Many small to medium sized businesses are using their websites, not only to brand and create a corporate image, but as a source for sales lead generation. It makes sense to generate your own leads, because it is very expensive and not at all cost effective to purchase list after list of junk leads. You can spend the same amount of money to generate your own leads that close at a 10%-15% rate rather than a 1%-5%.

I love the people who think that they can just put a website on the internet with a basic html form and they are just magically going to start generating leads. And then they’re all, ‘why am I not getting traffic’, or, ‘why am I only getting leads touting the latest ED pill’. Obviously doing your own lead gen takes a considerable amount more work, but if you’re a geek like us, this work is fun and interesting.

The things you need to know as a lead gen noob:

• SEO - You’ve got to have loads of organic traffic from the search engines. This is the most important thing to a successful website. SEO requires ongoing efforts to get a site up and keep a site up on the rankings. An internet marketing company can help you to optimize and there is much to be read on the internet on the subject.
• Advertising and Campaigns - While getting your site up in the rankings and in addition to SEO efforts, get more targeted traffic with paid advertising and marketing campaigns. You will definitely need some sort of tracking in place to manage all of your campaigns and advertising, or else you’re certain to get your wallet worked over.
• Lead Capture - You need to have a way to capture the lead data. These days you kind of have to do a little bit better than a standard html form. Bots mercilessly scour the internet looking for forms to fill out with garbage. Forms generated by javascript, php, or anything to hide the form from the robots will work much better for you.
• Lead Delivery - The data needs a place to go. Just delivering the lead to an email address is worthless. How are you going to get that lead to a salesperson? How are you going to keep track of the follow-up of that lead? Great, you have an email with some lead data in it, now what?

This is where a lead management solution or CRM software comes in. The days of the traditional CRM, such as ACT, or Goldmine have come to a welcome end. It makes more sense to go with a hosted solution that is accessible from any computer. There are a few hosted lead management solutions that address some of the issues involved with sales lead generation and management, but only one that addresses them all.

The AIMpromote lead management solution makes it easy to manage your leads from the capture of the lead through the close of the sale.

It is simple to create and edit feedback forms in the AIMpromote system. It only takes the use of an intuitive from editor to create your forms. The system generates a snippet of javascript code that you post on any page you want that form to appear. The code dynamically generates the feedback form on the page. Therefore, when any changes need to be made to the form, the change is made in the AIMpromote system form editor, and changes are automatically updated anywhere that form is posted. No longer will you have to bother with messy HTML forms every time you want to change a field, reorder the form, or make changes to the layout. Having javascript code on your page that dynamically generates a form rather than a static HTML form will keep robots from being able to see your form and automatically fill it out. Eliminate your form spam without having to bother your visitors with a stupid captcha program.

All of the lead data Captured goes directly into your AIMpromote account where it can be delegated to the proper representative or salesperson. They can then set the disposition of the sale, engage in light email marketing, create tasks and reminders, even create and manage support cases.

Not only does the system capture the lead data but it also captures the visitor information. You can see the visitor analytics for each individual lead. Track the campaign that drove them, search engine\search phrase, referring url, page views, and conversion.

Many advertising venues offer visitor and conversion tracking, and thats great, but what about after the conversion? AIMpromote allows you to track the result of the sales process as well. Therefore, you can know which of your online ads are producing visitors, and are then converting, and then turning into closed sales.

Leads can be assigned to be worked by your sales team. They can keep track of their leads by leaving notes, creating tasks, setting the disposition of the sale by setting the status and substatus, and email marketing their leads.

Really AIMpromote is a dream come true for anyone generating and working sales leads from the internet. The power is in the ability to track your online advertising dollar. Don’t get nickel-and-dimed out of your precious capital by online advertising venues that don’t produce closed sales for you.

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