65% of businesses say generating leads is their biggest challenge.
Lead generation has always been a challenge, but well-crafted and rich B2B lead generation strategies can help you boost your B2B lead generation process.
Before strategies let us understand B2B lead generation a little bit deeper.
What is B2B lead generation?
B2B lead generation is the strategic process of identifying and attracting ideal customers for your product or service and engaging with them to capture their contact details for future communications and sales efforts.
B2B lead generation is done by the sales and marketing teams in a company and is the crucial first step for any business.
Why is B2B lead generation important?
B2B lead generation is the fundamental step that creates a flow through the sales pipeline. If the sales pipeline is stagnant with zero leads, the company will have no customers or business.
Studies indicate that more than 30% of businesses take between one and three months to close a deal. Strategic lead generation can significantly boost the process of closing more and increasing revenue generation. Lead generation is the initial step, where you aggregate high-quality leads and systematically move them through the sales funnel, ensuring a consistent flow of opportunities
Lead generation helps you in:
- Building a robust contact database
- Discover your TAM
- Defining the ideal customer profile (ICP)
- Create a predictable and scalable sales pipeline
- Increasing brand awareness
And also, bring promising revenue opportunities.
What are B2B leads?
B2B sales leads are individuals or companies who are identified as potential customers or buyers for your business. A lead must be assessed and qualified by the marketing or sales teams to become a prospect.
There are generally two main types of leads:
- Marketing-qualified leads (MQLs):
Marketing-qualified leads or MQLs, are high-quality leads that have demonstrated a certain level of interest, obtained by the marketing teams through different marketing lead generation campaigns like,
- Advertising
- Content Marketing
- Social Media
- Search Engine Optimization
- Email Marketing
Marketing campaigns use lead capture forms, landing pages, and calls-to-action (CTAs) and other lead generation tools to convert visitors into leads.
- Sales-qualified leads (SQLs):
The leads that are vetted by sales teams and progressed to sales prospecting are called sales-qualified leads or SQLs. Adding to this, MQLs who have been advanced through the sales funnel are categorized under SQLs.
Sales teams identify potential customers via sales process like,
- Cold calling
- Cold emails
- Product Demo
- Webinars
- LinkedIn outreach
Sales teams find prospective customers who have the potential to become paying clients with B2B lead generation tactics.
B2B lead generation process
The lead generation process is a series of steps to attract, capture, and convert visitors into leads.
The key steps in B2B lead generation process include:
1. Identify your target audience
Conduct deep research into your target market and identify your target audience by understanding their preferences, pain points, and needs.
Segment your ideal customers based upon their geographical location, demographics, interests, and challenges.
2. Capture leads
Use lead-gen forms and sign-ups to collect contact details of visitors and convert them into leads.
To capture B2B sales leads:
- Create personalized landing pages: Understand your audience and create landing pages that resonate with the visitors.
- Use lead capture forms: To gather information, add lead-gen forms to your website, blog posts, and landing pages.
- Provide valuable content: Content is one of the most efficient lead generation tools. Give insightful and valuable content in the form of eBooks, case studies, white papers, and webinars.
- Add pop-ups: If your content pieces are performing well, add pop-ups or slide-ins that can induce the visitor to give out information.
3. Lead Qualification:
Qualifying leads to check if they fit your business is a crucial step in B2B lead generation process.
There are various ways to qualify leads:
- Ask sales qualifying questions
You can focus upon and take a set of qualification questions to ask your leads.
The top ones are:
- What business problem are you solving with this product/service?
- What are the tools being used by your team to address the pain point?
- How does the purchase approval process work?
- Is there a budget allocated for this project?
- What’s promoting you to address the issue now?
- Use qualification frameworks
There are various qualification frameworks that can accelerate your lead qualification process:
- BANT (Budget, Authority, Need, Timing)
- Budget: Does the lead or the company have the financial resources to purchase your product or service?
- Authority: Does your lead have the decision-making authority or is it someone else?
- Need: Can your product or service effectively solve your lead’s pain point?
- Timing: Can the lead make a purchase within a reasonable timeframe?
- CHAMP (Challenges, Authority, Money, Prioritization)
- Challenges: What unique pain points does the lead face?
- Authority: Who is the decision-maker?
- Money: What is the budget of the project?
- Prioritization: Is solving the pain point a priority for the lead?
- MEDDIC (Metrics, Economic buyer, Decision criteria, Decision process, Identify pain, Champion)
- Metrics: What is the result that the lead can achieve with your product?
- Economic buyer: Who is the final decision-maker?
- Decision criteria: What are the deciding factors used by the lead?
- Decision process: How is the decision made? Who are all involved?
- Identify pain: What are the challenges faced by the lead?
- Champion: Who can advocate for your product in your lead’s organization?
- GPCTBA/C&I (Goals, Plans, Challenges, Timeline, Budget, Authority / Negative Consequences & Positive Implications)
- Goals: What are the goals and objectives of the lead?
- Plans: What are the lead’s plans for achieving those goals?
- Challenges: What are the issues faced by the lead?
- Timeline: How soon does the lead want to address the issue?
- Budget: Does the lead have the financial capacity?
- Authority: Who are the decision-makers?
- Negative Consequences: What are the negatives of not solving the issue?
- Positive Implications: What are the positive outcomes of addressing the lead’s challenges?
- Lead Scoring
Assess and assign quantitative points to your leads, determining their quality and likelihood of becoming a paying customer.
Lead scoring methods are:
- Demographic scoring: Identify and assess demographic characteristics like industry, company size, job title and location of your lead.
- Behavioral scoring: Observe online behavior such as email opens, report downloads, website visits, and event attendance for behavioral scoring.
