But, times have changed. The insurance industry has ballooned quickly and new players are sure to come sooner than later. The competition is tighter and every one is at full tilt in outplaying the rivals. Need I say more? Also, consumers are more careful with the plans they want to sign up for. Since there are few mediocre companies that are not true to their words, consumers’ professional skepticism increased. And with the high number of firms they can choose, there is no doubt that market share per company is getting smaller. Getting prospects now is not as easy as it had been before. How do policy providers respond?

One of the best approaches in landing in front of potential clients is through insurance lead generation. It is about finding prospects that show interest in signing up for an insurance solution. Through this, companies will no longer wait for prospects to come. They just have to find those sales-ready opportunities either through online or offline, or both. However, it takes a lot of time to get in front of prospective clients. Add to that, it is expensive since firms need to have a skilled workforce, the right technology and other resources to search for qualified insurance leads.

Still, there are ways to succeed in gathering a number of quality leads without spending large sums of money. Not all of the times does effectiveness has to come with a big price tag. There are times that success can be attained at a fraction of costs. How? Here is a list of programs you can vouch as productive.

• Email marketing. They say that almost everything digital is cheap. I must agree with it when it comes to mailing campaigns. Direct mail is quite costly since it requires you to pay for the printing costs and the mailing services. With email marketing, expenses are greatly reduced. There is no need to incur printing expenses since the missives are in soft copies. What needs to be done though is a professional-looking email template and catchy contents. You can send thousands of emails a day and may possibly receive immediate responses. But of course, you need to gather as many email ads as you can. And be assured that each info is a direct email ad so you will be showcasing your solutions straight to the decision-makers.

• SEO plus social media. When your customers search online for the services you offer, be sure that your website appears on the first page of search engine results. This is so because first page results indicate trust and relevance. You can accomplish this feat by successfully implementing link building activities through search engine optimization. Also, you can strengthen brand awareness and identity by engaging in social media activities. Actively participate in Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

• Outsourced telemarketing. If you want a faster sales process, go for telemarketing. But, low-cost solution can only be achieved with an outsourced telemarketing service. An in-house insurance marketing through the phone is undeniably costly owing to the expenditures associated with labor, materials and overhead. By partnering an outbound call center, you only pay the contract price.

Are you ready to obtain easy-to-close health insurance leads, auto insurance leads, annuity leads, life insurance leads or medicare leads? You can do with less investment. Just choose the best solution for you.

So what if you’re a financial services firm? That doesn’t mean that you have to be less extravagant than everyone else. And who’s to say that taking your marketing scheme to a higher level won’t help you in generating sales leads? So when it comes to marketing the services of your financial services firm it may just pay-off to be a little shameless with your marketing tactics.

So where should you start with being shameless in your lead generation campaign? Well, if you want to generate high-quality financial sales leads then why not start with your inbound marketing strategy. Since inbound marketing is essentially about attracting new prospects to your company, adding a little shameless spice to your tactics may just get you the results you want to see.

Here are a few ideas on how you can start being a shameless marketer:

Ride the fame-wave.

You have to admit that there are a lot of things today that are quite popular among the masses. And well, you want your company to have its share of the limelight, too. However, being a financial services firm, that is not going to happen as easily as you think it is, nor will it be easily achievable.

Since we are talking about inbound marketing., one of the most effective ways to attract new prospects and have them set their sights on your firm is through the use of a blog.

One of the ways that marketers can become shameless in using a blog for inbound marketing is to find a highly interesting and popular topic and use it to their advantage. Due to the buzz that the current topic is already generating, chances are that you will be able to grab the attention of your readers by blogging about a hot topic!

Use a bit of exaggeration and humor.

When we speak of B2B marketing, we usually imagine guys in suits, sitting at desks and handing corporate promotions and all that jazz. However, even in B2B, exaggeration and humor still play their roles in helping your inbound marketing plans attract prospects.

Just because you are a financial services firm doesn’t mean that you need to constantly be serious. If you want your company to stand out then you need to be shameless and talk big. Humor? Who doesn’t like a good laugh? Even the prospects who will soon become financial leads for you want a bit of a giggle every now and then.

If you think that marketing and lead generation is all about being noble and professional, you’re on the right train of thought. However, if you think that you should always be serious when it comes to lead generation and inbound marketing then you’ve got another thing coming.

Lead generation through inbound marketing is about being unique and attractive to your prospects, meaning that you need to have awesome ideas and content that compels them to come back for more as well as shows them that you are the company they want to be working with.

