Effective B2B Lead Generation Requires Quantitative Tools
Lead generation is a core function of any successful growth strategy, but it’s easy to get caught up in the quantitative measuring of B2B lead generation. You need to create a healthy number of leads for your sales funnel, but if you’re not measuring the quality of your leads, you’re likely to end up with a lot of dead-end leads.
There are ways to improve the quality of your leads and ensure that the marketing you’re doing is resulting in conversions to sales, not just more leads. Telemarketing is a great tool to use in conjunction with each of these areas to improve your B2B lead generation efforts.
Creating clear buyer personas: It’s common, when creating a buyer persona, to define a buyer that is either too specific or too general. Make it too specific, and you’ll end up running out of topics for content creation and not have enough people joining in the conversation. When it’s too broad, your content won’t be relevant enough for your audience and may not solve the specific problems they are experiencing.
Telemarketing helps in this area by informing your buyer persona process. As you talk with contacts, you get key information for your buyer persona creation, including job title, preferred social media profiles and the issues and problems that concern them on a daily basis.
Using relevant data for lead scoring: Use a set of critical metrics to determine a lead’s scoring, such as placement in the buy cycle, how much you expect them to spend and how likely they are to convert, but you should also know the behaviors that lead to conversion for your customers. Does heightened engagement on social media tend to lead to actual sales or is it more likely to occur after a certain period of time and the opening of specific emails?
Telemarketing will help you better understand the metrics that should be included in your lead scoring system. Talk with your contacts to get an idea of their timeline, the number of people involved in their decision-making process and what factors will help them make a decision.
Have a strategy for nurturing your leads: Many companies are not sure how to move their leads from being on a list to becoming a customer. Maybe you’re posting regular content and sending out email newsletters to your general lead list, but these activities are not targeted to particular leads in their specific stages.
Telemarketing adds important information to your B2B lead generation efforts when you are working to nurture leads into sales. Talking with customers about what reservations or hesitations they have in making a purchase can help you tailor content to leads that are in that stage of the buy cycle. In addition, telemarketing can provide a wealth of information that fuels your lead nurturing strategy, including:
- Identify all decision makers involved in the purchase
- Clarify your understanding of their decision-making process
- Find out where they are in that process, including their timeline for a decision
- Determine budget availability or restrictions
- Hear about the alternative products or services your contact is considering from your competitors
Talk with your sales team: This is an important step that many marketing teams miss, but you need to know that your sales reps have the same definition of a quality lead that you do. Talk with them about whether your B2B lead generation efforts are leading to in-person meetings that result in signed contracts or ongoing relationships with customers.
Blue Valley Marketing can help you design a lead generation strategy that works. Talk with us about how to create balance in your marketing channels and create a lead nurturing plan to converts leads into sales.
Last Updated on September 14, 2023 by Ronen Ben-Dror