The internet has, in one sense, made the job of many marketers a lot easier. On the other hand, it has also multiplied the amount of competition you face for every sale. Capturing customers’ attention is more challenging than ever.
So, how can you aim to create qualified leads that can eventually turn into valuable customers? We are, of course, talking about B2B lead generation. Done right, this involves targeting specific industries and gathering the kind of information that will allow your sales team to cultivate ongoing relationships.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? The importance of B2B lead generation can hardly be overstated for many businesses. However, you also need to understand that there are different types of B2B leads – some more useful than others. We’re also going to touch on some of the tools, services, and software solutions that can help you make sense of what can otherwise be a daunting process.
Some of the topics we’ll discuss today are:
Keep in mind that your company’s growth depends heavily on how many conversions you can obtain. At the same time, you want to increase engagement with your brand to set you up for greater future success.
Whatever products or services you’re selling, there are potential clients out there who are likely to make a purchase at some time but haven’t done so yet. Some, you’ve never even heard of; in either case, they’re called “leads”. Exploiting these involves collaboration between marketers and sales teams. First, however, you need to at least get some contact information in order to develop these into prospects.
The acronym “B2B” just stands for “business-to-business”, meaning that you’re hoping to get in touch with organizations rather than individuals. B2B sales pose some challenges compared to business-to-customer (B2C) marketing, some of which we’ll examine in this article. In particular, succeeding at B2B involves engaging decision-makers within each company, not the mass market.
Since your marketing budget is limited, you can’t fully explore every single potential lead. A sound strategy therefore focuses on lead quality over quantity.
One way to categorize those leads you generate would be to list them in order of potential sales volume. More commonly, though, lead management is primarily concerned with how likely each is to produce a sale. Leads, as opposed to prospects, are at the very top of the sales funnel, so you will generally prioritize those with the highest quality. The following terminology is standard in the industry:
Marketing-qualified leads, or MQLs, are likely to convert into paying clients but aren’t quite there yet. They can be identified through behavioral patterns such as multiple visits to your company’s pricing page, completing contact forms, participating in webinars and courses, and downloading ebooks.
MQLs understand your service or product and probably have a need for it. You’ll want to employ lead nurturing tactics to turn them into customers.
SQLs, or sales-qualified leads, are primed to complete the next stage of the sales process. They’ve indicated a willingness to start a relationship by contacting a salesperson, requesting a demo, or even requesting a quote. With proper encouragement, they’re probably going to become clients.
While a salesperson may focus on long-term relationship building, they need to start somewhere. You can’t have customers without a strategy to attract them in the first place. Marketing therefore begins with generating leads in a systematic manner.
Along the way, you will obtain a deeper understanding of who your ideal customer is and what they’re looking for. Knowing your target audience, in turn, allows you to come up with more qualified leads.
In smaller companies, lead generation and indeed all sales and marketing functions may fall under a single person’s purview. Ideally, though, different individuals will be responsible for content creation, email marketing, planning campaigns, and all the other jobs that go into developing new sales opportunities.
The efforts of the whole team need to be coordinated, though. One useful division of labor works as follows:
Marketing groups: B2B marketers spend time on both demand generation and lead generation. This means they utilize various marketing channels to increase a company’s profile and identify potential buyers. Their role also includes lead scoring and segmentation so they can pass on useful information to their counterparts in sales.
The most effective strategy for garnering new leads depends on your industry and market, not to mention what resources and skills are at your disposal. Generally, though, all techniques fall into two broad categories:
Now that we’ve established those two definitions, let’s take a look at a roadmap you can follow to develop your own B2B lead generation process:
Effective inbound marketing requires understanding customer needs almost better than they do themselves. Similarly, any effective outbound method usually involves personalized communication and additional research. In either case, the first step is often to come up with an ideal buyer persona that reflects the most important characteristics of your target audience.
This is relatively easy in B2C marketing. In the B2B sphere, though, you need to create a profile not just for the organizations you market to but also the decision-makers you want to convince.
You can start by defining the age, demographic, industry, job title and roles, desires, and pain points of this persona. Once you know what your perfect customers look like, it’s time to scout out businesses that closely fit that description.
Make a list of the most promising B2B buyers. Sources you may want to consult include Google, LinkedIn, and other social media platforms.
Armed with this list, you can now make a start on opening a conversation with each. This represents an opportunity to find out more about their needs, gain an awareness of the problems they face, and perhaps spark some interest amongst likely buyers.
Cold emails and calls are some of the most cost-effective ways to reach out. These two tactics have a lot in common, though you’ll probably find that each is more appropriate in different situations.
Cold emails introducing yourself and your value offerings often yield good results. However, you must be very careful when sending one. These kinds of unsolicited messages, if not personalized, clear, and concise, often end up in spam folders and can hurt your domain’s sender reputation. Try to address your contacts by name and job title. Instead of simply boasting about your company’s experience, tell prospects how you can help to address their pain points.
Cold calls have also been known to work. Though salespeople have to spend time on each potential customer individually, requiring more resources than a cold email campaign, this kind of conversation allows you to share a lot more information quickly.