How Much Financial Expertise Is Needed For Financial Lead Generation

On the other hand, you can also attest that an expert knowledge of financial management is not something that can be easily acquired. Unfortunately, that could mean standards that might be too high for the average marketer. The promise of limiting your choices will not hold much either if it only leaves you with no possible candidate to direct your lead generation campaign.

At this point, you are now experiencing the classic dilemma of getting your lead generation campaign underway and supplementing it with an appropriate amount of expertise on financial services. Striking the balance between this sounds too perfect to be true. Despite that, how then could you explain the financial leads being generated by your rivals? What is their secret?

The secret is actually more commonly known. If your marketers were truly on the same level as you when it comes financial expertise, the would not be offering lead generation services. They would be yet another one of your competitors!

Related Content: Eyes On Lead Generation – What Does Sales Say?

So what then is the actual level of expertise require to oversee a financial lead generation campaign?

• It starts at basic – A lead generation strategy works better if you use content that is digestible. The thing about easy-to-understand content is that it is always defined by the basics. Why is financial management important? What are common mistakes often recognized by your entire industry? These are questions that your marketers need prospects to ask and prepare you to share the answer.

• It focuses on prospect education – One service that you can already provide with financial service lead generation is education. More specifically, it is helping your business educate your prospects and then get them ready when your business finally serves them as consultants, managers, planners etc. Think of training your marketers as a simulation of training other business owners who have yet to learn.

• It brings you down to perspective – A common mistake in marketing is staying stuck in your own perspective. Your lead generation strategy should teach you how to consider the perspectives of your prospects. Both previous concepts are based on this last one. You need to see how much your prospects already know and what they are willing to hear before you qualify them for financial leads.

Related Content: Using Lead Generation To Get A Two-Way Relationship Going

The next time you wonder why you cannot find the right marketers, look to your standards again. It is understandable that you want an expert to oversee your lead generation campaign. However, the kind you need may not be those who share the same level of your knowledge. It might be the kind that can share your knowledge so as to generate financial services leads.

Different Traits To Measure In Your Sales Leads

Before you can start though, you need to make sure that the provider of your sales leads can exercise transparency. Not only that, they need to assure it and demonstrate it in all their marketing activities. Anything less could mean your leads are going through a questionable process before entering your part of the funnel. You need to have a lot of access to information in order measure the following traits of your prospects.

• Methods – Normally, business leads are generated by a one-on-one approach. The encounter may start out via email blasts or social media engagement. But eventually, its starts turning into a conversation between businesses and then ends with them turning into sales leads. That is the ideal at least. The reality is that unless you know the basic details of how this prospect found your business, you will not understand which method (or combination thereof) works and what makes them work. You will also be cut off from what exactly was being said that resulted in the qualification.

Related Content: Lead Generation Telemarketing – Watch What You Say

• Conversation – Since your provider is transparent, they should give you access to the conversations that have occurred. In your database, there should be a means to access calls made, emails exchanged, and even copies of conversations that have happened over a social network. This will allow your salespeople know that your lead generators know what they are doing. It is also another to fully maximize the value of sales leads by trying to glean insight from what the prospect has said so far.

• Scheduling – Prospects most often imply client meetings. The details of those meetings need to be spelled out neatly. They should also be within the specifications of your salespeople much like how they are supposed to stay faithful their definition of financial sales leads. Do not underestimate the role of proper scheduling and convenient meeting places when it comes to sales success. Plenty of good business opportunities have gone to waste simply because one party failed to meet on time.

Related Content: Plan Appointment Setting Campaigns BEFORE Promising Seasons

• Long-term value – Sales leads should not just result in one-time payments. As a financial service, your job is to make sure your business relationships last long enough for constant returns. If your leads result in more repeat customers and extended contracts, their value could be even greater than just getting new customers each time. The details in these sales leads, while simple, should at least hint to the possibility of future work with the prospect.

The next time you feel doubtful about what your provider is delivering, make sure you know exactly what standards to use when measuring their next batch of opportunities. You can never be too thorough when inspecting the quality of your financial lead generation campaigns.

So how does one create powerful presentations in doing B2B telemarketing? Isn’t my team competent enough to do lead generation for my business? The answer to that question may be yes, it’s just that your script may be the material you need to question. Telemarketing call scripts, unfortunately, sometimes limit our capabilities in performing lead generation telemarketing and getting our prospects to engage with us further.

One of the key factors which will help your telemarketing campaign succeed is to create powerful telemarketing presentations that catch their attention and eliminate all those generic and overused lines which we ourselves hear from telemarketers that phone us on a near daily basis.

