The top three challenges faced by today’s leaders are identifying good leads, getting responses from prospects, and converting those prospects to sales. These three tasks are the life-blood of any thriving organization. After all, when sales are good, everything else is good.

Here are three strategies CEOs can deploy throughout their sales teams to increase revenue and drive growth.

Identify Your Target Audience

The first step to finding good leads lies in identifying the target audience. An effective way to build strong marketing and sales strategies is to develop buyer personas.

These are fictional characters that have real-life attributes of your target buyers. For instance they fit a certain age range, have particular likes and dislikes, and have specific problems they need solved.

CEOs need to spend time building out these personas and putting them on paper. Then every piece of sales copy, every shred of marketing material, and any sales script needs to be developed with these personas in mind.

Generating Viable Leads

Once CEOs have an idea of who their customers are, they need to go to work generating leads. Online there are a variety of great ways to get the contact information of qualified prospects.

One way is to offer a content upgrade or opt-in. This is a piece of content that appeals to the buyer persona and requires a small amount of information in order to download. For example if you are a tax preparation business with a target audience of small business owners in need of tax assistance, you may develop a short guide entitled ‘top ten tips for small businesses to save big at tax time’.

Visitors would be prompted to trade a name and an email for the content and then the business owner would have contact information for a prospect they know is interested in saving money by using a tax preparation service.

There are other methods for generating leads as well such as pay per click advertising, search engine optimization, social media, and email marketing.

Converting Leads to Prospects

The key to converting a lead is to push them down a funnel to the next step in the process. The type of business a CEO is running will determine what that step is. For instance many service-based businesses will want a lead to contact them for a consult. A business selling products will want a lead to buy.

Whatever that next step is, CEOs and sales teams need to push leads to the next step by following up with them promptly. This means through email, through social, or by calling them. However the prospect is communicated with, the contact needs to be fresh, helpful, and strategic. For example if an email is sent, it should happen soon after the initial download of an opt-in, it should contain helpful information, and there should be a call to action to sign up for a consult or buy a product.

Conclusion

By following a simple process, CEOs can help their sales teams generate qualified leads that are primed to buy. Achieving that means figuring out who the audience is, building out content that appeals to them, and following up in a timely manner to convert those leads into sales. Each part of the process depends on another to be successful.