What is lead generation?
Lead generation meaning is the ability to leverage different marketing channels in ways that will help you to find new business opportunities in a chosen market.
To generate new leads for your business, you need to find creative and innovative ways to attract decision makers and key business influencers. You should consider presenting messaging that will demonstrate ways that you can help business executives to solve challenges they may be facing.
What lead generation channels deliver the best results?
Strong B2B lead generation channels include LinkedIn, marketing automation, search optimization, direct email, retargeting, industry websites and publications, appointment setting, telemarketing, and online executive events. Ideally, you should consider having all channels working together to maximize engagement and to help create an optimized lead generation model.
What is a marketing lead generation process?
A marketing lead generation process involves mapping out the overall sales requirements of your business and then working out which marketing channels will be used to deliver the results. You should focus on marketing channels that are capturing interest in ways that can help in developing a sales pipeline that can support your sales team.
How is lead generation done?
Today, there are many different marketing channels available that can be used to generate leads for your business. If generating B2B leads is your focus, using a combination of inbound and outbound lead generation channels is often the best way to develop a process of attracting prospects to your business and increasing their interest through nurturing.
Who needs lead generation?
Every business needs some type of lead generation process to be successful. Whilst referrals and business introductions are important, relying on those channels solely can present real challenges if they are the only way that you attract new business. Investing in lead generation can have a significant uplift in generating new revenue and often means your sales team are not wasting time and resources trying to chase new prospects.
How important is lead generation?
In short, lead generation is probably the most important activity that any business can invest in. If you are generating new business opportunity, successful lead generation strategies will be the heart of its foundations. It is critical for every business to develop a lead generation process that builds visibility, credibility, trust, and interest from a specific group of prospects (potential leads).
What is the process of lead generation?
Every business needs to create a lead generation model that will deliver the types of new business opportunities they require to be successful. The process of lead generation starts with understanding the amount of new business customers your company requires in any given year. Once identified, you should consider working back from that goal to calculate how many leads your business needs to generate, based on your close rates, sales cycle, and sales teams’ ability.
What is a lead provider?
Any company that offers a service, tool, or product that you can use to source more leads for your business is considered a lead provider. As with all things in life, some lead providers are better than others and have more experience in managing campaigns to discover and qualify customers for businesses. To be considered seriously, a lead provider should guarantee their results and stand behind the quality of the leads they provide.
Why are leads important?
If you rely on new business revenue, then lead management is important; in fact, it is vital to your company’s success. Without generating leads, your sales team will tend to struggle to meet their targets and your business will struggle to maximize its position over its competitors. Maximizing lead generation will allow you to make connections with new prospects outside of your existing customers and business network.
What is an appointment setter?
The process of appointment setting involves using a call strategy or call script with the objective of arranging appointments for sales representatives. In Australia and New Zealand, local callers are preferred over offshore callers. The use of local callers can make a significant difference to the appointment setting results able to be achieved.
What does an appointment setter do?
Appointment setters learn as much as they can about the company, they are setting appointments for. They contact leads, often on cold calls, and have conversations with prospects to determine interest in a product, service, or solution. Good appointment setters are very good at navigating past gatekeepers, having natural conversations with prospects and protecting the brands they represent.
What is a lead generation specialist?
A lead generation specialist is a professional that operates in B2B industries and given the responsibility of acquiring and evaluating new leads for a client or company. Good lead gen expert will generally have many years working across different B2B industries. They will have built up experience in a lead generation role, understanding the best type of lead generation process to suit the specific requirements of the client they are working with.
Is lead generation sales or marketing?
Lead generation is a blend of sales and marketing. It involves developing a marketing lead generation process with the sole focus of generating new business enquiries for a company’s sales team. In budget terms, lead generation normally sits within marketing, but given much of the conversion of leads to sales sits within the sales team, sales departments are a vital part of lead generation success.
What is B2B lead generation?
B2B lead generation is the process of identifying the ideal customers for your product or service, then attracting them to buy. B2B corporate lead generation goes a step further; it is usually targeted at senior decision maker levels and requires considerable experience to generate the right type of leads for your business.
Why is lead generation important to a business?