Here are some tips to help you create powerful B2B telemarketing presentations to increase your success rates with your teleprospecting campaign.

Learn to be a performer.

Some telemarketers that ring us up, admittedly, sound like robots and it is so obvious that they are reading from a script. However, at other times, there are those who call us and just wow us with their presentations. One thing that a telemarketer must master in doing B2B telemarketing is to become a performer. Rather than bore prospects with the usual business-centered drivel that we spout on a daily basis, a telemarketer must learn how to perform and just bring a certain wow factor when phoning prospects.

Honestly, do you think that your prospects are going to respond to your appointment setting calls if you do not capture their attention?

Be a story teller.

When we were children, stories amazed us; fairy tales would drive us to imagine that we ourselves were princes and princesses of our own kingdoms. In short, stories hold a certain captivating power. In telemarketing, you can use that to your advantage when you learn to be a telemarketer that is also a story teller. You can enthrall your targeted prospects not with fairy tales though, but with different scenarios in which a company has succeeded – you can tell them about how some start-up company found success by doing this and that and whatnot.

Stories not only help captivate our prospects and focus their attention on what you’re saying, stories also help to give a clearer picture of what you are trying to tell them. Remember back then when there was always a moral at the end of the stories we were told? The same thing basically happens when you know how to tell stories to your prospects. At the end of the presentation, you leave them with a certain “moral” which they’ll be thinking about. If your idea sets in, then you have just successfully delivered a powerful telemarketing presentation.

Sell your product/service with emotion.

Often enough, telemarketers fail at lead generation because their sales spiels are scripted and terribly bland. The key to selling, however, is to be emotional with your sales. A newbie marketer may be nervous and thus read their scripts verbatim, however, an ace marketer is one that has chucked away their notes and just understands what they are trying to sell down to the very core.

In order to create powerful telemarketing presentations, you must learn to sell with emotion. Don’t sound like you are reading from a script. You need to start sounding like you understand every single thing about your products and services and you must learn to sell them with emotions that get your prospect to say “Whoa! This is one heck of a good salesman!”

Are your inside sales representatives not generating leads and sales? If they aren’t then it may mean that your teleprospecting approach needs to be taken up a notch. Well, you can do that by creating more powerful telemarketing presentations!

Maybe even as we go even further in time we will have to adapt to an all new marketing landscape just so we can continue marketing and advertising our companies. But let us not get ahead of ourselves and over-think the situation. For now, 2012 is coming to an end (not according to the Mayan Calender hopefully) and 2013 looms over the horizon.

So what will marketers most likely face this coming year? What lead generation practices should we start taking a look at in order to get our stuff together? Well, one of the things that seems to be making it’s way to the top is the use of content in marketing. Is it safe to say that content marketing is the future of lead generation? Maybe yes, maybe no. However, it is shaping how we do marketing.

As such, let us explore what we should start doing with our content to achieve better results in doing lead generation.

It’s time to start blogging more.

Blogging is no longer a thing to just help our SEO – it has become an essential part in acquiring new leads. Companies that don’t maintain their own blogs and companies that don’t even have one should start considering keeping one as we drive into an age where information and prospect education matter more in generating leads.

That’s right, you heard me. Sales lead generation is now all about prospect education and engagement. And what better way to do that than through content? As an industry expert, you can generate an interest in your company’s products and services through publishing blog posts, content that helps address stress points and other issues which you know your prospects will want to find out. Feeding your prospects the information they want is one way that you can start fostering trust between you and them. And as you may already know, a prospect that trusts and looks up to you will most likely choose to buy from you.

Web content compatibility matters.

Back then we built our websites and content based on the knowledge that people interact with them only through desktop PCs. Today however, we have a multitude of people who visit our websites through smartphones and tablet devices. And to be honest, if your web content looks crappy on a mobile device, your prospects are not going to be happy with you.

We live in an age where people want to stay connected. The Internet is now available nearly everywhere and people thrive with being able to stay online almost anywhere in the world. Taking advantage of this fact, people either use it for leisure, or better for you, for business. Your target prospects could be browsing your website right now and could be disappointed that your content is not compatible and built to be viewed on his/her mobile device. If your site doesn’t look good on mobile; if it isn’t responsive, then you can say toodaloo to a potential lead.

Prospect education is the name of the game.

The first point we covered was about how businesses should start blogging more than ever. This point is pretty similar to the first one in that it is about prospect education. Your blog serves as a resource page for your prospects to browse when they need information you are capable of providing them with. If they find what they seek, they will most likely come back to your blog page just to look for more information and ideas.

