An effective B2B sales lead generation program will propel your company forward.
Unfortunately, building one such program is harder than ever. According to a recent study, 61% of B2B marketers say that lead generation is their top challenge.
What’s the solution? First, sales and marketing teams need to work together to generate and vet quality leads. Second, well… We have a few ideas for you.
Keep reading and we’ll show you how to nail lead generation for B2B sales. That way you can cut through the noise, capture your buyers’ attention, and beat the competition.
Target The Right People
Your B2B sales lead generation program will fail if you target everyone. Instead, develop an ideal customer profile (ICP), and only sell to companies that match it.
What’s an ICP? It’s pretty simple: an ICP is a fictional company that could theoretically benefit from the products and/or services that your company sells. To create an ICP:
- Analyze: Which of your customers get the most out of your offerings?
- Pinpoint: What attributes do your top customers have in common with each other?
- Study: How do your customers use your products? What pain points do they solve?
- Create: Now, combine all of the data you’ve uncovered into an ICP template that includes industry, location, company size, budget, and other important details.
Your ICP will keep your prospecting efforts on track and make sure you don’t waste time on leads that will never buy the products and/or services that you sell.
Search B2B Lead Databases
Did you know that you can just buy B2B sales leads?
Companies like UpLead will give you access to entire lists of prospects, which you can import directly into your customer relationship management (CRM) tool of choice.
By searching through these kinds of B2B lead databases, you may be able to find quality prospects to reach out to. Just remember, you’ll need to qualify them to make sure they’re good fits for your business. Then you’ll need to nurture them to make sales.
Establish a Lead Qualification Framework
Productive lead generation for B2B sales is all about qualification.
In other words, you need to qualify prospects before you pursue them. Doing so will help you weed out bad-fits so that you can focus your time on companies that might actually buy.
Supercharge the qualification process by establishing a lead qualification framework. Don’t worry, you don’t have to build it from scratch. Here a few well-known ones you can use:
- BANT: This framework was developed by IBM in the 1960s. To use it, establish four criteria for every lead—their budget, ability to buy, need for the product, and timeline.
- CHAMP: This framework was created as an alternative to BANT. To use it, pinpoint your prospect’s challenges, ability to buy, whether they have the money necessary to purchase, and how much of a priority making said purchase is to the organization.
- GPCTBA/C&I: This framework is another alternative to BANT. To use it, learn each prospect’s goals, plans, challenges, timeline, budget, authority, consequences, and implications to see if they’re a good fit for your company’s offerings.
Of course, you can always create your own lead qualification framework. For more information on this topic, check out this article from Oktopost.
Embrace a Multichannel Sales Process
Some prospects like to talk to sales reps on the phone. Others would rather communicate via email, or text, or LinkedIn. You should try to accommodate each prospect’s preferences.
The best way to do that is to build a multichannel sales process with a tool like SPOTIO.
With SPOTIO, reps can track every phone call and in-person visit they make. They can also schedule emails and texts to send at the most appropriate times, boosting productivity. It’s an easy to use platform that will help you manage a robust multichannel sales process.
Sign up for a free demo of SPOTIO today to see if it’s the right tool for your sales team.
Attend Trade Shows
It may seem like an old school approach, but trade shows can be a gold mine for B2B sales lead generation. The key is choosing the right trade shows to attend.
Pick events that cater to your industry and target audience. If you sell software, for example, don’t waste time and money going to the “Food Marketing Conference” or anything like that.
Once you’ve chosen a trade show to attend, give it your all. Sign up for a booth, use video to attract attention, give product demos if possible, and, above all, establish ways to collect contact information from the many potential customers you’ll meet.
Help People Remember You
As a sales rep, you meet a ton of people. Do they remember you? They should!
One of the best ways to make yourself more memorable is to create and distribute digital business cards, AKA business cards that can be sent and stored digitally.
These sales tools can be created with SPOTIO. Simply log into the app, tap the section titled, “Business Cards,” and then enter your information into the template. Voila!
Once you’ve created a digital business card for yourself, you can distribute it to prospects via email, text, or QR code. Even better, you can track when prospects open your digital business cards, which means you’ll always know exactly when to follow up with potential customers.
Remember People’s Preferences
As mentioned above, your prospects have preferences.
