How Lead Generation Helps You To Power Your Business Needs!

Lead Generation Helps You to Power Your Business Needs

When you are an entrepreneur, a marketing mantra is constantly buzzing at the back of your mind—draw new customers, generate demand, capture interest, track, reach, engage a target audience. What do you think about this constant buzz? Consumers are, after all, the backbone of any firm.

With the abundance of information and mass advertising strategies available today, competition is almost palpable, and it has become more challenging to capture and engage prospective customers.

This is where lead generation makes your life easier. Lead generation helps you attract, nurture, and convince potential customers who have themselves sought you out!

Let’s get to the root of this exciting opportunity.

Came, saw, conquered (purchase): Understanding the concept of Leads

Leads form an integral part of a company’s CRM and sales process. If you want to breathe some energy into your company’s sales funnel, you have to start attracting leads!

So, what is a lead exactly? A lead is a person or an organization who shows interest in your brand’s products and services. This could be an individual business owner, an organization, or even a business representative.

Inbound and Outbound Lead Generation Are 2 Types of Lead Generation Processes

These individuals or leads usually express their potential interest in your brand. They initiate a conversation through your website or share their personal information with you, such as their contact number or email address or even their social media account details.

Leads are entities that can become potential buyers that bring you business. As such, it is essential for every business to manage and generate leads so as to convert them into customers and eventually increase their client base.

Leads therefore build the foundation of a company’s marketing and sales activities. Generating high-quality leads is a challenging and crucial part of every business.

To survive and thrive in today’s fierce competition, companies are adopting lead generation strategies to acquire leads and stimulate the sales funnel.

Inbound lead generation, as well as outbound lead generation are two types of lead generation processes.

Inbound Lead Generation

Inbound marketing is a customer-centric lead gen strategy that engages leads that have found you out.

At this stage, you should provide these leads with valuable content. Now that you have captured their interest, you also need to nurture these leads through the funnel and bring them closer to the end goal of purchasing.

Outbound Lead Generation

As against inbound leads, outbound leads don’t come to you; instead, you go to them. This is a proactive approach.

For example, you capture their attention by sending out customized emails or calls.

Now, depending on how your leads qualify and their position in the sales funnel, they can be categorized into different types. Let’s explore—

The different types of leads in business

Understanding the Difference Between Leads Help You Focus More on Users Who Buy from You

t is essential to understand the difference between all the leads, as this will help you to focus more on only those leads that are most likely to seal the deal with your company.

Cold Leads

A cold lead is an entity that has not expressed any interest in your brand yet but still fits the bill of an ideal customer. Cold leads are usually generated by lead generation tools or software or are found through personal research.

It is called a ‘cold’ lead because you need to put in a lot of effort to convert it into a successful lead. Also, such leads do not always have the proper budget, time frame, or authority to invest in your brand.

Cold leads are potential leads that you need to turn into prospective buying customers. Companies usually communicate with cold leads through a series of follow-up emails, or calls, addressing their pain points and constantly nurturing their interests through lead generation campaigns.

Warm Leads

Warm leads are already acquainted with the product or service of your business—they follow your blog posts, subscribe to your newsletters, follow your brand on social media, etc.

Warm leads are simpler to influence when compared to cold leads since the potential of a deal closing is relatively high. Furthermore, you require only moderate nurturing to gain profitability.

Hot Leads

Hot leads are known so because they check all the criteria boxes of sales dealings. They’ve indicated an interest in the product and meet all of the criteria for potential clients, which include they have the need, i.e., a pain point which your company can help them solve. They have authority, i.e., they have purchasing power, and they make decisions. Finally, they have the time frame and the budget.

It’s simple to turn warm leads into new sales. You just need to strike the iron when it is hot.

Information Qualified Leads (IQL)

An information-qualified lead is a lead that gets in touch with you seeking some information. An IQL often provides you with personal data such as name, email, location, etc., or you can learn more about them by initiating contact. This way, you can address their query and supply them with helpful information or provide solutions for their pain points.

IQLs form the start of the buyer’s journey and are called cold leads. Your marketing and sales teams should offer valuable information to ignite interest and prompt them into doing business with you.

Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL)

Marketing Qualified Leads Have Expressed Interest in Your Company

Taking hints from the name, marketing qualified leads are leads that have expressed interest in your company through the marketing efforts.

As against IQLs that are first introduced to your business and the product or service you offer, MQLs are roped in through your marketing team’s efforts.

These leads are called warm leads as they have actively shown interest in your brand—they follow your social media, they attended a webinar, among others.

Marketing leads are placed in the middle of the sales pipeline. You can persuade them to agree to the deal if you work hard enough.

Sales Qualified Leads (SQL)

Sales Qualified Leads ( SQL) Are at the Bottom of the Sales Pipeline

Sales qualified leads, also known as SQL, are at the bottom of the sales pipeline. These quality leads are willing to purchase; hence are also known as hot leads.

It is crucial to provide the right prospects and nurturing to influence the purchase decision at this final stage. As SQLs are fully qualified, they are usually handed over to the sales team, who can talk them through the sales process.

Lead your sales pipeline: Understanding lead generation?

The lead generation process is a marketing strategy used to attract and convert ‘leads’ into paying customers. The task lies in capturing and stimulating customers’ interest and increasing their curiosity by nurturing them until they are ready to buy. In the end, your purpose is to develop and lead your sales pipeline.

The more leads you direct towards your sales team, the better are your chances of gaining potential customers for your business. As such, lead generation efforts optimize your brand’s image and value and boost the credibility of your marketing and sales teams.

Let’s consider an analogy. When you plant a seed, it slowly begins to take root. After a few days, it breaks through the soil and sprouts. Let’s consider these tiny sprouts as leads, entities who have shown interest in your business, the tiny bearings of your efforts.

However, your work doesn’t end here. In fact, it is just the beginning. It would be best to nurture the new leads; in this case, the new sprouts until they grow into a plant. The more you nurture during the germination process, the better plants you will grow.

The more you nurture the sales qualified leads, the better you will attract potential customers, and the better you will fuel the sales pipeline.

We live in a fiercely competitive world, and traditional marketing is not enough to draw and engage customers with calls and mass emails. Marketing has got a new face today, and lead generation marketing saves you from becoming that annoying disruptive marketer while also saving you the whooping costs of mass advertising.

With quality leads, you are being found by self-directed buyers who you can qualify as inbound leads.

How to qualify a lead?

How to Qualify a Lead?

Lead qualifying determines if a new lead matches your company’s expectations or requirements to purchase your product or service. The process can take place during initial cold contact, during a sales procedure, or both.

Score your lead

Using a lead scoring model helps you to gather insights into the potential customer without appearing intrusive. It is a useful system to qualify your leads.

With lead scoring, you can gather vital information on their engagement with your business their interest in specific content, among others. This helps you to know more about their pain points.

These insights help you make the initial call, providing them with the business requirement and information they want to hear.

This method assists you in assigning a mark or numerical value that allows you to determine where they sit on a scale that ranges from “interested” to “ready for sale.” You can set the standard, providing your marketing and sales departments are aware of the uniform standards.

BANT

BANT is an acronym for Budget, Authority, Need, as well as Timeframe. It lays out the key areas you need to check off your list to qualify a lead.

However, you need to be careful while obtaining answers to each of these elements. You cannot blatantly ask, “What’s your budget?” This is where SPIN comes into play.

SPIN

The concept of SPIN was created by Neil Rackham—a supporter of “consultative selling.” He indicates the importance of SPIN selling to optimize lead engagement. SPIN selling provides a methodology to the sales team and helps them to ask the right questions during the lead qualifying process.

SPIN is an acronym for Situation, Problem, Implication, as well as Need payoff.

Use advanced lead sales tools

Quality sales tools will streamline your leads qualification process. They help you gain insights into what every lead needs—this, in return, allows you to develop an impactful qualification approach.

How to lead gen: Understanding how companies generate leads for business

How Companies Generate Leads for Business

Buying leads

Depending on the region or business type, there are agencies that sell a repository of qualified lead information. For instance, as a digital media company, you can buy a list of potential companies, i.e., leads who could be interested in digital marketing services.