Your prospects will now thrive on educating themselves before they come to a decision on whether to make a purchase or not. As the year rolls on, you will find that your content will play a bigger role in your company’s lead generation strategy. Reliable and high-quality content will give you better conversion rates from your blog. As we say in marketing: content is king! Well now it really will be.

So what do you think is going to happen in 2013? Do you think content is shaping how we do marketing?

Related: Lead Generation for Financial Services Firms – 2 Ways to Get Leads

There are, however, only a few reliable lead generation strategies that can work for a financial services firms. In order to generate good leads and acquire new customers, such a business would have to determine the best form of lead generation to use.

Want to find out how a financial services firm can run their own lead generation campaign? Here’s how!

Lead generation through the use of content.

Many marketers nowadays say that content now plays a key role in how a business generates leads. Well, such is true. More and more people who we can consider our potential customers now seek good content to help back-up their desire to make a purchase.

However, as a firm that specializes in providing financial services, you aren’t selling a “product”. Rather, you are offering a service. True enough, there are companies that need such services. As a person with an expertise in your chosen field, and as a company no less, you can capitalize on your knowledge about the type of services you provide to your targets prospects. Translating your expertise and knowledge into good content allows to create articles, blog posts, website content, and other material which your prospects can digest to get an idea about the type of service you provide, as well as back-up their decisions to pursue working with your type of company.

If your prospects find that your content answers their needs, they may just convert into a lead.

Lead generation through the use of B2B telemarketing.

A rather traditional approach to lead generation is one that makes use of B2B telemarketing. Sure content is a good way to get prospects to convert into leads, but sometimes nothing beats good old communication. As a lead generator, telemarketing is still widely used by many companies in the world today. Often enough though, they use appointment setting.

Appointment setting is when a telemarketer makes a call to a prospect company and sets an appointment between who they are calling for and the company they are currently in contact with. Lead generation through appointment setting in a B2B scenario works in that business between two companies is often better when discussed face-to-face. Appointment setting serves to bridge the connection between two companies by bringing two of their representatives together.

You of course want to close deals with your prospects. However, you aren’t going to be able to do that when you do not have leads to pursue. As such, appointment setting can help you generate finance leads by allowing you meet face-to-face with a representative from each of your prospect companies. You can give your sales pitch and then proceed how you naturally would when you pursue a lead.

Lead generation through content is somewhat new, however is becoming increasingly significant in how you can convert visitors into leads. Telemarketing is a step above using content and should prove to be useful in pursuing not just new prospects but also those who your content have converted into leads. A combination of both should prove rather effective for a financial services firm.

Outsourced Sales Leads – Their Different Cost Could Imply Different Category

Well first off, a lower cost is generally pitched by many outsourced services. Advantageous that may be, that still is also a reason to consider placing it in a separate category. According to the experience of Joe Worth, one thing you might risk otherwise is that costs are more easily overlooked that way. Below is an excerpt from his article on Entrepreneur showing how something similar happens with the Costs of Goods:

“Every business makes something or provides a service to customers (or both). The direct costs associated with this activity are recorded in the Cost of Goods or Cost of Services section of your income statement. However, I’ve found that with small businesses it’s quite common for these costs to end up under Operating Expenses, where they’re easily overlooked.”

So what do you think? Could the costs of your accounting leads be overlooked in the same way? Well, here is more from Worth’s experience and perhaps you can start making your own applications for outsourced marketing (or even your own outsourced services in general):

“When I started working with a fast-growing security systems company, all payroll costs were lumped together under Operating Expenses. The owner believed that putting them all in one place made them easier to manage. But in reality, he had no idea how much his payroll was affecting his profitability and his long-term success. Unless all of these direct costs are correctly split out into the appropriate categories, there is no way to accurately calculate the gross margin on your products or services. At worst, you could be in for a nasty surprise–you could be actually losing money on each sale or job.”

One thing remains consistent though, you have to categorize the costs. In the following are several other factors that you should consider when lumping the costs of outsourced lead generation with the cost of your regular marketing:

Related Content: How Appointment Setting Should Consider ALL Marketing Results

• Quality of results – Suppose you are outsourcing not only one marketing service but one that also specializes in a particular method. Meanwhile, you have an in-house team that generates leads using another method. Neglecting to separate their quality of business lead generation from yours might cause you to overlook which one is actually performing better. This has a lot of implications (such as the competency of your provider or if whether or not you should have your marketers do something else instead).

