Sales Leads on Auto Pilot

A true marketing and publicity system delivers a predictable number of quality sales leads to you every day, month after month, year after year, so your salespeople only spend time with people who already understand what you do and who have proactively asked you to help them solve their problem.

Our entire modern world is only possible because we can automate many things. If new cars were assembled by hand instead of machines, they would cost $100,000 instead of $20,000. If we used Pony Express to deliver mail, each letter you send would cost $100 instead of 37 cents.
Just as manufacturing in developed countries must be automated, similarly no sales person can effectively compete in the 21st century unless automated marketing tools are doing the most unpleasant and inefficient grunt work for him.
A finely-tuned marketing system is automated. It’s like a machine used in manufacturing: If you power it up and put raw material in one end, it produces qualified results – prospects – on the other end, predictably and reliably, around the clock.
Every day when you walk into the office you know it will produce new potential customer relationships for you to cultivate.

A Website Can Sell on Autopilot: 24/7/365
One of my most interesting successes was creating a web page that sold a product on the Internet. It was a four page sales letter that used those time-tested marketing formulas to move my customer from mere casual interest all the way to typing in their credit card information and ordering the product online. There was no phone number where they could call and ask for more information, and no email address. The website had to do all the work by itself.
That web page has hardly been changed in three years, and it is still successfully selling that product to one out of every twenty-five visitors. It literally runs like clockwork, a selling machine that works on autopilot. You can’t do much better than that, can you? The product and the website together are like an annuity that works for me 24/7/365 and puts money in my bank account month after month with 55% gross profit – all with no maintenance and no annoying phone calls.
Wouldn’t you like your business to run that way? Wouldn’t you like your sales process to be a machine that runs on autopilot, constantly generating leads or sales orders whether you’re awake or asleep, whether you’re in the office or on the golf course?

Sales Leads on Autopilot, 24/7/365
I’m here to tell you that your business CAN run that way. Now please understand, if you sell two million dollar printing presses, nobody’s going to order one from your website with their VISA card, as though it were a $12 book on Amazon.com. However, you CAN get lots of quality sales leads for that printing press, the exact same way, if you know how to do it. Make no mistake: Once you have a system like that in place, your life as a sales professional will change for the better – forever. You will NEVER go back to the old way of selling again!
When you have that kind of marketing machine working for you, you’ll make more money, have less stress, experience less month-to-month variation in your sales numbers; your sales people will be more motivated, you’ll attract reps and resellers and get more mind share from your sales people because they don’t have to work nearly as hard to get appointments.

Autopilot: Not a Fantasy, But A Necessity
“Marketing on autopilot” is not some fantasy or theoretical ideal. It is a the cornerstone of literally thousands of businesses and it quite literally is the difference between failure and success for many people. If you look around at all the really successful people you know, they all have systems that work for them when they’re playing or working on other projects. Maybe it’s their stock portfolio, growing their money year after year. Maybe it’s real estate income, maybe it’s their employees and the businesses they own. But in any case, they’re not using manual labor. If you can make the transition from manual-labor grunt work sales to marketing on autopilot, you’ve literally built a foundation for business success.
Do you or your sales people spend 50% of their time prospecting for new business? There are millions of sales professionals who spend most of their waking hours doing just that. It’s even worse for brand new salespeople, who often spend 80-90% of their time doing prospecting and cold call grunt work.
Believe me, I’ve done it. And it was tragically wasteful.
What would happen to your commission checks if you could end the never-ending battle with voice mail and eliminate the time wasted getting past gatekeepers and setting up appointments? What if you spent all that time in front of qualified prospects instead? Wouldn’t you double your sales and your income?
Convert that wasted prospecting and grunt work time to productive sales time. Generate a steady flow of interested prospects who call you and want you to help them, and make sure your sales people are spending 90% of their time in front of those prospects. You’ll make twice as much money and cut your stress level in half!

Eliminate the Stomach Churning Misery of Cold Calls and Rejection
There are several other huge benefits to this, by the way: first, the life of your sales people dramatically changes for the better. The stomach churning rejection and constant stream of no, not interested… not today… call me in three months… you’ll have to talk to the purchasing department about that… all that goes away. It’s far less tempting to procrastinate when you know that everyone you call on the phone is at least somewhat interested in having your help in solving a problem. It’s a lot easier to roll out of bed in the morning when you know that when you get to the office every day, you’re going to have a number of hot leads on your desk that have come in via the website, email, fax machine or voice mail, people who understand what you do and are waiting for you to help them solve their problem.
Second, it’s easier to attract and keep good sales people, whether they work directly for you or if they’re commissioned representatives or resellers.
Now if you sell a cutting edge, high tech product, then despite the fact that it’s cool and sexy, it’s probably very hard to sell. The world has an overabundance of neat products that nobody feels compelled to use. This forces small, innovative companies to do backbreaking missionary work to sell that neat new product. This is the #1 reason why hi tech companies go out of business – the cost of acquiring new customers is simply too high.

Getting Those “Lazy” Distributors to Go Sell Something
Have you ever tried to get your distributors to sell a bleeding edge “missionary work” type of product? It’s like nailing jello to the wall. You can’t get a distributor who’s making maybe 20% gross profit to stock and promote a product that nobody’s eager to buy. It just doesn’t make business sense for him to do so.
A lot of manufacturers think it’s just because those distributors are lazy. They think, “These guys are all bozos! They just don’t understand how great our product really is!” No, actually it’s because they’re too smart. They’ve fallen for that before, probably more than once, and they’re not going to do it again. They work on commission; they’ve got car payments and a mortgage. And they don’t like eating baloney sandwiches and ramen soup.
So if you have a cool, sexy, cutting edge, high tech product, and if you use my lead generation system, then you won’t have any problem getting serious potential customers to raise their hands and express interest in that product.
The system will educate those prospects at very low cost before you make any significant investment in them, and you’ll be certain that they’re pre-disposed to buy before you get in your car and go see them.

Your Marketing System Can Protect You From Lousy Prospects
Please listen very carefully: You should not visit anybody, unless on a scale from 1 to 10, they’re at least a five in terms of “likely to give you their money.” Personally, I ain’t even calling a customer on the phone unless they’re a 5 and they’ve called me first. And I’m not going to actually, physically go see them unless they’re a 7 or 8.
You can actually have such a wide funnel that captures so many leads and interested prospects that you then devise second, third and fourth steps in your marketing system that further separates the diamonds from the dirt. You can even make prospects jump through hoops to talk to you, if necessary.
A built in feature of a true marketing system is that it qualifies leads for you so you can determine the quality of each lead with a high degree of accuracy. Then you can actually adjust the size of the bottom of your funnel as business conditions change, and literally regulate your sales volume from one quarter to the next.
If you’ve got plenty of sales leads that are 4’s, 5’s, 6’s 7’s and 8’s coming in every day – and the occasional 9 or 10 – then you’ll find that VARs, reps, and even your own sales people are much more eager to go see those customers, because they know those customers are genuinely interested.

Original Source: Perry Marshall