Business to business lead generation takes patience and a strategy that aligns to the approach your company wants to take to drive marketing and sales qualified leads. The following are 4 planning initiatives that will accelerate your lead gen efforts:
1. Customer Interviews
Why are Customer Interviews important? If done correctly, they’re an authentic and highly reliable perspective of your company, products/services - interviews will create an invaluable, nearly infallible, planning road map for marketing, sales, operations, and product development. And most importantly, your lead gen strategy. Done correctly Customers will almost always tell you exactly what you need to incorporate into your plan.
From the small to the enterprise sized business, most companies really haven’t taken the time to profile their customers through one-on-one interviews. These interviews provide invaluable insights regarding the pre-sales process all the way to perspectives regarding future needs. The following are 3 critical questions
I. What were the pain points prior to deciding you need a better solution?
II. What steps did they take to identify what options were available?
III. Who from the organization took part in the decision making process?
2. Map out a contact strategy/plan
This is the most commonly missed strategic phase in lead generation. This is also the stage where a good marketing automation platform can pay for itself. Contact strategies should be developed by segments that target your decision makers, and then map out a plan by each “touch point” based on whether the recipient has responded or not responded. Below are the most common secondary behaviors most tech companies seek to achieve:
I. Download a White Paper
II. Register for a Webinar
III. Register for a demo
IV. Schedule a call with Sales – the main objective
3. Map your Customer Profiles to News and Research Feeds
How many daily or weekly emails do you receive in your in box from the same news resources? Almost all business people rely on a few resources to stay updated on tech trends, regulatory/legal changes, best practices, etc in their unique job category and/or industry. Gaining an understanding of these “go-to” resources is invaluable and one of the most cost effective ways to position your product/service. Many of these resources also have packages to support various sponsorships to promote your products/services to their unique audiences. This is one of the best ways to cost efficiently target your lead segments within an environment they deem credible and valuable.
4. Customize Landing Page by Segment
The difference between a generic landing page – one-size-fits-all – and a landing page that calls out a targeted segment by name, ie Human Resources, Customer Support, Accounting and Payroll can impact conversion by as much as 50%. Taking a pre-designed landing page and dropping in a customized Headline and/or picture (even better) shouldn’t take more than a few additional minutes. Consider the amount of money spent to develop the content you’re hoping for targeted end-users to download, and the value of building a database of potential lead opportunities, and the minimal time/cost to add a small amount of customization is insignificant.
Lead generation comes in many shapes and sizes. The goal for all marketing and sales teams should be to identify the most cost and time efficient approach that provides the greatest impact for the organization-The above recommendations are nearly table stakes for almost any business that wants to achieve these goals.
AMP Marketing (aka amptopia.com) has one mission, accelerate the sales opportunity funnel with qualified lead opportunities by competitively positioning our Clients as close to the consideration and research stage of the purchasing process as possible. It’s a tested and fine-tuned process. The results generate a happy sales team, and much more reliable sales forecast. Want to learn more? Let’s connect, we’re happy to share – [email protected]
