Season 1 Bonus - Lead Gen Quizzes with Nik Thakorlal - a podcast by WordPress business specialist Troy Dean featuring Seth Godin, Michael Gerber, Guy Kawasaki, Joe Pulizzi, Andrew Warner, James Schramko, Brian Clark, Ed Dale, Dan Norris and many more.
from 2017-04-12T23:30
Watch the video of this podcast here.
Nik Thakorlal specializes in lead generation products and helping businesses grow through high yield lead generation. He also owns a software company, despite not having a background in software development.
The first thing we talk about was how he recruits his team members. He explains the initial step when building your team is to understand what you want to get done now and also in the future.
His strategy is to build a team that scales as the business grows, no matter what industry you serve or what position you are hiring for. To do this you need to get a vision of where you want to be in the future and recruit from that vision.
From there, come up with a project or test case that replicates what it would be like in the future and test the candidates with that and then hire people based on who delivered the best results. Nik created his contests so the winner gets a prize of a few hundred or a few thousand dollars.
He has done this effectively after discovering interviews weren't indicative of whether the person would be a good performer or not! After some disastrous hires he devised this strategy instead and it has worked out well for him.
When I asked him why lead generation, Nik explained that lead generation is the core of all businesses. If you can get your lead generation working properly then you can solve any other problem in your business. The primary function of any business in any industry is to acquire customers, lead generation does that for you. But without lead gen, you don’t have a business.
And that’s his advice to anyone who wants to start a business - go out and find a customer!
To dig a bit deeper, Nik describes what high yield lead generation actually is and how it works. When most people think of lead gen they think it's about getting a name and an email address or a physical address if it's an offline business. But that doesn't tell you very much about the person. With just an address we don't know enough about them yet except they are interested in whatever you offered them in exchange for their name and email or mailing address.
While having their contact information is a start, from there you want to gather other data from them too and find out where they are in the buying continuum. Are they ready to buy something to solve their problem? If so, then you can direct them to solutions. But if they aren't in buying mode yet and you present the offer too early, you won't be effective and you won’t make sales.
High yield lead generation means you want to capture more about them so you know where they are psychologically from a behavioral perspective, and what their beliefs are about their problem. You can do that easily with quizzes, survey questions, and the like.
If they someone tells you they haven't quite bought the problem yet (meaning they aren't in a place where they acknowledge that the problem is hurting them) then you have to sell them on the problem. Once they are sold on the problem, you can move them along the sales continuum.
But you won't know where they are by just getting an email address and their name, you need more information from them.
Also on today’s show, Nik explains how a dynamically created offer or thank you page gathers that collect additional information from your leads, the optimal funnel and the optimum path from opting into buying, and how his team has developed this technique in their high yield lead generation software.
Hear about that and more on this edition of the WP Elevation Podcast.
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