A Complete Guide To B2B Lead Generation For Sales Professional |Ampliz
B2B lead generation is tricky. No doubt. Over 85% of marketers face lead generation as a daunting challenge for the business.
If done correctly, businesses can beat their competition and grow in their industry. Even when marketers can gather B2B leads, they fail to achieve quality leads that smoothly convert to prospects.
Regardless of anything, quality is one of the essential criteria for B2B Leads generation. Simply increasing the volume of the B2B Leads does not equal quality leads. It only makes the marketing and sales teams spin their wheel more aggressively to onboard the customers.
However, if a lesser percentage increases the volume with an increase in quality in a higher percentage, it increases the business’s revenue by an appreciable rate.
In this article, we shall uncover:
What is B2B lead generation?
Why is B2B lead generation important? What is B2B leads?
Who organizes B2B lead generation?
What is the importance of data in B2B lead generation?
How to do B2B lead generation?
Let’s go.
What is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is the organic marketing method used for driving prospects to the organization. It implies identifying and sparking interest among the potential customers to make a purchasing decision.
The process entails an array of inbound marketing tactics that amplifies visibility, awareness, and interest from customers on a specific target audience. To be more precise, it includes curating blog posts, practicing SEO activities, creating and posting social media posts, email marketing, running paid advertisements, and more.
Lead generation acts as one step ahead in completing the buyer’s journey and is designed to take prospects through the funnel for the final sale. The method starts by capturing leads and then guiding them to the funnel for the sales team to handle.
The goal of adopting lead generation tactics lies in increasing the sales and revenue of the businesses.
Why is B2B Lead Generation Important?
A buyer’s journey is a compilation of 4 complex processes for any business. It starts with creating awareness among the prospects, leading to research on user’s intent, then consideration for purchasing our product, and finally, purchasing the product or services.
Since B2B lead generation plays a vital role in any business in today’s era, running simple traditional marketing and old paid advertisements will not suffice. Today’s consumers are more sound with information and data available on the Internet. They prefer to have their own research on services or products they are willing to purchase.
Want to drive more leads for your business?
Focus on creating more awareness before considering sales.
Here are some reasons why B2B lead generation benefits your business.
Awareness for Brands
People prefer to shop for brands that build trust with them. To reach this level, you’ll have to build your visibility and a sound reputation for your brand. Establish your leadership in the industry among your prospects and show that you are the leader in the niche. Prospects find you more trustworthy, which is most likely to increase conversion rates.
Sales Opportunities Increased
B2B lead generation strategies are about establishing and maintaining long-term relationships with the target audience. Once you acquire the trust of your audience, they are more likely to make a purchase decision for themselves. This leads to more sales opportunities and amplified revenue for the business.
Insights on Target Audience
While running lead generation campaigns, you get information on the audience. With the intel gathered, you can personalize and tweak up your marketing strategies for better conversions. Leverage the analytical tools to understand and market to the target audience to boost sales.
Less Expensive
Advertising can be a hefty expense for a few businesses. To bring ads in front of your target audience, you need to spend thousands of dollars. Whether you adopt digital advertising, big-time influencers, running ad campaigns, it becomes challenging to meet the break-even point at times.
Lead generation is cost-effective. Pay once for content creation and work upon the SEO practices to reach better ranks. Numbers show that content marketing costs 62% less than other traditional marketing methods.
Appealing to Target Audience
Forcing to make a purchase is not appealing to the target audience. With lead generation, you don’t force your products or services on them. Instead, you deliver informational and valuable insights to customers using your products/ services. This implies that all your promotion is done indirectly, making it feel that the user has the power to drive the decision to take a look at or make a purchase.
Sales and Revenue Boost
Effective and quality lead generation means more leads for sales teams to crack. With lead generation, you have the potential to drive thousands of leads in any single day and as many sales as you expect by deploying expert sales teams.
What are B2B Leads?
B2B leads are the highly qualified leads that the marketing team generates and sales team approaches to reach and sell out to. Any people or company that could be your potential customer is called B2B Leads.
A B2B lead can be further segmented into two main categories:
Marketing Qualified Leads
MQL or Marketing-Qualified leads are the most likely converting pool of potential prospects. The qualifications consider the engagement that MQL has had with your brand and its marketing efforts.