Cold calling has a drawback, though: the prospect can simply hang up! If you’re not prepared to answer a potential client’s questions or can’t explain what advantage you have over competitors within the first few sentences, you’re better off going back to the drawing board.
Once you’ve communicated with everyone on your initial list, it’s time to qualify your leads. This basically means figuring out how far down the sales pipeline each of your prospective customers is.
Some businesses you contacted may have been practically ready to make a deal, some may need additional incentives, and others might have told you to get lost. Refer back to the sales funnel model of marketing and segment your leads depending on whether they’re in the awareness, consideration, or decision stage. Try to prioritize high-quality leads that are most likely to convert, i.e. those closest to placing an order.
Naturally, the whole reason for all this effort and activity is to earn some revenue for your company. Unfortunately, this can sometimes be easier said than done. While any progress down the sales pipeline is worthwhile, turning prospects into paying consumers is what it’s all about.
There are many kinds of effective sales techniques you can use at this stage, one of which is consultative selling. This is a collaborative, relationship-focused method. It assumes that you’ve already exchanged a significant amount of information with a potential client. You fully understand their problems and can demonstrate that you have a value-creating solution to their pain points.
This consultative selling approach is perfect if your product is somewhat complicated and addresses an important but obscure need. A technology company that needs to improve its lead generation strategy, for example, may benefit from applying it.
The list of B2B marketing tips is long and diverse. There are an enormous number and some of them may not be applicable to your situation. This is a dynamic field: lead generation specialists adapt to changing market trends and don’t assume that a strategy that worked in some case studies is necessarily scalable or suitable for a different industry.
Content marketing using whitepapers may yield good results for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) business, while cold calling generates more leads for someone who provides professional solutions such as accounting. Therefore, before jumping right in with any of the following guidelines, make sure they fit your company’s business model and branding objectives.
Let’s say you’re about to launch an outreach campaign. Obtaining a list of validated B2B email addresses is simple, provided you’re willing to spend a little money. How, though, can you decide which of multiple templates for a personalized cold email will be most effective?
The answer is called A/B testing, a data-driven approach to fine-tuning your lead generation. Simply send different versions to small groups of potential clients, see which produces the best results, and refine as necessary. The same principle can be employed in many different environments, for example to see which layout of your website’s landing page gets the most visitors to subscribe to your newsletter.
Though choosing a responsive web design that displays correctly on small screens has more to do with SEO than lead generation, it can’t be overlooked. Almost 61% of web traffic comes from mobile devices today.
If your site doesn’t load quickly or doesn’t display calls to action (CTAs) prominently enough, you may lose the interest of phone and tablet users. This could mean ignoring an opportunity that would otherwise have fallen into your lap.
Paid advertising requires strategic planning if you want to get a good return on investment, but it can certainly get your message in front of the right audiences. By bidding on suitable keywords, for instance, you can get your sponsored results displayed right at the top of the search page.
These often link to companies’ landing pages. You may only have their attention for half a minute, though, so make sure your website encourages them to take the next step.
Effective calls to action (CTAs) are an incredibly important aspect of generating leads. Whether you’re asking prospects who are already well down the sales funnel to call a sales rep or inviting new leads to pencil your upcoming webinar into their calendars, wording and appearance matter. Do what you can to make your CTAs more “clickable” and noticeable.
Social proof is all about showing prospects that other customers enjoy using your product or service. This establishes trust and credibility.
Asking current clients to write a testimonial can do wonders for your B2B lead generation effort. Consumers naturally prioritize messages that incorporate others’ real-world experiences over anything that looks like advertising.
Chances are that a majority of your prospects ask you the same questions. Using your website’s Q&A page to guide people to the answers also allows you to share specific information on the value you can provide to your customers.
Case studies examine how your product or service successfully solved a real-world problem. Even if your company doesn’t yet have much of a track record, this is one way to show that you’re able to innovate and provide measurable successes to your partners.
Because case studies tend to be analytical, you can use these to show your audience the finer points of your unique selling point. You can also look into publishing the results of research you undertake yourself. There’s a lot of derivative nonsense on the internet, so this kind of unique content can provide a significant boost to your online profile while also convincing prospects to trust in your expertise.
Employing SEO for online visibility is basically mandatory, but costs money and takes at least four to six months to show much effect. Thinking outside the box instead may just reveal ways of getting the attention of groups of prospects you’d find hard to reach through conventional means.
You could, for instance, include a personalized video that focuses on creating value propositions in your outreach campaigns. This neatly combines some of the best features of cold calling and cold emailing.
LinkedIn is a goldmine for outbound lead generation. On this networking-oriented social media platform, businesses that offer something valuable can make important connections fairly quickly.
Insightful articles, advice and resources relevant to topical problems in your industry are popular. However, LinkedIn has almost 1 billion users, so there is plenty of competition. Only high-quality content that holds the reader’s attention can hope to succeed.
While Facebook and Twitter may be the first platforms that come to mind when discussing social media, you will find that many prospects group together on lesser-known channels. One example is Tumblr, which continues to attract a younger audience and has over 500 million blogs.