You will be tempted more than you realize to buy leads. After all, it’s simple and time-saving. However, nothing comes easy. And you know it.

Why is buying leads such a bad idea?

For starters, the leads that you buy don’t know you. They had opted for a different site; you were not their prospect; they were not interested in your product or service. Sorry to be harsh, but let’s face it, they have not signed up to receive anything from your company.

With your purchased leads, you will only be seen as intrusive and disruptive. Isn’t that what you call people who send you unwanted messages?

Organic lead generation is always better rather than buying them. After all, you don’t want to go on a blocklist. That is not how lead generation works.

Google advertising

With this paid service, you can advertise your brand’s website on Google. This form of online lead generation is helpful because your business appears in related searches.

Ads with a straightforward CTA are powerful that instantly encourage people to convert. However, be sure that your landing pages offer what is promised in your advertisement. This is one of the popular lead generation trends today.

Newspaper ads

While we are at ads, another way of generating leads is through newspaper ads. A crystal clear message with your company’s contact information is a powerful channel to attract leads. The newspaper is a reliable source for lead generation.

Webinars, business conferences, events

This is an excellent example of lead generation through referral marketing. Several companies organize large-scale events such as seminars, business conferences, webinars and invite industry experts.

Such events provide the opportunity to guide potential leads. As such, you are generating leads through referral or word-of-mouth and putting your business in the competitive market landscape.

LinkedIn Tool

LinkedIn lead gen has become one of the popular tools used by businesses for lead generation. LinkedIn, with its massive repository of industry professionals, offers a rich platform for leads.

Social media

Social Media Helps to Influence Your Followers into Becoming Leads

Social media provides a massive scope to influence your followers into becoming leads. With easy swipe-up or shop options, you can guide your followers to take action through bio links or bitly URLs on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.

There are several social media campaign tutorials to up your game of lead generation strategies.

The process of ‘closing the leads’

Let’s understand how the promotional marketing channels from the above section start generating leads—

  • The elements mentioned above of lead generation marketing consciously drive traffic to your landing pages in the form of leads.
  • The generated leads express interest in your brand’s product or service and communicate with your company through phone calls or emails.
  • If your company is using a CRM, then the new leads that are generated from various sources are accumulated in the system for further action.
  • When you have many leads generated and captured in the CRM, you need to ‘close the leads’.
  • The process of closing the lead is a screening process where you need to shortlist qualified leads and close unqualified leads for further evaluation.
  • At this stage, your sales reps need to act fast and strike the iron while the lead is still hot. Getting in touch with the leads through email or phone calls is crucial. Gathering the leads’ contact information such as company background and other specific requirements such as budget, the time frame is their priority at this stage.
  • The expertise of the sales team is put to the test when they analyze the leads for assessment. At this stage, it is crucial to evaluate the questions: Does the client’s requirement match the company’s product or service? Does the client’s budget match the company’s price/ expectations?
  •  If the leads meet the above criteria, they become active leads and are converted to Contact/Account for further follow-ups.
  • The active leads are captured in the CRM, and the status of non-qualifying leads is set to dead.
  • This is how you close a lead.

Boost your inbound leads: Step-by-step process to set up your lead generation strategy

How to Set up Your Lead Generation Strategy

The process of lead generation varies depending upon the various business types. However, this is how the process looks in general from start to end—

Researching

The very first step of the lead generation tactics is is to understand and examine your target audience and market effectively. To achieve this, you need to narrow down on the following questions:

  • What type of people is looking at your website, social media platforms, blog posts?
  • What do you know about these visitors? Do you have their names or email addresses?
  • How are they navigating around your website?
  • What kind of info are they looking for?
  • How can you interest them with your products or services?

At this first stage, you have to gain more insights into the website visitors who could become potential customers. Your lead generation strategies should create content that addresses their pain points, which is also engaging and informative. This helps you to generate inbound leads.

Creating

High-quality content is the ultimate ingredient to successful lead generation. Valuable, informative, engaging, useful, downloadable, and shareable—yes, we realize those are a lot of adjectives—but you need it all to generate leads!

Create flavorsome content for your viewers, and don’t forget to garnish it with a solution! And before you know it, you will have a loyal following to your blog posts, newsletters, videos, infographics, social media, or eBooks.

