Get on top of your lead generation activity with advice from Daryl Jay, business development director at Marketscan
Lead generation has always been an essential marketing task. But recent changes in the buying process, increased digitisation and an ever more demanding market mean a strategic approach to lead generation and lead nurturing has never been more important.
But how do you go about prioritising where to focus your efforts in your bid to build leads that have a greater likelihood of converting? It can seem a complicated procedure involving cross-departmental collaboration, the overhauling of work processes and reassigning KPI measures, but it’s important to recognise the opportunity rather than focus on the challenge.
This five-step guide allows you to go back-to-basics, highlighting five areas to focus on if you want to deliver better leads.
1. Prioritise data quality
The starting point of any worthwhile lead generation exercise always has to be data. Your dataset is your business, and it pays to ensure it is as well organised as possible. Common barriers to success include incomplete records, duplication, out of date data and a lack of process for members of staff charged with maintaining and adding to records. It pays to assign data integrity responsibility to specified internal champions. They can then lead the process, advocating the value associated with ensuring data is well maintained and well respected. There are no prizes for burying your head in the sand with data.
It can also be tempting to try and ensure your database is as large as possible but quality and quantity are rarely synonymous, and lead data is no exception. Be strict when segmenting your data. Allow only fully verified, complete records into your main active database. There’s no point addressing 50,000 people if you only really know a fraction of them.
2. Work with sales
The old marketing versus sales model is dead. The companies performing best in the era of digital marketing are the ones that have managed to renegotiate the battle lines. Indeed, it’s hard to see how any serious business can expect to move forward without its marketing and sales teams pulling in the same direction.
When it comes to generating, nurturing and – ultimately – passing over the highest quality usable leads, this cross-departmental collaboration is absolutely essential. Although team structures differ from business to business, it is possible to follow best practice steps that should be applicable in most organisations.
First of all it’s preferable if buy-in is secured from both sides. Once that’s in place it’s essential to document exactly what marketing thinks a lead looks like and what sales thinks a lead looks like. Nurturing and lead scoring are your friends here. With an effective agreement in place it will mean leads are only passed to sales when they are ready. And that more of them will convert.
3. Think people, not leads
When discussing leads there’s a real danger of forgetting that the records being generated and pushed through your funnel are actually the names of real people. They are people with unique objectives and challenges, needs and requirements. Treat them as such when planning the content that will form the core of your demand generation and lead work.
Before you start penning your content, commissioning copywriters and thinking about design and delivery, make sure you know exactly who you’re hoping to engage and what they want to consume. Get under the skin of the challenges they face. Creating personas is a relatively easy way to ensure your messages are being crafted in a way that means they’re likely to resonate with their intended recipients.
If you can become a trusted content partner and source of inspiration for your prospects, they will happily make their own way down the funnel.
4. Integrate everything
There’s little doubt that inbound marketing has breathed much needed new life into B2B lead and demand generation. Many companies have been able to add real value to the markets in which they operate by following best practice content marketing advice. And, as mentioned above, that’s a great way to build solid leads.
However, focusing on inbound marketing at the expense of more traditional methods isn’t necessarily going to bear fruit when it comes to lead generation. Email, DM and even telemarketing all still have their place when it comes to generating quality leads. Once again, it all comes down to the individual people you’re trying to reach.
The most sensible way to approach lead generation is to adopt an integrated model. Only when all your marketing efforts dovetail and direct people to the right messages, as and when they want them, can you regard your efforts as being entirely efficient. Know what works where, and never do anything for the sake of it.
5. Have patience
As any good salesman knows, nothing is likely to scare off a potential sale quicker than a lack of patience. The same is true for lead generation and nurturing. Quite simply, people will only be ready to buy – or even move in the direction of purchase – when they are good and ready, and this is especially true in B2B markets where you are potentially asking people to put a great deal of money and their professional reputation on the line.
The imperative to hit KPIs, lead targets and revenue figures in any given quarter can sometimes feel all encompassing. But patience is a virtue, and the best leads – the ones that convert and come back for more – are very rarely created overnight.
