenue from a handful of clients. It is a great exercise to carry out by the way!
So this figure plays out in all walks of life. I know for a fact that I have many clothes in my wardrobe and I probably only wear about 20% of them including shoes and earrings and various other things. It’s just a phenomenon that plays out in life..
How does that affect you when it comes to your lead generation? Well here’s the thing, with lead generation remember that you spend all this time and activity on driving people to your website but at any one time, probably only 20% of those people are qualified. If you follow some of the principles that we teach, we teach about catching people’s names and email addresses. When you do that, you’re getting a targeted person. Now it may be that people who hit your website, only 20% of them might sign up. That would be quite a high figure. Once they have, then you can start to market to them.
Out of this database that you are collecting also remember that this 80/20 rule starts to play out and potentially only 20% of the people that are in your database will actually be likely to purchase your services or to sign up with you as a candidate, or that you’ll be able to place them. And that’s okay… You may say “God, that’s frustrating Denise if there is only that many?!” But the thing about it is once you know that, then what you can do is start to work out how your numbers will work for you.
The next two things that I want to cover are related to the 80/20 rule and it’s about the adoption cycle and the seven points of contact theory. Now let me explain this to you. So the adoption cycle – we all at various points in our own buying cycle or process. Here is an important point to remember; the adoption cycle happens at different rates depending on what we are buying or selling.
Generally, we go through four main phases. First of all, we become aware of the possibility that we can get our problem solved. There’s an awareness around whatever issue we have whether that’s our leads coming in or not. There’s an awareness that “Okay I think I might need to do something about this.” And then we probably start to do a little bit of research. Nowadays people go online and they start surfing, and they start considering who if anybody could help them solve that problem. There’s some consideration that starts to go on.
Next, there’s some sort of buyer intent. As an example of our own offerings, we find that people become aware of us and then they start to come and read our blog. They will sign up for our 5 strategies marketing series and they’ll be watching what we’re doing. And then they start to prioritize whether they may want to start working with us. Are we a fit and a match for what they need right now?
It’s exactly the same for recruitment business owners like yourself when you think about you and your consultants, and the clients, and the candidates that you’re interacting with.
Your clients and candidates and potential talent are having these internal conversations where they become aware of you. They start to consider whether to work with you and they have more of an intent – “Right okay, let’s pick up the phone and speak to these people.” And then they start to make a decision. That is how the adoption cycle works. Unfortunately, many organisations don’t plan out their marketing in alignment with this process.
What’s amazing about online of course is that this costs you a lot less to implement than it did pre the World Wide Web. Remember when you used to have to send direct mails all the time to people to try and warm them up? Well, it’s much easier to do that because you’ve got e-marketing, you’ve got social media that help you create awareness. So you have all these different ways to help people move through that adoption cycle and as they’re doing it, stay with you rather than go off and start becoming aware of another recruiter down the road.
This leads nicely to the seven points of contact theory. It’s a well-known fact that people rarely buy on the first contact point or touch point or whatever you want to call it because they need to build this relationship. We’ll come onto that in part two. So you need to be thinking about when you are mapping out your sales and marketing funnels, how am I going to create these points of contact? What might they be? What’s going to help our candidates and clients the most? What’s going to help them engage with us? That’s why it’s important to start planning this out.
We had a conversation with a chap the other day and he was talking about how he sent some emails out and literally nothing happened. When we dug a little bit deeper, we found that he sent two emails out over a very big gap and nothing had happened. Basically what happened is he stopped too soon because he hadn’t really considered the adoption cycle and how that was going to work for him and his recruitment company.
So key points here for you to remember – the 80/20 rule and remember that you need to keep having more and more targeted leads coming into your funnel; because what will happen then is, according to their adoption cycle, and the points of contact theory, you want to put yourself in the best possible position to convert these leads as they’re coming into you……..and when they are ready.
So next time I’m going to talk about why we are doing this whole thing in the first place and one of the reasons is because leads that actually come to you are statistically more likely to convert. I’m going to talk about that next time.
This is Denise and we’re just going through a short series on ‘principles of lead generation’ and we will see you next time.
This podcast was hosted by Denise Oyston. Follow us on Google+
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