One of the key concepts behind lead generation and the lead cycle is timing. Managing your leads correctly is all about understanding what point your readers are at and how they are likely to respond to your offers at any given time.

This is key to understand but too many people overlook it. Very often, we think about sales in terms of who is likely to buy from us and who isn’t. Someone is either a likely buyer, or they aren’t and there is no in-between!

In fact though, someone can be likely to buy one day and not likely at all to buy the very next day! Approaching your leads at the right time is key to making this difference.

Cold Sales Never Work

This is why trying to make cold sales is almost always going to be met with failure. Too often, companies try to convert every single person that lands on their website into customers by having a strong sales pitch front and center. This is essentially cold selling because most of those visitors will never have heard about them before.

If you’ve done your marketing correctly using SEO or PPC, then hopefully the people on your website should have demonstrated some kind of interest in your brand and they should at least like the niche that you’re writing about. If you have a fitness site for instance, then you should be able to assume that most people visiting it will have a passing interest in fitness.

But this alone is not enough to ensure that people will want to buy from you. If you’re selling a protein shake and someone lands on your site when they are ‘cutting’ for example, or when they have just bought their protein shake, then they aren’t likely to buy from you.

If all your site is is a big sales pitch, then chances are that these visitors are simply going to leave and then not come back. This is why it’s so important that you offer something more – and specifically that you offer value and entertainment. This way, those visitors will stay on your site and will keep visiting back until they are ready to make the purchase and they see your item!
What’s more, the fact that you are consistently providing that entertainment and value means that they are much more likely to become more interested in your product over time.