Bizal Group Lead Generation Event

Today I attended a Lead Generation Event hosted by the Bizal Group, which brought together a group of companies with a strong emphasis on generating sales and increasing turnover, in front of a business audience willing to listen.

It’s the first time these companies had tried this together, and mixed together informational presentations with self-promotion of core services.

Lead Generation Seminar

First up was Dave Ashton, the managing director of Bizal, who introduced key sales and marketing issues central to his company, on their lead generation ethos.

Following was Scott Howard of Optimiser, a search engine optimisation division of Big Mouth Media aimed at the UK SME market, who introduced the role of search engines for lead generation via organic listings and PPC marketing.

Gillian O’Neil of KG Interactive followed on after coffee, providing a short but sweet talk on the importance of maximising Powerpoint presentations. She underlined enhancing the visual and communicative elements, providing examples of where clients had been coached on planning, message, visuals, and delivery.

Eddie Gibbs of Business Mailing then took the reigns to describe how relatively easy it was to not simply send, but target in very specific ways - ie, geo and by industry - mass communications via e-mail, postal mail, and even fax mailings.

Andrew Watterson closed the event, describing how Contact Foundry used professional telesales to empower lead generation, and a sales manager for Computacenter provided a testimony on how properly targeting telesales with Contact Foundry had helped them.

After that, a buffet lunch was provided.

Lead Generation information

Although the companies were not shy of promoting their own services, there was a strong informational element, and key points arising from the entire event including the following:

• Chase up targeted leads, using prospect profiling, geo-targeting, and industry targeting
• Set realistic sales targets from past sales performance
• Online networking by company staff is a great way to get your products found and recommended
• Tradeshows present great face-to-face marketing opportunities, and have a strong public relations aspect for branding a company as active and progressive
• Focus on upsell - ensure the product base isn’t closed off between departments, so that existing customers can more easily access existing and new offerings
• Test market different strategies before heavily investing - see what works and what doesn’t before making a big commitment
• Talk to clients - ask why they bought, and what attracted them to that purpose
• Make it easy to pay - don’t present barriers to online ordering
• Constantly revise progress in a sales continual improvement program
• Monitor everything, from cost per lead, sale, and prospects
• Manage expectations - as with New Marketing, under-promise and over-deliver
• And carrying on from that - emphasise long-term relationships.
• And as the event clearly demonstrated, work in partnership with other companies, especially those suppliers who compliment your business and help grow it.

Overall

This was the first of a projected series of lead development events/seminars, not least due to higher than expected demand. Certainly there’s a strong base to take this project.

Was it worth going to? Certainly it was. I wasn’t able to network much, but the first person I talked to generated a sales lead in itself - which for an event that cost nothing more than £10 rail ticket, promises to provide a far higher ROI on attending conference level events such as Search Engine Strategies.

Even that aside, although I had already expected a self-promotional tour of the companies involved, there was plenty of useful information provided. It was an event worth attending, and the fact that it was free was a gift horse.

Despite being somewhat opinionated myself, I was a good boy and didn’t try and query the presentations (for example, Scott appeared to show a chart for search engine usage for the USA, not UK), and gagged myself from trying to answer audience questions on SEO. To be fair, Optimiser target a market at a higher level than myself - they have a set floor from which they can do business from, whereas myself I’m a SEO whore who is happy to work the longtail. :)

Where the event in future would probably be improved is by focusing on informational rather than self-promotional aspects - a company that informs of how to generate leads is already selling itself. If the project is expanded upon, this is probably where it will be better able to sustain itself in front of increasing audience sizes.

All in all, there’s a serious project here that is worth watching for - and it they take it across the UK, as they’ve already threatened to, then I can really see this entire concept growing into a much bigger conference in its own right. I certainly hope to see that happen.

If there’s one coming up within travelling distance of you, it’s an opportunity worth taking.