Reddit offers additional opportunities for B2B lead generation. You’ll find countless subreddits dedicated to specific niches and industries there. It is a great place to understand what potential clients may be looking for, though comment spamming and outright promotion are frowned upon.
Likes and reposts improve your inbound campaigns’ SEO and can increase organic traffic dramatically. You must first create potentially viral content, though, and this is far from simple.
Still, it’s not hard to write a few blog posts covering various industry topics. All you have to then is include a dedicated share button on each post. Assuming something resonates with readers, you may well harvest a few B2B leads in this way.
Long-tail keywords are precise queries that users type into Google when searching for specific things. Because they’re more targeted and unpredictable than short-tail keywords, they attract less SEO competition.
Fewer people, for example, search for “where can I find an invitation to a webinar on multi-channel marketing” than simply “multi-channel marketing webinar”, but it’s relatively easy even for an obscure website to rank for the longer search query. You should try to guess what a potential lead might type into Google and incorporate that text into your content.
One of the most dynamic forms of social proof is somebody recommending a product or service to a friend. Even if the referring party is rewarded in some way, this is the online equivalent to word-of-mouth advertising.
Results will be limited if nobody knows about your program, though. Make sure to announce the launch of your referral program by:
B2B databases bought online are certainly a good starting place, but building your own lead list allows you to target exactly those people who’ve already demonstrated an interest in your company. Strategically placed email sign-up forms on your website may be all that’s needed. In addition, incentives for signing up, such as whitepapers, ebooks, exclusive deals, and promotions will increase your response rate.
We mentioned earlier that defining your ideal customer, or perhaps several different buyer personas, is always a good idea. However, you can also use data analytics for insights that go beyond simple demographic and company information. Online metrics can provide a wealth of answers to questions like:
Once you know this information, you can utilize CRM systems for the management of inbound leads. Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a powerful tool that can track customer activity, implement segmentation, and conduct behavior analysis. HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zendesk are all worth looking into. Many of these incorporate ABM (Account-Based Marketing), allowing you to prioritize the most valuable leads.
A large, active group of social media followers can generate B2B leads as if by magic. However, a company that hopes to leverage social media platforms in this way should also devote some effort to engaging their community. Frequent, insightful posts on industry issues may do the trick.
You need to pick your battles and choose the right platforms for your business, though. Facebook and Instagram, for example, boast huge numbers of users but encourage a rather casual tone. LinkedIn can yield fewer but higher-quality contacts.
YouTube, too, has a role to play in your inbound marketing strategy. Producing a professional-looking video can cost anything from a few hundred to several thousand dollars per minute. However, you can recycle the same content by embedding it on your website or converting it into “shorts” you can then upload to Facebook, Instagram, or even the youth-orientated TikTok.
Though partnering with certain popular online personalities may not exactly align with your brand’s image, figures who are well-known and respected in particular niches can help you get the word out. In this way, you can reach both businesses and individuals, all with the aim of attracting B2B leads.
Many of the people who have some influence in your industry don’t advertise themselves as marketers and aren’t associated with companies that specialize in generating leads. Still, you should be able to find a credible enthusiast with a YouTube channel or a large following on Facebook. Arranging the details of your relationship is up to you.
Let’s say it again: for a cold email to work, you must tailor it to the person or business you are contacting. In other words, sending an email is cheap, but doing the necessary background research tends to be time-consuming.
In addition, you may find that your email list isn’t as up-to-date or accurate as you thought. This makes it a good idea to ensure that the businesses you are trying to contact have deliverable addresses.
That’s why using something like BookYourData’s real-time email verification can be very helpful. Using this service can save you a lot of time and money while increasing the success rate of your cold email campaigns.
You can boost your cold emails with verified leads from BookYourData.
A free trial or product demo always gets attention and basically kickstarts the sales process. It allows potential clients to evaluate your service on a qualitative level before worrying about how much it would cost to implement.
Perhaps more importantly, this naturally lets you qualify your leads. If they accept a free trial, you automatically know they’re near the bottom of your sales funnel.
Getting lead generation right is a mixture of art and science; each campaign is different. You have to accept that you may need to refine your techniques as you go along and learn by doing.
The lead generation process can certainly be exhausting and overwhelming. Things get a lot easier if you outsource some of the grunt work; this is why platforms such as BookYourData exist. With BookYourData, you’ll have access to a plethora of resources that can help you make the process of reaching new customers easier and more successful.
Feel free to visit BookYourData today and find out everything it can do for you.
The answer varies by industry and your specific objectives. In general, LinkedIn, content marketing, organic Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and Google Ads (or a combination of these) yield good results.
While designing a campaign, you have to select the most important lead-generation KPIs (Key performance indicators (KPIs). These include Average Lead Value (ALV), Cost Per Lead (CPL), Lead Conversion Rate (LCR), and Return on Ad Spend(ROAS).
While there usually isn’t a quick fix, the above steps, tips, and strategies will be of some use. You can start by creating a customer persona, implementing a lead-scoring system, and promoting collaboration between the sales and marketing teams.
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