Most sales training books and courses spend a lot of time on closing the sale, but very little time is spent on discussing the leads that, well, lead to those sales.  Every sales process begins with generating leads, so the more you know about sales leads, the more profitable your small business can be. 

Can you count the number of leads you received over the past 30 days? Most people can answer that question with a handful of leads that have high potential or resulted in a sale, but a large number of potential leads fall out of the process, sacrificing possible sales. 

So, what’s the big deal anyway?  The more you know about your leads the more successful your business will be, because generating leads is the first step to making sales.  And, if you can use your newly found information to either reduce the cost of your marketing or the time that you spend, wouldn’t that be worth it? 

Your first action plan is to create a way to track key information about the ways that you generate your leads.  Here are some things to consider: 

1. What is the main venue through which you get your leads? A “pre-lead” is really just a prospect, for example a website visitor or someone you shake hands with at a meet-up group.  Your job is to identify those venues you use to collect your prospects, such as trade shows, meet-up groups, advertising, or your website.

2. Then, answer the question, what specific sources do you get your actual leads from? Organic search, PPC, a specific networking event, another website, response to a blog post on someone else’s blog, or a specific advertising campaign are all examples of specific lead sources.

3. How would you rank the quality value of each of those leads from your source and specific source?  The best way I have found to pinpoint this is to assign a percent value to each lead.  So, if a lead actually results in a sale, it receives a higher percentage value than one that expressed interest but didn’t get past the proposal stage.

You will be able to spend your marketing budget and your time much more efficiently once you understand where you leads come from and the quality of those leads. 

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it simple to track your leads and conversion rates.

Do you know the number of leads you need to generate to reach your income goals? This may seem like a simple question, but I haven’t found a lot of folks that have the answer.

There are two things to consider regarding this question.  The first is your costs.  You should make sure to have an online accounting program advanced enough to help you analyze your costs and how they relate to your profitability. 

The next factor to take into consideration is how successful you are at converting sales from your leads (conversion rate).  The better you can convert your leads, the more profitability you are capable of achieving. 

Let’s take a look at the process more closely:

The first thing you will do is to work out what sales level you want to achieve each month. For our purposes, let’s use $100,000 as your monthly sales goal.

Now you need to figure out your conversion rate. While this process can be used for any type of prospecting, for this example, let’s keep it simple and assume the only way you get leads and sales is through your website. 

Now, let’s say that for every 1000 visitors, you “convert” 2.5 into sales leads. That’s a .25% conversion rate.

Here is a formula to calculate the number of visitors your would need to meet your monthly sales goals.  To keep it easy, suppose that each conversion will ultimately result in a sale.

(Desired Sales / Sale Price / Conversion Rate) X 100

The formula would look like this, if you want to achieve $100,000 a month in sales, you have a conversion rate of .25% and your average sales price is $20:

($100,000 / $20 / .25) X 100 = 2,000,000 visitors needed per month to achieve your sales goal.

Wow!  That is a lot of visitation!  Luckily, there are a few adjustments you can make.  The average price can increase. Your can improve your conversion rate or you can multiply visitors.

For most people, the best place to start is conversion rate. If you test a bit, it’s actually quite easy to bring a .25% conversion rate into the 1.5% or even 2% range.

Let’s look at the difference that would make using the formula:

($100,000 / $20 / 2) X 100 = 250,000 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal.

That’s a nice change! 

If you want to decrease the number of visitors you need even more, try increasing average sales to $47:

($100,000 / $47 / 2) X 100 = 106,383 visitors per month to achieve your sales goal. 

Today, it’s all about working smarter, not harder.  Hopefully these examples drive home the importance of planning the leads you will need to reach your sales goals, and testing the factors you can change to become more efficient. 

Get more small business success strategies and claim your free white paper: “7 Ways Your Stone-Age Accounting System is Stealing Money From You Every Day … And, How to Get it Back This Year”  to learn about an online accounting program that makes it simple to track your conversion rates.

FDI Opportunity

What is Financial Destination Inc, and what exactly is missing in building a profitable opportunity from the ease of your pad?

Before we venture in that crucial question we should go ahead and define this unique company.

FDi stands for Financial Destination Inc and is a privately held corporation founded in June 2003 by William Andreoli. Headquarters are located in Windham, New Hampshire which is only 30 miles from Boston, Massachusetts.

Financial Concierge Services Comes With:

LifeLock, TeleDoc, Discount Pharmacy, EquityTrax, CreditTrax, MoneyTrax, First Class Retirement, First Class Family Legal, Dental, Vision, First Class Travel

Personal Concierge Service:

Ranging from Dinner Reservations to helping your child with assignments now Everyone can have your own assistant. First and only VIP personal and financial concierge company and it’s no cost with membership!

So with so many features and benefits, what about the feature and benefits for advertising a business…. Online?