Some want to be called on the phone, others want to be contacted via email. Some like to take sales calls at the beginning of the day, others would rather wait until the afternoon.
Give your B2B sales lead generation efforts a boost and remember what each of your prospects likes so that you can accommodate them during the sales process.
Don’t worry, you don’t have to actually remember these little details. You just have to add the information to your CRM of choice so that it will remember for you. (Note: SPOTIO is great for this, as it allows field sellers to easily capture these kinds of details, then automatically transfers them to their CRM thanks to seamless integrations with many top tools.)
Fine-Tune Your Territory Mapping
Are you part of a field sales team? Then you’re familiar with territory mapping.
Well, guess what! Proper territory mapping will lead to better lead generation for B2B sales. “How so?” You ask. Think about it: when you properly map your territories, you’ll be able to tell which are underperforming and why. You can then work to fix prominent issues.
You’ll also be able to ensure an equal distribution of workload and make sure that the reps you have working each territory have the necessary skill sets to succeed.
Each of these things will help your team generate better leads and close more deals.
Map Existing Customers
Plenty of field reps map their prospects. Doing so allows them to see where the potential buyers are and plan the most efficient routes between them.
Here’s a wild idea: map your existing customers, too.
Once you locate the existing customers in your territory, you can leverage those connections to meet new prospects and make more sales. Maybe you ask an existing customer for a referral. Maybe you just ask to use their name in future sales conversations.
Either way, your relationship with existing customers can be used to meet better, more qualified leads and, ultimately, close more deals for your company.
Align Your Sales and Marketing Teams
Think back to the beginning of this blog post…
Do you remember what we said? We said that one of the keys to successful B2B sales lead generation was getting marketing and sales teams to work together.
It’s true. If marketing and sales are on different pages, your lead gen game will suffer. When these departments are aligned, you can expect to see 32% greater year-on-year growth.
To ensure alignment, make sure both marketing and sales agree on what a qualified lead is and when leads get passed from one department to the other. Then work together to create content and full-fledged campaigns to generate new qualified prospects.
Create Engaging Content
Speaking of content, you should create it to aid your B2B sales lead generation efforts.
Just remember, people at different stages of the funnel will need different kinds of content. For this reason, marketing and sales professionals need to make a wide range of material.
Here are a few content types you can use to generate quality leads for your company:
Blog posts
Your target audience uses the internet to find information. Answer their most pressing questions in a blog post and you’ll establish trust. Once this happens, it will be much easier for you to acquire contact information and turn website traffic into bonafide leads. (Keep in mind, to succeed with blogging, you need to optimize your content for search engines.)
Guest posts
Blogging on your company’s website is a great idea. But if you really want to kick this strategy into high gear, invest in guest posting, too. Guest posting can go one of two ways: you can either write blogs for other websites, or you can ask other writers to write blogs for your site. Both strategies will get your brand name and content in front of new eyeballs.
Case studies
Case studies are valuable pieces of content—especially at the bottom of the funnel when sales reps need to convince prospects to get off the fence and sign on the dotted line. Interview your company’s happiest customers and ask them why they love your products and/or services so much. Then publish their story on your website.
Videos
There’s no doubt about it, video is one of the best types of content. Why? Because audiences love it, which is one reason why YouTube is the second biggest search engine in the world. Don’t worry, you don’t need to create a Marvel-type film for your company. We suggest repurposing old content into video format and posting them online. That’s it.
Webinars
We’d bet money you’ve attended a webinar or two in your day. But if not, just think of them as mini online conferences that typically help audience members learn a specific skill via slide shows, expert interviews, and more. Host one of these bad boys with a tool like ClickMeeting and build trust, influence, and sales opportunities with your ideal customers.
White papers
Finally, we have white papers, in-depth reports that are often given to potential customers in exchange for contact information. As such, they are great B2B sales lead generation tools. Like many of the other content types we’ve talked about, white papers can also help companies establish authority in their niches and earn their target customers’ trust.
Gate Your Content
So, you’ve made all this content. Now what? Obviously, you need to promote the blogs, videos, and case studies you’ve created. Social media and email marketing are great tools for this. But we suggest gating a few of your top-performing pieces, too.
