You’re using your book as an integral part of your marketing. It’s an advertisement on Amazon getting you wheelbarrowsful of new leads. It’s a key component in your fantastic multi-faceted multimedia lead follow-up system. Clever you!
Now all you need to do is qualify these leads to determine which of them are, in fact, good sales prospects. You need to get qualifying information:
- Which leads are ready to—nay, urgently must—purchase now?
- Which leads have the financial ability to purchase one or more of your offerings?
- Which leads meet your many other customer requirements?
What you need is a lead-qualifying process that encourages your leads to give you this information, and provides them with a variety of avenues to do so. Your book can be used in this lead-qualifying process in two compelling ways: to teach your leads to qualify themselves, and to point your leads to your online lead-qualifying landing pages.
Your book can include content that educates and informs potential customers about how to pick the right offerings and providers. It can help your prospects understand the various price points for different offering and providers, so that they can pre-select good matches pricewise. (Do you want to spend any time talking to a lead who can’t afford to purchase one of your offerings?) Your book can provide a checklist of qualifying questions your potential customers need to answer before they start shopping in earnest. In short, your book’s content can be used to train your leads to self-qualify and self-disqualify.
Placing the web addresses of your lead-qualifying landing pages at tactically appropriate points throughout your book is another incredibly effective way to use your book to help qualify leads. If, for example, your book is about “marketing using social media,” at the end of your chapter on using Facebook include the web address of your lead-qualifying landing page for your “Getting Started with FaceBook” webinar. At the end of your chapter on Twitter include the web address of your lead-qualifying landing page for your “Grow Your Business with Twitter” training program.
As marketers we qualify leads so that you we can spend our valuable time and money on those sales prospects who really could become good customers right now. Why not use your book to make this critical step in the sales process that much easier?