Sales Qualified Leads
Sales Qualified Leads are those MQLs who undergo the entire funnel before making a purchase decision. An SQL shows their intent to shop your brands’ products or services.
Who Organizes B2B Lead Generation?
The entire B2B lead generation process is taken care of by the marketing and sales teams of the organization. They either work alone or with the team. To make lead generation and conversion effective, both teams need to be close-knitted and aligned in the process.
Sales Team
A sales team takes up the leads to turn them into customers. It generally consists of two teams working in collaboration.
Sales Development Representatives
The group is responsible for indulging in conversation with the leads, engaging with them, and scheduling meetings.
Business Development Managers
The BDM groups are responsible for conducting demos with the leads, closing deals, and generating revenue for the business.
Marketing Team
In the case of a successful B2B lead generation, a marketing team has two efficiently working groups. Even though they operate separately and adopt different marketing approaches, their work may overlap.
Demand Generation Marketers
The group focuses on completing revenue from the B2B lead generation cycle. They guide the prospects through the funnel- from merely being aware of the brand to becoming customers and, lastly, an advocate.
Growth Hackers
This group emphasizes revenue growth keeping the budget as minimal as possible. They typically work in the infant stage of the startup and tend to be more experimental in their approach. Typically, the methods adopted by the team are non-scalable.
Despite their difference, these teams rely on data and testing to drive customers to make decisions and focus on the B2B lead generation cycle.
How to do B2B lead Generation?
Narrowing down to 2 teams again, we can divide the process of B2B lead generation in two:
1. Sales 2. Marketing
1. Sales
The sales team carries out B2B lead generation via outbound.
It includes the following:
Cold Calling
The sales development representatives (SDR) reach out to the leads via telephone calls, explain to them the benefit of the product and services, qualify the lead for future engagement.
Outbound Email
When SDRs approach leads via email expecting to strike up a conversation, an outbound email is managed by email automation platforms.
Social Selling
SDRs follow B2B leads on social media platforms, engage with them, and develop relationships quickly. Linkedin is the best choice for B2B businesses among all social media channels.
Sales Cadences
When SDRs employ all the techniques in a combination to magnify the B2B sales strategy, it further increases the chances of a B2B lead responding.
2. Marketing
Marketers adopt lead generation strategies, also known as demand generation. Several marketing activities and tactics are used to leverage and generate leads and demands.
Growth Hacking
Growth hackers deploy the usual and unorthodox methodologies to generate demand and power the business quickly. It includes incentives, free tools, and contests.
Content Marketing
Marketers publish relevant content on various platforms and promote it to the appropriate audience. Content can be in any form blogs, vlogs, videos, webinars, eBooks, podcasts, and more.
Account-based Marketing
Marketers approach the firm’s ideal prospect (the right and critical decision-maker) by creating marketing campaigns personalized to them.
Why is Data Important in B2B Lead Generation?
Data is the key to the success of B2B lead generation. It is fundamental to forecasting and analytics. Acting as a bedrock for KPIs and standards for marketing teams, the companies can adopt strategies and analyze the outputs and results.
The insight from analyzing the B2B data becomes valuable. Business leaders can instantly analyze if they are going in the right direction or not. They can understand if they need to bring changes and adjustments in the case of the B2B lead generation process.
The data held by sales and marketing teams should be high-quality to conduct the practical lead generation activities.
It might be impossible to perform cold calls or trigger outbound emails if the sales development representatives have incomplete or wrong data. Having inaccurate data on the target accounts can make creating and promoting marketing activities difficult for marketers.
The most successful B2B business is the one that realizes the importance of data and uses it for implementing marketing strategies and for day-to-day decision-making processes.
31 Best Ways for B2B Leads Generation
Get into Multiple Conversations
Prefer not only relying on blogs, websites, or videos for generating leads. Understand that sales are all about establishing relationships, so have as many communications with your prospects as you can.
Generate a good list of business contacts
A targeted B2B list is crucial for generating B2B sales leads. Marketers can get in front of the number of buyers by cold emails. It is important to have a database with accurate and appropriate information.
Cold Emails
Ensure that you reach out to the leads via cold emails with personalization. Ensure to use the right tags to make each message personalized for each lead. A personalized cold email is more likely to trigger a response.
Warm Calls
A warm call is a call made to the leads who have heard of you in the past. If done right, a warm lead is more likely to convert than cold leads.