Related Content: Lead Generation Tips – Evaluate Your Own Advice

• Unavailability of financial information – As an accounting form, some would think you could simply ask your provider to have a look at their own costs of production. But obviously, that opens a whole roll of red tape. Financial information is not something any company would hand out lightly. This is a hesitation that even those among your own marketers can attest. So since you cannot so easily determine the actual costs of their accounting sales leads, you might as well separate the only thing you can determine: the money you are paying.

Qualified B2B Leads Should Minimize Disappointment

Your accounting leads are supposed to certify that a prospect is interested in a service and can be a valuable opportunity for your sales team. However, if they have false expectations of what you can do, then that interest itself is false. Therefore, they do not qualify. Period.

Now normally, many people would encourage you to go past your limits. They have a point. However, there also comes a point when you have to face certain realities. Take this article from LinkedIn for example. The subject is about how tax planners will just have to face uncertainty due to the unstable political climate. There is just no way to definitively predict which cuts will stay and for how long:

“‘Even the world’s best soothsayer could not predict with accuracy what will happen between now and the end of the 2012 tax year with respect to the tax law,’ Richard Bloom, National Leader of Trusts and Estates, and Neil Tendler are telling clients in a bulletin provided to CPA Trendlines.

For example:

1. Will Congress extend the Bush-era tax cuts temporarily or permanently?
2. Will Congress extend some of the Bush-era tax cuts (i.e., perhaps those that affect taxpayers earning less than $250,000)?
3. Will Congress pass some form of tax relief in 2013 and make it retroactive to January 1, 2013?”

Related Content: Appointment Setting Tips – Election Is More Reason To Refrain From Politics

Imagine your own prospects coming to you with these questions. When would you rather hear them? A.) When you are still qualifying them (be it via telemarketing or email) or B.) when your salespeople prepare as much as possible but still cannot give the actual answers?

Obviously, you would pick A.

Remember, B2B appointment setting is just as much about making good use of time as it is a good opportunity to bring in money. Alas, you will undermine both if you do not first spell it out clearly what your accounting services can or cannot do.

While one half of good business is about striving hard against limitations and expanding your capacity, the other half is also based purely on honesty. It is better to disappoint a client now than to blatantly lie and only end up with terrible retention.

Related Content: Generating Loyalty For Accounting Lead Generation

At this point, there are also other limitations you have to be honest with asides from just requests for cloudy tax predictions. For example, some accounting services have only enough experience in certain industries. On your side though, this is where you are supposed to exercise targeting. Telling every prospect the range of your capabilities helps with that.

So the next time your lead generation services go search for prospects, always remain honest by verifying what you can and cannot do.

Appointment Setting Strategies Should Contribute Instead of Cost

Make no mistake, getting the attention of a market is an established need. It does not matter whether you are a B2C or B2B firm. It does not matter whether your lead generation is done in-house or is outsourced elsewhere.

Doing it right does still come at a cost. But again, that cost shouldn’t undermine your business by using so much money that you scarcely had more than what you had prior to spending.

This is not even just exclusive to finances. The costs can also undermine your capacity to grow, your capacity to serve, and even your capacity to keep marketing!

• Capacity to grow – Your marketers should go beyond what their own results show. They should be able to see how their efforts, despite their supposed success, translate into a more tangible success via growth of a business. Will the prospects they attract become long-time customers? Will the money earned from a close deal cover the cost and at the same time, give you enough improve your accounting services?

Related Content: How Appointment Setting Should Consider ALL Marketing Results

• Capacity to serve – After all the money you poured in, does it leave you with enough to even maintain the quality of your services? Growing is one thing but daily operations and paying your employees are a more pressing needs because they are also your present ones. You can put the brakes on upgrading till you have found ways to save up enough. But if you cannot even maintain the current costs of running your business, you need to re-evaluate how much your B2B accounting leads are guzzling.

• Capacity to keep marketing – Marketing costs can also consume marketing itself! At this point, you are looking at the worst case scenario. If the costs of, for example, a single click on your web banner ad eats up half of your online marketing budget, it is time to stop. That is the best thing you can do before the next click bites out the budget you have set aside to pay your resident tax advisers. If you cannot even see a way to keep the costs of marketing from eating itself up, then you need to seriously review cost-efficient ways for generating your leads.

Related Content: Outsource For Your Accounting Leads To Make Your Own Accounting Firm More Cost-Efficient

Never forget that, at most, a quality lead generator only does half of what you need to keep your business running. Yes you need the attention of your market but that is for the purpose of gaining more opportunities and more customers. Those opportunities are lost if your campaigns do not leave you enough to spend to make it happen. The costs of B2B appointment setting should not cost you your sales!