B2B lead generation today is highly affected by the fluctuations of today’s economy. Take Europe as an example; the country is facing an economic downturn that leaves businesses within to be challenged with keeping their companies surviving. What more if they want to generate leads for their business?
The paradox here is that how can you attract attention from targeted markets without having to spend more than you should?
To better answer this question, one should look into their current processes and standards of marketing. Businesspeople should study what they have already been doing and what they haven’t tried as of late. According to a blog post in marketo.com entitled Lead Generation: Less is More in Challenging Economic Times, a vast majority of current businesses use this marketing strategy to get more sales (which is good). However, many pass the leads to their inside sales team at a wrong time (which is bad).
What do they mean about passing them at a wrong time? It simply means that the lead has been passed to the sales team in an either too late or too early time frame. What happens is that the lead will be sent back to the marketing team for further evaluation, nurturing, management, and a re-qualification. Marketing people will be dismayed by the fact that all their hard work will have turned to dust.
The article also stated a number of great tips on what should be done to lessen costs and get more sales from leads.
- Determine and agree with your sales team what a Sales Lead actually is.
- Build a funnel that shows the complete flow from Name to Prospect to Lead to Opportunity
- Agree on the ownership and responsibility for each part of the funnel
- Implement a scoring system that will allow you to align the behaviour of the potential lead with your agreed goal of passing only qualified leads to sales
- Develop nurturing strategies and content to nurture Suspects to become Prospects to become Leads etc. This doesn’t have to cost lots of money, often more brain power than budget
- Only pass those leads that meet the agreed criteria from marketing to sales
- In return for only passing those sales-ready leads, get assurances from sales that those leads will be followed-up promptly and agree on acceptable timeframes (e.g. Service Level Agreements, or SLAs)
Through the tips listed above, one should be able to pass leads (although a bit fewer in quantity) but with higher probability of getting a sale out of them. This is the whole concept of getting higher quality leads as it is done in a more precise and delicate manner. One can use such tips to even lower costs from their internal marketing methods to the benefit of the business.
Businesspeople should follow said tips in order to gain higher quality leads and pass it to their sales team at the right time. Through these, you can gain a various array of business leads like software, accounting, commercial cleaning, or even tax leads with the greatest of quality and precision targeting.