In today’s modern and fast-changing world, the process of lead generation has become more complex than it has been in the years before. Simply gathering prospects’ contact information and following up with them has evolved into a sophisticated and targeted strategy.
Some companies invest in telemarketing services that target a different population than the one they usually serve. For example, did you know that pharmaceutical companies spend millions each year on lead generation processes that specifically target pregnant women?
There are many more examples you are about to see in this guide. And now, let’s start with the basics.
What is a Lead?
A lead is any person who expresses an interest in the company’s products or services in any form. You can start communication with them to explain more about the value they can get.
After opening the communication, leads are more likely to hear back from you if they submit their personal information. They will give you their information in case you offer a free trial or a great offer. How exactly do you become a lead?
Let’s say you fill out an online survey regarding taking care of your vehicle. A day later, you receive an email from the auto company describing how they can help you take care of your car.
It would be less intrusive than if they called you randomly and asked about your car maintenance requirements, right? Very few people would enjoy that conversation.
However, the data that the auto company collects via your survey responses can tailor the communication to your specific needs. If you are a business, do not waste your time calling leads who aren’t interested.
Not all leads are not created equal. You can classify different types of leads based on their lifecycle stage and qualifications.
What is a Lead Generation Process?
There are two types of processes to generate leads – inbound and outbound. Let’s find out how lead generation fits in the inbound marketing strategy.
A visitor first discovers your business via one of your marketing channels, such as your blog, website, or social media pages.
The visitor follows your call to action (CTA), an image, button, or message encouraging website visitors to take some type of action. The CTA links to a landing web page. This page is intended to collect lead information and provide an offer.
Note: An offer refers to the content or something of value being offered on the landing page. It could be an ebook, course, or template. Visitors must perceive enough value in the offer to give their personal information to gain access.
Your visitor will fill out the form once they have reached the landing page. Although forms are usually hosted on landing pages, they can technically be embedded on any page. Voila! Voila!
You now have a lead. You can get more as long as you follow best practices for lead-capture forms.
Do you see how it all fits together?
Let’s summarize. A visitor clicks on a CTA to take them to a page to fill in a form to receive an offer. At that point, you have generated a lead.
Sales Lead Generation Process
The sales lead generation process is strongly associated with outbound and inbound marketing practices. Yet, we need both to see the whole picture. The most effective way to do that is by analyzing the actions most marketers and their sales team take.
Marketers are known for their ability to create content. However, very few mention the efforts of sales development teams to attract customers. What are these sales teams doing to attract new leads?
If we observe Google’s “lead generation” search results, we can find blogs and articles dedicated to content marketing, SEO, and newsletters that dominate other search results.
Marketers and their sales teams are fully committed to content marketing and write most of Google’s impacts on the “lead generation process.”
Yet, what else do these sales teams do to attract new leads?
Cold calling or telemarketing is one of the most widespread outbound methods for lead generation marketing. This method allows you to contact consumers directly via phone, unlike other advertising methods. When calling someone on the phone, you better prepare for an adverse reaction.
Telemarketing is not a popular strategy because most potential clients don’t like calls from strangers. Still, that should not stop you from trying this method.
Although you and your employees should treat every customer individually, it’s essential to have a structure for your calls. Your sales team must convince the customer that you offer the right products and services. When calling a stranger on the phone with an offering, you’d better have a script.
Microsoft Business Hub recommends that you make a phone script and follow it. These documents give employees basic guidelines to follow when answering phone calls. Wendy Weiss, author of Cold Calling for Women – Closing Sales and Opening Doors for Women, points out that workers should not use their scripts for specific conversations.
Prospect and Blitz
The Harvard Business Review recommends that you split your cold-calling efforts into two tasks. Prospecting leads and then blitzing top prospects.
You should complete the first task before moving on to the second. That allows you to identify the top leads and make it easier for you to reach them.
According to the news, you shouldn’t do source prospecting too soon. Blitzing is time-consuming. You might want to wait until the evening or morning to prospect customers before they are busy.
Rejection is part and parcel of the blitzing stage. Encourage your employees not to give up, even after several unsuccessful calls. However, cold calls may not always work for everyone.
Nevertheless, persistence is essential. If you keep calling prospects enough, they might eventually open up to you if you are persistent and don’t quit.
What is a Lead Generation Campaign?
Have you ever wondered what a lead generation campaign is? If you are dealing with marketing content, you already know the answer. Yet, a lead generation campaign is a campaign that generates leads for your business. That also means your campaigns convinced someone to leave their personal information.
Then, you can reach out to them again to nurture them hoping that they become a customer one day.
A few things are necessary when you build a lead generation campaign. That includes a clear goal, clearly defined audience, content or offer, budget, measurement, and nurture.
It’s not hard to understand why online lead generation is key to your success, right? Because without generating new leads, your business starts to slow down.
In the next point, we will break down creating a lead generation campaign into ten crucial steps.
Lead Generation Tutorial
It is hard to build a lead generation campaign that runs smoothly and at the same time performs well. If you want to achieve that, you’ll need to follow the following steps:
- Establish an apparent objective – how many leads per day/month do you need? Exactly when do you need to be successful? What’s your cost per lead goal?
- Research your audience – who is your best customer? Do you expand this pool?
- Plan your content – what content does your consumer want? A free trial? a discount, or an offer of some type?
- Create an offer – get creative with your content, your creatives to promote the content, and more.
- Promoting your content – choose the proper channels; Where do you spend your budget, and where your campaign performs best?
- Optimize your lead capture – measure and optimize as you go.
- Test – if something isn’t working, try something new.
- Lead score – not all leads are equal. Develop a mechanism, so you know who is worth nurturing and following up with.
- Nurture – keep a warm relationship with the valuable leads for you.
- Close deals
How to improve your sales process and lead generation? Well, you need to do a couple of things to achieve that result.
For example, improve the design and copy of your landing page while keeping things simple, clear, and compelling. You can also enhance your offers according to the buying cycle.
Final Words
The process every business owner has to go through to generate leads is individual. You found different approaches and steps in the article that may benefit your business. The most important part was the last point because success is likely to follow if you implement the steps.
Promoting your content and developing mechanisms is not an easy task. Yet, not every business owner can implement the steps and achieve success, and that’s normal.
Always keep an open mind for collaborations with professionals in that field. Choose wisely the ones that have previous successful results with lead generation campaigns. And remember, shoot for the stars.
Good luck!