Like so many other successful network marketing companies, Financial Destination fails to effectively teach the distributor on HOW to correctly promote your own home business online. Pushing a company generic url is NOT an Internet Marketing plan.

A solid Internet marketing plan should consist of educating the network marketer on HOW to correctly build their own business online using techniques like blogging, ppc, Facebook/myspace, twitter, and many others. Of course to No fault of Financial Destination Inc to NOT teach this because when there are so many distributors running around; there is bound to be a lawsuit waiting to happen when those new to the business start breaking rules they are unaware of.

So to protect their business from new reps or those with low business values, Financial Destination has no choice but to NOT train home distributors these types of marketing techniques.

This is where a FDi rep savvy enough to understand the power of the Internet plays a hand. Those with the foresight to educate themselves on correctly advertising their home business online will have an audience that is essentially thousands more than their own personal social circle of influence.

There is the correct way to building a FDi business without chasing reps.

ACN Business

ACN, alleged to be the world’s biggest direct selling telecommunications company conducts business from twenty countries in three continents. So if you are a network marketer in the United States, Europe or Asia Pacific, you would have definitely chanced upon the prospect of earning as a distributor of this company’s products.

First, let’s glance at the background of the company and find out how profitable this venture’s likely to be?

· ACN Inc – What’s it about?

This company was founded in Farmington Hills, Michigan by four businessmen, Greg Provenzano, Robert Stevanovski, Mike Cupisz and Tony Cupisz in 1993 to offer local and long distance telephones, internet, wireless, satellite TV with DirecTV and Home Security. The company adopts MLM system to sell their products,tha is by hiring representatives to promote products and sign up more distributors. ACN supposedly has a MLM payment system that’s unmatched in the industry; distributors get to earn a residual income.

· How do you earn in ACN?

As a distributor for ACN, your commission is a percentage on your customer’s usage value according to your level. Since your income is a percentage on your client’s usage value, you keep earning till the client uses ACN’s products. This means, all you have to do is sell a product to earn a lifelong income. Sounds interesting? Think again!

· Criticisms

Are these claims based on the truth?Let’s find out

1. The commission is very low This is because the company cannot afford to pay more in an industry with such high rivalry.

2. You’ll have to make an investment of 9 to join.

3. Though you get a commission based on your customer’s usage, it’s payable only when the minimum usage is 000.

4. As a previous employee claimed, it’s more profitable to sign in new recruits to ACN than in making sales

5. ACN marketing strategy is to target your “warm market” which are your friends and family to build your business. Soon, you’ll start getting cold stares from your warm market

· So where does this leave us?

Do not quit. These criticisms don’t mean ACN Inc is a wasted venture.

To be truly successful, you need go beyond the usual and tap your customer base. Project yourself to a global audience and reach people who are outside your warm market. The secret to this is going online.Now, you’ll have customers contacting you instead of you going from person to person. Adopt a new approach to marketing and conduct your business in style using the best tools in the net.

AllXClub

You’ve attended to calls from sales reps, gone to parties hosted by people you know, fended off appeals for a “few minutes of your precious time” and overcome the temptation to become a member rep to sell everything from medicines to maps. Anyone’s bound to think of all these experiences when you mention the word MLM. The AllXClub Income opportunity is something entirely new; completely different from other MLMs and very challenging. Read on to see what AllXClub is about and what opportunities and challenges it poses to members.

· AllXClub – What Is The Story?

The AllXClub was formed as a pet project of pioneers from the MLM industry and adult entertainment industry.The Club offers virtual adult entertainment to its members other than discounts on adult entertainment products.This has an MLM program where you could earn money by enrolling people. Started in April 2008, this program has caught up at an amazing speed and has found a lot of takers.Adult entertainment is one field that has been found to have tremendous demand; billions are spent on this industry every year.

Your membership charge at AllxClub works out to .95 a month to get access to adult VODs, DVDs, live chat, dating service and offers on adult entertainment products. The income opportunity is interesting wherein you’ll need to enroll a minimum of three people to enjoy residual income for up to nine levels.

· AllXClub Member– Factors In Favor

- Adult entertainment is a hundred billion dollar industry.

- You work entirely through the internet; you could keep your identity anonymous.

- The AllXClub offers an impartial, yet appealing income program.

- This is an MLM business that does away with traditional methods of calling people or stocking inventory.

- Since this was very recently established, your potential is vast.

· Difficulties AllXClub Members Will Face

- The obvious discomfort of having to deal with adult content. You may find it difficult to market your business among people you know.

- You need a knowledge of many strategies to stay ahead in this rat race.

- Since your product is of adult nature, you may find many barriers in the form of spam guards etc. while promoting your product.

· How feasible is this income plan?

AllXClub offers an earning program that’s legit as well as interesting. Armed with the right marketing techniques, you have a good chance to emerge a winner in this business. Being a sensitive field, you have to make sure your business promotion overcomes the barriers of getting rejected.

Just a few online marketing tricks should set your profits soaring in your AllXClub business.