B2B Lead Generation

Lead generation services: 4 key considerations

Four things you must look for in a lead generation services partner if you want to reach your sales targets.

Lead generation is one of the most important elements in achieving sales targets, maximizing revenue growth and attracting and retaining high-value customers.

The problem is that in many ways, B2B lead generation is broken. Most businesses struggle with poor quality leads, low volumes of leads and an inability to convert leads into customers.

Successful lead generation follows a formula. When choosing a B2B lead generation service, make sure that your lead generation company works across all four of these pillars:

Attracting prospects
Engaging with prospects
Nurturing leads
Converting potential buyers into sales-qualified leads

Here’s how to evaluate whether you’ll receive a return on your investment

1. Attracting prospects

Let’s face it. Cold calling doesn’t work, particularly when so many decision makers are working remotely. Warm leads give your sales executives a much higher chance of setting up meetings and closing deals.

So, how do attract prospects to your brand so that they not only enter the buyer’s funnel, but willingly give you their contact details?

Digital marketing: This is a cost-effective way to generate leads through social media platforms and messaging that speaks directly to your target audience. Uncover their pain points and address them to raise awareness around your solution and how you understand what they’re going through.
Lead magnets: Your digital marketing campaign should have a call to action. A Lead magnet can be a webinar, blog post, white paper or podcast that entices your prospect to give you their contact details in order to download it. Lead magnets should offer real value – your goal at this stage is to build trust, not sell.
Landing pages: All marketing should direct prospects to a landing page that clearly links the product, solution or offer to the marketing message they have seen. There is nothing more frustrating (and quicker to lose a prospect) than clicking on an advert and being redirected to a home page with no additional information on the solution.

2. Engaging with prospects

There are many different ways to engage with prospects, but the most important thing to remember is that your brand needs to be where they are.

Is your target audience most active on LinkedIn or Facebook? Is Twitter a good way to reach them, or Google banner adverts? You can spend thousands on advertising, but if the right people aren’t seeing your marketing collateral, you won’t see a return on investment.

Quality B2B lead generation starts with a firm understanding of who your ideal, high-value customer is, where they are most engaged, and how to reach them. Real-time monitoring and optimisation of performance assets seeded online gives a clear indicator of what is and isn’t working and, more importantly, who is engaging with your brand.

Without this view, you cannot expect to attract high-quality leads or achieve ROI.

3. Nurturing leads

Here’s a key question that many businesses cannot answer: How many leads start off ticking all the boxes but end up as missed opportunities because they were not nurtured and ended up choosing a competitor?

Every hour counts when a warm lead moves through your sales funnel. The longer it takes your brand (or a lead generation service operating on your behalf) to connect with a potential customer, the higher the probability that they will move on to a competitor.

A market qualified lead (MQL) is a prospect who has engaged with your marketing collateral and offered you their contact details. A sales qualified lead (SQL) is a potential customer who has been contacted, nurtured and vetted against key criteria. These are the leads that convert into sales.

Not all leads convert immediately, however. The Marketing Rule of 7 states that a decision maker usually has to engage with a brand seven times before purchasing. Email marketing is an excellent way to build relationships and keep the conversation going with your prospects as you nurture them through the buying cycles.

4. Converting potential buyers into sales-qualified leads

We’ve spoken about MQLs and SQLs, but this is the crux of all successful lead generation campaigns – can the leads you’ve generated convert into sales.

While your sales team has an important role to play in increasing your sales revenue, the better the leads they have to work with, the higher their chances of success.

Converting a potential buyer into a sales-qualified leads ensures that your sales executive isn’t going into a meeting cold, that the prospect has a genuine need and interest in your solution, and that they meet your criteria and will be a high-value client that delivers real ROI.