Today's Marketing Cookie - Grab The Last Lettuce Wrap

Today's Marketing Cookie came via Twitter from Krister Dunn, whom I went to college with in the early 1990's. As I remember, Krister was the guy who was friends with everyone and I really should find my way down to Maryland and see him again sometime. In the meantime, Mr. Dunn is the manager at SunTrust Bank and I suppose everyone loves him there too. (You should follow him on Twitter: @KristerDunn)

Today I want to talk about lead generation, which is fiercely competitive. It's what I do.

We have clients that need as much as 250,000 leads per year. For those of you that are good at math, that would be about 29 leads every hour of the day... or roughly one new lead every two minutes of every day. That's a lot of lettuce wraps to grab!!! If you don't find every single lead there is to be found, and keep the engine running, then someone on the sales team will go hungry, and we won't make our numbers.  Oh yeah. I should also say that budgets are limited, and so we must continually generate more leads, at a higher quality, and do so for less money.

You may ask, "how does one generate that many leads every day?"

Your question has less to do with "how" (at least initially), and rather should be focused on, "where" and "when" - and the answer I would give you is "nearly everywhere" and only "at the right time". Prospects are searching right now for the services and products you have to offer, so being found organically on page one of Google as well as through paid search advertisements will capture them at the right moment. Prospects are also discussing their need for your products and services right now, so being proactive in social media will help you capture them at the right moment. Prospects are viewing webinars, reading whitepapers, watching videos, reading tweets, emails, blogs and participating in discussions, and they are doing it right now.  My job is to get the right message in front of the right audience, at the right time, and to capture every last lettuce wrap so that you never go hungry!