In a nutshell, offer them something they perceive as valuable to gain access for which they are willing to share their personal information.

Promoting

Your content is hot and ready, and now it needs a good tasting. At this stage, you need to start promoting your brand across various business distribution channels. Need help with that? Well, we are sure you have heard of social media like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, Google advertising, or wherever else you think your target audience can find you.

Your goal is to get noticed by existing customers and potential customers—let them find you through a scroll on social media or a simple search on Google.

Learn more about lead gen marketing campaigns and distribution channels in our following section.

Nurturing

So, you have new leads who have signed up for your company’s newsletter or email list. Now, your goal should be to nurture and build a lasting relationship with these potential leads.

There are many ways you can achieve this by carefully guiding them through the sales process and encouraging them to buy.

Some companies also send unique, targeted emails prompting quality leads to use a free product trial or download, etc.

You may also generate leads by guiding visitors to call-to-action (CTA) through your marketing channels such as social media, blog posts, etc.

Lead scoring

Our section on types of leads highlights the need to value some leads over others because not all leads qualify as quality leads.

At this stage, use your lead generation tools to their best capacity. Here you need to rope in your marketing and sales team. They can give information on—

  • Which leads are communicating more with your brand?
  • Which leads are visiting your website regularly?
  • Who is reading your content?

At this stage, your lead gen efforts should focus entirely on profitability.

Handing on

All the above-mentioned steps involve intensive efforts taken by the marketing team. So, be sure to congratulate them. Their marketing tools have brought you to this stage.

Lead generation is mainly about converting subscribers into leads, so it’s now time to hand over the baton from the marketing team to your sales team. This far into the sales funnel, you have to generate interest among the new leads to eventually convert them into sales.

Let your sales team walk them through an enriching customer experience and make prepare them to close the deal.

Evaluating

Lead generation strategies are an ever-evolving process. To maintain an effective lead gen strategy, you should continue evaluating the leads.

  • At which stage in the sales cycle are your leads going cold?
  • How can you keep new leads and potential leads interested?
  • What benchmarks should be met?

Using marketing analytics is an important lead generation tool for lead scoring and evaluation.

Learn from the best: Tips to optimize your lead generation campaigns

A lead generation campaign needs to evolve constantly. You need to continually check which part of your lead gen engine is redundant and which part needs fine-tuning. Let’s observe some tips to build your lead generation campaign—

Use quality lead generation tools

To acquire and manage leads, the most effective marketing teams utilize lead-generating software solutions and a good CRM.

The following tools can help you improve your marketing. These will help you to create valuable content for your site and capture prospective leads:

Advanced CRM

Whether you own a small or large business, investing in an advanced CRM will effectively capture high-quality leads. A good CRM also streamlines the process of lead generation through follow-up and communication tracking.

Lead Generation Software

Young Business Woman Working on a Virtual Screen & Sees the Inscription: Lead Generation

The software tools include features like lead capture, lead flow, and contact insights, among other quality features.

You may want to try these popular picks in 2021:

OptinMonster

Popular for its mobile-friendly system that attracts, captures, and shares marketing leads.

Best features include—

  • Easy integration with major CRM and email marketing platforms.
  • Unique, quality features for a marketing campaign, from page-level targeting to OnSite Retargeting.
  • Powerful and easy setup forms.
  • Mobile-friendly and easy to use.

Lusha

Most sought after for its B2B contacts database.

Best features include—

  • Provides browser extension for Chrome that allows an automatic scan of the profiles you are visiting on social media platforms for up-to-date contact information.
  • Most suitable for marketing teams to gather a sales qualified lead while also boosting campaigns and driving revenue.

HubSpot

In demand for its all-in-one features of marketing, sales, and customer relationship management.

Best features include—

  • Easy integration with CRM
  • Creates automation workflows, email campaigns, and easy management of social media accounts.
  • Most suitable for small businesses who are not yet ready to invest in expensive CRM software and its challenges.

You may also choose from:

  • Outgrow
  • Unbounce
  • ConstantContact
  • Mailchimp
  • Prospect.io
  • Leadfeeder
  • Intercom, among others.

