The math is simple. Leads bring meetings, meetings bring sales, and sales bring more work. It is a constant cycle that has to happen for any business to survive. You wouldn’t pay a salesman that didn’t constantly generate new leads and schedule more meetings, right? 

I quickly want to define a lead for you just to make sure we are on the same page as we go forward. I am talking about potential customers leaving behind contact information of some kind. In some cases, this could simply be an email address, or possibly more detailed information.

Your website is a great means to gather leads! There are two primary types of leads that you can gather from your website:

Email Leads - Gathering email addresses for an email newsletter is one of the simplest and most effective ways to gather new leads. It is an excellent strategy because it provides a very low barrier to entry, and will be utilized by many visitors. These leads typically include an email address and nothing more and require a Mass Mailing app such as Odoo. Read more about this topic in "What are the acquiring tools available to stimulate lead generation?".

Use the new CMS to add a Discussion Group to your website, inviting website visitors to leave their email address. Use Odoo's Mailing Campaigns App to send stunning mass mails that you can easily create through the CMS. Our templates are awesome and easy to design. You don't need to develop anything in order to create new pages, banner, themes or building blocks. We use a clean HTML structure, a bootstrap CSS. Customize every page on the fly with the integrated template editor!

Contact Leads – Leads generated through a contact form usually come with the advantage of including a lot more information than just an email address, but can be far more difficult to gather. These leads are highly valuable though and certainly worth striving for. Leads generated this way are far more likely to actually turn into money over a simple email address.

Automate your Lead Acquisition by using a Contact form. Through your website, your company wants to get as much information as possible about the people who visit the website. But how can you make sure that every person who wants to know more about your company is actually registered somewhere? Well, you could use the CMS Contact form for this. And precisely such a form allows you to register contacts automatically in Odoo CRM.

All data entered in this form are linked to the Lead form in the CRM. Each time someone enters this contact form, a new lead is automatically created in OpenERP. The Lead channel is automatically set to Website, to allow you to track the efficiency of your Contact Page.

Such a system is a very easy yet flexible way of keeping track of your leads. You can push the App further by automatically launching your marketing campaigns through the Marketing App! 

Email marketing is one of the best online marketing tools available to those who use it right. While it doesn’t usually lead to an immediate sale, it does allow you to develop a trust relationship with leads over time. It is the slow and steady approach, but very viable. Contact form leads are extremely valuable and more likely to turn into business, but they are harder to get. We generally recommend a tiered approach that focuses first on email leads and second on the contact form leads.

Now that your site is perfectly tuned to generate new leads, you will need to have a good system for handling them and closing the sale. For each business, this will be different, but it is not something that you want to forget. If you plan to actively capture leads, plan to actively utilize them with an email marketing program integrated in a customer management system that allows you to track customers and leads. Being smart on both sides of the new data is key. Odoo is your key to unlocking all these features!

Inspired by http://todaymade.com/blog/the-secret-to-using-your-website-to-generate-new-leads/