Adopt Market Automation for Lead Nurturing
After gathering leads and data for your prospects, it is time to use them for marketing automation. It helps segment the customers and target them with the right messaging to lead them to conversion.
Include Email Signature
Promote your brand while practicing outbound email marketing activities in the form of an exclusive and appealing signature. Integration of a link on the signature will help drive more traffic to the page without extra effort.
Relevant Social Media Channels
Indulge in relevant LinkedIn and Facebook groups or contacts to reach out and engage with the ideal prospects.
Online Forums for More Leads
Join industry forums to meet new leads and know your customers better. Showcase your strength and build trust amongst the prospects by sharing answers and asking relevant questions.
Online Reviews
Most customers prefer to scour through the reviews of the brand online. 80% of B2B businesses prefer honest reviews before making a purchasing decision. If customers leave great reviews for your services, you attract more leads.
Lead generations ads on Facebook or Twitter
Leverage social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter to run lead generation ads where you can gather intel of customers. Results ought to vary depending upon the content promoted.
Google Adwords to Increase Traffic
Increasing traffic with paid ads can be a little tricky depending upon the niche, industry, and competition.
Use Remarketing
Remarketing is the best way to approach ideal prospects by leveraging retargeting tools. Retargeting can be via different channels like email or social media. It helps entice the customers to learn more about you by coming across another brand ad.
Use SEO to Increase Organic Traffic
SEO helps in improving your rank on Google’s Search Engine Results Page. Have thorough keyword research to reach out to the ideal clients and engage with them in excellent dialogue. Start with the lead capturing element on the page to increase sales from your organic leads.
It is not easy but not rocket science to handle Google’s algorithm for ranking better on google. It is not smart to rank with lousy content. Since Google is constantly improving, you need to enhance your content.
To boost your ranking with SEO, you can have backlinks by guest blogging. Regardless of everything, you must understand that keywords are essential and use the content to target the ideal audience.
Optimize Website Landing Pages
Optimize the landing pages in terms of content and images to keep the page user appreciative. Ensure that you have a unique landing page for every website and make it a little unique for your customers by providing them with the requisite solutions.
Include CTAs on the landing page to help you increase sales leads. Ask the visitor to leave their name, email, contact number for a gift or a specialized offer.
Use Blogs & Newsletters
Blogs and Newsletters are required to have rich content for enticing and solving the visitors’ problems. With rich quality blog content, you can generate leads, and backlinks can be included in the blog posts. Create newsletters to stay in touch with the people and remind them about your product and services while they hunt for the same.
Use Webinars
Webinars are online conferences handled by the presenter who discusses the topic relevant to the ideal prospects. They are either done via slides or in an interview kind of setup.
Use eBooks
eBooks offer sales leads relevant content and show off their expertise in products or services. The best approach is to try and get the email address of the person showing interest in the ebook to nudge them later.
Interview Influencers & Key Decision Makers
You can reach out to the top influencers and decision-makers in the industry via ebook or blog posts or whitepapers, or others. Ask short and quick questions to share the information with their respective audience further. Via this method, you build a network and allow the sales leads to learning about your industry position.
Leverage Guest Posting
Guest Posting is the best approach to spread your message to a broader audience. In any case, if you do not have time, you can outsource the work to freelancers. Ghostwriters or freelancers can help you draw a pitch for your clients and help you for other publications. However, remember to give them thorough guidelines for creating the content and review the content to adjust the brand’s tone as it is bound to vary.
Continue Building Networks
Networking is the soul for expanding your business. It helps in achieving the goal of the company. Figure out the diverse ways to achieve more leads, better contacts, and more. Be creative in your ways as people experience ads for multiple things.
Get more Referrals and Customer Recommendations
Establish and develop trust with the customers and ask them for genuine referrals. Whenever one prospect has had a good experience with your organization, they share it with their friends and family. These customer referrals results in B2B leads. Use different processes to find your leads via referrals. Ask your customers to make recommendations for the services and products availed.
Find out Unsatisfied Customers of your Competitors
Go and research your competitors. Are they less priced or high pierced? Are their solutions less formant than what you offer? Take a chance to go on Twitter and see who is complaining about their solutions and reach out to the customers directly.
Originally published at https://www.ampliz.com on March 4, 2022.