Here are some more tips to crank up business in a tough marketplace.

1) Get out of the office now
Go talk to customers. Ask deep questions. Listen. Show them you care.

Go talk to salespeople. What are their biggest concerns? What would they change if they could change only one thing?

Go talk to staff too. Ask more questions. If they could just do one thing, what would that be?

2) Clone your customers. Johnny Anderson of Bulldog called his program “Two Headed Calf.” The idea is to take your best customers, figure out what and why they bought, and recreate it over and over. If it worked in the past, clone it.

3) Re-craft your value proposition. I don’t care what you call your product or what you say it does. In step one you went out and talked to customers. What do THEY say your product does is what it does.

4) Show some love. Customers want love. Employees want love. When I was VP of Sales and Marketing for a UK based search firm, I was told I have a “very happy” sales team. I left and happiness went out the window. Their number one salesperson left the firm.

5) Marketing please. Go talk to the marketing and sales folks again. What are you doing to drive demand? Do you have email campaigns, webinars, white papers, podcasts, customer testimonials, search optimization, lead nurturing… Is your website optimized for search? Try dialing your own phone system. (I bet you’ve never done this. You’d be appalled how bad they are.)

6) Go viral. Find influential people and pay attention to them. Make it easy for people to share with friends. Get a bit crazy and hound publicity.

For companies looking for best practices in b2b lead generation who wish to improve the way they acquire new customers, Find New Customers is the place to go.  CSO Insights says companies need to improve the way they generate leads and implement processes for business to business lead generation.

Jeff Ogden, the Fearless Competitor, is a demand generation expert and sales leader, as well as the President of Find New Customers, a lead generation company, who helps businesses create lead generation campaigns and continually publishes the best lead generation ideas, so his readers can determine the best lead generation strategy to find new customers.  He can be reached at (516) 284-4930 or mailto:[email protected].