All An Encore Entrepreneur Needs To Know About Sales Leads

Pre­vi­ously posted at http://www.sagespark.com/community

As we have said often, oper­at­ing an encore busi­ness is dif­fer­ent than run­ning a more tra­di­tional one.

Your busi­ness goals are usu­ally dif­fer­ent: You’re con­cerned as much with explo­ration and learn­ing as you are with mak­ing vast amounts of moolah.

But you still have to make a lit­tle bit and that means you have to sell your ser­vices. The only way to do that is to gen­er­ate leads – poten­tial cus­tomers who might be inter­ested in actu­ally pay­ing you for doing some­thing you love.

Now, there are thou­sands of mar­ket­ing oper­a­tions around that will give you advice on how to go about this. That advice usu­ally ranges from the lat­est whizz-bang inter­net mar­ket­ing tech­nique, to the very loud and usu­ally inef­fec­tive adver­tis­ing or direct sales message.

I’m not say­ing you should ignore it all, but I do sug­gest you pick what­ever is rel­e­vant to your busi­ness, and put the rest far into the background.

Gen­er­ally all this mar­ket­ing advice is a waste of time, because the mar­ket­ing is aimed at the mass.  An encore entre­pre­neur usu­ally wants  to talk to only a few of this big herd.

So, the best lead gen­er­a­tion tech­niques for the encore entre­pre­neur include:
1.    Work­ing the Rolodex: By your age you’ve prob­a­bly amassed a wide net­work of con­tacts in all areas of busi­ness. Even bet­ter, they know you to vary­ing degrees. Since peo­ple tend to like to do busi­ness with peo­ple they know,  why not mar­ket directly to the group where you have the best chance of suc­cess? Pre­pare a sum­ma­tion of what you can offer and go have a visit with long-time friends and aquain­tances. You have to ask for the busi­ness, but try to keep the hard-sell pitch­ing to a min­i­mum. If they can’t use your ser­vices, ask them if they know any­one who can.

2.    Social Media: I’m not say­ing you should plas­ter your­self all over every social media web­site out there. But you might want to pick one or two pop­u­lar blogs or web­sites where your prospects are most likely to be, and start hav­ing con­ver­sa­tions (again, not hard-sell pitches). It is after all, free, except for your time. But be care­ful to man­age it and not get caught up in the trivia.

3.    Speaking/Writing: Yours is prob­a­bly a busi­ness based on your exper­tise, so you have to find only the cus­tomers who can use it. There’s no bet­ter way to do that than to speak on the sub­ject or write arti­cles for mag­a­zines, newslet­ters, or blogs that focus on your area. It’s called exper­tise mar­ket­ing, in which you show your stuff as an expert to poten­tial cus­tomers. Your goal should be to become the answer per­son in this area.