If you look at most successful businesses, lead generation is one of the most important aspects of their success. The ability to target your desired customers at different demographic locations allows you to collect important information about your prospects, their needs, and their preferences. This allows your company to tailor solutions specifically suited to your target audience and ensures you remain relevant and focused based on the feedback you are receiving from your target market.
What lead generation services are available?
There are all sorts of different lead generation services available; telemarketing, appointment setting, digital pay per click, social media selling, search engine optimization to name a few. You really need to understand how your target audience discovers information and then formulate the right strategy to move people through the interest stages to a point where genuine opportunity is determined.
How to create a lead generation engine?
To create a successful lead generation engine, you really need some or all available B2B lead generation channels working seamlessly to ensure your sales and marketing teams are supported and uncovering genuine market opportunities. Whilst not always an easy thing to do, building a solution lead generation engine for your business will be the single most important asset you can create.
What is inbound lead generation?
Inbound lead generation is commonly used by a lot of businesses to find companies looking for their products or services. Inbound channels often include paid ads on search engines such as Google or Bing but can also include placing ads on LinkedIn and other business sites as well as radio, TV, billboards, and outdoor screens. The main premise of inbound marketing is you are waiting for people to enquire about your services.
What is outbound lead generation?
Outbound lead generation allows you to approach a specific group of people, using different strategies, channels, and tactics to capture their attention and move them to genuine interest. Companies that can successfully build an outbound lead generation process can grow exponentially, which is one of the main reasons why outbound lead generation is one of the most favored form of generating leads for businesses.
What types of leads do you generate?
The leads we generate can be varied to suit our client’s needs, based on the amount of leads they require and the size of their sales team. An example of the types of leads that can be generated are as follows:
- Prospects that have agreed to a date and time to discuss the offering with our client
- Registered for online, or in person events
- Have expressed interest but indicate a future need or timeframe to connect
- Requested more detailed information for review with their colleagues
- Downloaded information that indicates an interest in possible solutions
- Have responded to our outreach, indicating an interest or need
- Have responded to our outreach, indicating an interest or need
In all instances, leads generated are:
- With decision makers or key stakeholders that have been approved for our outreach
- Have received multiple touchpoints via digital or calling activity
- They understand what the company/solution does and how it can benefit their company
- They have indicated there is genuine interest to learn more or be contacted to explore the offering in more detail.
Are your leads BANT qualified?
Outbound lead generation can be challenging in the sense that, companies are not usually reviewing providers/solutions on a regular or frequent basis. This means consistent, ongoing marketing activity is critical. Not only to identify short-term opportunities, but to start building relationships with decision-makers early in the process and continue to nurture them over time. This means your company and solutions are well known to the prospect/company, a good relationship is already established and you are front of mind when the company is reviewing options.
Some leads may have an immediate or short-term need. Others will be at a various stage when it comes to considering solutions and partners. All leads are important, as building a relationship well in advance of decision-making generates a pipeline that can be nurtured and converted to an appointment, as and when is suitable for all parties.
How qualified are your leads?
All leads are generated from an approved data set, which has been sent approved content that has been developed in the campaign scoping and set-up phase. They are:
- Decision makers or key stakeholders that have been approved for our outreach
- Have received multiple touchpoints via digital or calling activity
- They understand what the company/solution does and how it can benefit their company
- They have indicated there is genuine interest to learn more or be contacted to explore the offering in more detail.
How many leads should we expect?
All campaigns are assessed on a range of factors prior to commencement and a mutually agreed target and guarantee is set for each campaign or client. Lead volumes vary depending on a range of factors including:
- How well know the company and solution is in the current market
- How the solution competes with others in the market
- How senior the decision-maker titles are within the target audience that we are engaging with on our client’s behalf
- The size of the companies we are targeting
- The call to action and desired outcome, or type of leads to be generated
- The capacity our client has in terms of being able to manage and facilitate leads
- The budget allocated to marketing activities
- The strategies that we are able to implement for outreach
How do you generate leads with people that already have a provider or similar technology?
Often companies we reach out to will fall into two categories. 1. They don’t have a solution in place or 2. They have a current provider.
Presenting the importance and value of regularly reviewing partners and solutions is important. Asking key questions that may uncover gaps in their current situation is also valuable in generating leads.