If you’re not familiar with the term, gating content is the practice of putting white papers, webinars, and other materials behind a lead capture form.
This strategy will allow you to collect emails, phone numbers, and other forms of contact information, while boosting your company’s reputation—assuming you have great content. Plus, it’s a widely used and accepted tactic, so your target audience won’t mind.
Automate Your Sales Processes
Let’s face it, lead generation for B2B sales is hard. There are tons of tactics to try and details to remember. It’s easy for things to fall through the cracks.
Because of this, we suggest using automation to streamline your sales processes and ensure you follow up with leads in a timely manner that encourages them to make purchases.
SPOTIO’s Autoplays feature was designed for this exact purpose. Design custom sales sequences that include phone calls, emails, text messages, and in-person visits. Then receive notifications when it’s time to perform specific tasks, or allow SPOTIO to do them for you.
It’s an incredible time-saver for field sales teams that will also help you connect with more leads, and turn more leads into paying customers.
Set Up A Referral Program
Referrals are some of the best leads around. Want to generate more of them for your company? No problem, just set up and implement a referral program.
There are a bunch of ways to do this. You could, for example, simply incentivize your current customers to share your products and/or services with their family, friends, and colleagues. Trust us, your customers will love a percentage discount or a cash rebate offer. You can partner with other, non-competing businesses to generate referrals, too.
Whatever you decide to do, make sure your referral program is beneficial for all involved. That way people enjoy participating and your B2B sales lead generation efforts soar.
Analyze Your Data
After reading this blog post, you might decide to create an ideal customer profile for your company, invest in content marketing, and build a referral program. You may think about attending a trade show or two as well, and plan to get serious about territory mapping.
Great stuff! Just don’t get so busy that you forget to take stock of your efforts. Are you actually generating more leads? And are those leads high quality or throw-aways?
The only way you’ll know for sure is to analyze your B2B sales lead generation strategy to see if it’s working or not. If it is, double down on your approach. If it isn’t, change tactics.
Improve Your SEO
SEO, short for search engine optimization, is a BIG topic—way too big for this article. But that doesn’t mean it can’t help with lead generation for B2B sales.
By optimizing your website and content with specific keywords, you can increase the likelihood that it appears in Google search results, thus exposing your brand to new leads. When this happens, prospects will come to you instead of the other way around. Win!
Just know that SEO takes time and, usually, a high-quality tool or two. Some of the most popular ones include Semrush, Ahrefs, and Moz.
Run Retargeting Ads
Ready to supercharge your B2B sales lead generation strategy? Try retargeting ads.
According to Instapage, retargeting keeps, “Your brand in front of your potential customers after they have left your website, persuading them to reconsider your offer when they need it.”
Basically, an internet user visits your company’s website, but doesn’t buy anything. Then you run retargeting ads to recapture their attention. The next time they surf the web, they see your ad—maybe on Facebook or a different website—and decide to finally make a purchase.
While this strategy can get expensive, it can be extremely effective because it targets leads who have already shown interest in the things you sell.
Ask For Reviews
Finally, try asking current customers for reviews to increase lead generation for B2B sales.
Why are reviews important? Because 92% of B2B buyers are more likely to buy after reading them. If your company doesn’t have reviews, you’ll have a hard time making sales.
It makes sense. Seriously, when’s the last time you bought something on Amazon without perusing the review section? We’re going to guess never. We all want to make sure the products and services we buy are worth the money. Reviews are great for that.
Many times, all you’ll need to do is ask your top customers for reviews. They love your products/services. They’ll probably be more than happy to share their thoughts with the world. But if not, give them an incentive: 20% off their next purchase, a $25 Visa gift card, etc.
How Will You Get More B2B Sales Leads?
Your company needs leads, which means it needs to invest in B2B sales lead generation strategies. The only question is which of the above tactics will you choose?
We suggest trying a few different approaches to see which works best. The top tactics may surprise you. But as long as they connect you with quality prospects, it doesn’t matter.
To assist your effort, consider SPOTIO. Our solution was specifically designed for field sales teams. As such, it has all the tools field sellers need to generate more leads, build strong relationships, and close a record number of sales—all inside the same platform.
Sign up for a free demo of SPOTIO today to see if it’s the right tool for your sales team.