- Engagement scoring: Study the character and personality traits of your leads in accordance with your past interactions.
- Fit scoring: Evaluate if your lead is fit for your ideal customer profile. (ICP).
4. Nurture leads
Once your leads are qualified, guide them towards a purchase while you nurture them with valuable content that is apt for them.
Decide the content that suits your leads with the results from your lead qualification process.
5. Conversion
Once you have nurtured and educated your leads with the idea of your business, you can now safely convert them into prospects.
6. Analyze
As soon as your lead generation process is over, track your lead generation KPIs. These KPIs include conversion rates, ROI, and lead quality.
Collect feedback from your leads and optimize your lead generation strategies with these KPIs.
B2B Lead Generation Strategies
B2B Lead generation can be improved with well-crafted strategies
- Content Marketing
Valuable content has the capability to attract potential leads seamlessly into your website. Create insightful content pieces such as blogs, whitepapers, eBooks, case studies, educational videos, and more that address the pain points of your target audience.
Gated content enables you to attract visitors and capture their contact details, converting them into quality leads.
- SEO
Any content on your website has to be optimized to rank higher for relevant keywords in search engines. Focus your content on targeted keywords that will position your web pages in the first page of search results.
This attracts organic traffic from potential leads who are searching for a solution.
- Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Advertising
Run targeted ads via Google Ads or Bing Ads to drive traffic to customized and dedicated landing pages or website pages that have a powerful CTA for visitors to act on when they land on the page.
In PPC ads, advertisers pay a fee each time their ad is clicked.
- Social Media Marketing
Social media marketing (SMM) is using social platforms to build brand awareness, increase sales, drive website traffic, and engage with customers.
SMM can be done on social media platforms like FB, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. These platforms allow you to market using various formats like pictures, copies, videos, and online stores.
- LinkedIn Outreach
LinkedIn can be considered as a professional business platform where you can connect with potential customers, business partners, and decision-makers to build relationships and generate leads.
While reaching out on LinkedIn, humanize your message as much as possible. Use Zintlr chrome extension for LinkedIn to know and understand the personality traits of any business professional on LinkedIn. Also know their career paths, preferences, future goals and ideologies to craft compelling messages.
- Email Marketing
Email marketing allows you to promote your product or service through email campaigns. A few common types of email marketing include:
- Email Newsletter
- Promotional emails
- Lead nurturing emails
- Survey emails
Along with lead generation, email marketing is also used to incentivize customer loyalty and increase the rate of retention.
- Cold Emailing
Cold emails are personalized and unsolicited emails sent to potential leads who have had no prior interaction with your brand. Cold emailing can be considered as a subset of email marketing and also the equivalent of cold calling. Cold emails can also be used to create a promising lead list.
- Cold Calling
Cold calling is a sales solicitation from B2B businesses to customers who have never interacted with the sales rep before. Cold calls are an attempt to convince prospective customers to make a purchase. Usually, it takes five follow-ups before a deal is closed.
- Lead Magnets
Lead magnets are primarily focused on collecting contact information of potential customers by giving them free resources, coupons, downloadable case studies, demos, trials, or webinars. Lead magnets have an unavoidable freebie with strong CTAs and landing pages where visitors can submit their contact details.
- Webinars
Webinars that are conducted by both sales and marketing professionals for lead generation with an aim to attract and engage with the target audience. The positive outcomes of conducting webinars include real-time engagement, establishing credibility, and nurture cold leads. But before the webinar, remember to promote the webinar and build awareness about it among your target audience.
- Referral Programs
Referral programs are used by B2B businesses as a marketing strategy that rewards customers if they recommend the company’s product or service to other businesses. The rewards include incentives like discounts, free product trials, or even cash. The company gives unique referral codes or links which can be used by referees to make a purchase.
- Partner Marketing
Collaboration is the key to partner marketing. Partner marketing is nothing but the collaboration between two companies who come together to develop marketing and sales strategies that promote both their products and services. Affiliate marketing is one of the popular subsets of partner marketing.
- Account-Based Marketing
Account-Based Marketing (ABM), also known as key account marketing, is where marketing and sales teams target specific companies with customized marketing campaigns, rather than going with mass cold calling or emailing efforts. A few examples of ABM include personalized invitations, special dinners, customized gifts, and also personalized follow-up after the event.
- Retargeting Ads
Retargeting or remarketing is a digital marketing strategy that displays ads to potential customers who have visited or engaged with the website. These ads aim to gain the attention of those visitors and compel them to explore the business more.
- Industry Events and Trade shows
One of the easiest and most effective ways of lead generation: industry events and trade shows. Business professionals attend industry events with curiosity to see innovation and advancement. So, when they see something new, you have their attention. And usually, industry events get a greater footfall of high-profile individuals.
- Lead capture forms
Lead capture forms or lead-gen forms are placed in landing pages or CTAs for website visitors to fill in their contact info through a concise form that can be filled up quickly.
- Chatbots
Bots that attend to website visitors, address their queries and navigate them through the website in form of interactive texts are chatbots. These bots are pre-programmed and fed with answers for inbuilt questions that the companies feel may arise while using their website.
- Testimonials
Showcasing positive reviews from top clients on the website with a CTA near them can influence website visitors to be a part of your business.
- Video Marketing
Using informational and educational videos either to create brand awareness or in a promotional aim is called video marketing.
- Influencer Marketing
Influencer marketing is a marketing strategy where businesses collaborate with people who have large social media followings. This collaboration results in great brand exposure, establishes trust, and also generates leads.
These B2B lead generation strategies can help you accelerate your sales process.