CTA Templates

You may want to try some of the smart, free, and customizable call-to-action (CTA) templates. Including clickable CTA boxes on your website, marketing content, and other areas of your site will assist in converting website visitors into leads.

Visitor Tracking

This is a virtual tool that shows you how a visitor navigates through your site with the help of a color-coded representation. With visitor tracking, you know what information your viewers are seeking, what they care about, what content they are viewing the most, and how much time they are spending. You can ultimately use this information for your surveys, lead generation forms, feedback forms, etc.

Create a dedicated sales team

Sales Team Inputs Will Guide You along Your Sales Funnel

The inputs of your sales team are going to guide you enormously along your sales funnel. Even if you own a small business, it is advisable that you have dedicated marketing and sales teams who will convert an MQL to SQL.

Remember when we said your marketing team needs to hand over the baton to the sales team during the sales process? Well, to improve lead quality, to yield a higher conversion rate, and to measure results of lead generation effectively, you need to evolve relationships with marketing and sales reps.

Define follow-up steps for every single lead, and make sure everyone involved is updated about every single lead.

Use social media marketing

Smart Use of Social Media Platforms is Helpful & cost-effective in Lead Generation

Strategic and smart use of social networks is helpful and cost-effective in lead generation. There are a lot of online lead generation tactics and campaigns to capture leads. For instance, you may want to consider lead generation strategies for the following popular social media platforms—

Facebook Lead Generation

Since its inception, Facebook has offered lead-based strategies. You can use outbound links for your posts and provide information in your bios. A lot of companies use this trend to draw more strangers to their websites.

Since 2007, Facebook has even created paid Lead Ads. The paid ads allow you to use a CTA button, which is right at the top of your Facebook page. With this, you can direct your followers directly to your landing page.

Twitter Lead Generation

By using Twitter Lead Gen Cards in your tweet, you can effectively generate quality leads within a tweet. Users can connect with your brand by simply pulling out the card and filling out contact information like— the user’s name, email address, and Twitter username. They merely have to click on “Submit” without having to leave the site, and voila, you have got yourself a lead!

LinkedIn Lead Generation

We introduced you to this option in our earlier section, but here is a little more that we wish to add. LinkedIn uses Lead Gen Forms, which helps you to generate high-quality leads through pre-filled forms that provide professional information of users with accurate LinkedIn profile data. Furthermore, you can also download leads from LinkedIn’s Campaign Manager and even integrate them with the marketing automation or CRM tool of your choice.

PPC Lead Generation

PPC Is the Acronym for Pay-per-click

PPC stands for pay-per-click (PPC) and refers to the ads on Google or search engine results pages (SERPs). Google gets millions of searches every day – one of the many reasons why it is a major hit for any leads based ad campaign. The success of your PPC campaign depends majorly upon target keywords, search engine optimization, user flow, your budget, and other factors.

B2B Lead Generation Strategy

B2B refers to business-to-business lead generation. It refers to a particular business model with a specific approach that identifies prospective customers for your brand and then uses lead generation to capture their interest in buying.

B2B lead generation is the pillar of B2B sales and marketing activities. Based on HubSpot 2021 Marketing statistics, the majority of the B2B leads come from referrals. 65% of B2B leads come from referrals, while 38% are generated from email marketing, and 33% of leads are obtained from Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Be flexible

Your lead gen campaign needs to be as diverse and dynamic as your prospective customers. Marketing data morphs, consumer behavior changes to the ever-evolving marketing trends—and you should be open and iterate to survive and thrive.

You may want to try the following tips to capture quality leads.—

  • Make the best use of your lead management software
  • Conduct A/B split testing
  • Develop better content for your landing page
  • Evaluate which type of inbound marketing works best
  • Trial and error with design, layout, advertising channels, UX.

In closing

So, there you are! Regardless of whether you have a small or a large business, effective lead generation is a must-have factor to boost sales queries. Your challenge is not only to attract prospective customers but to qualify these leads who have shown interest in your company.

Keep creating CTA content for your landing page, make attractive offers, develop targeted emails, use social media and lead generation software, follow-up with the leads, and never stop testing and growing!

Are you ready to lead?

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