Lead generation: The key to success in sales

Lead generation is a process in the marketing area, which involves capturing and stimulating people’s interest in a specific service or product, with the intention of developing a sales channel. Therefore, the generation of potential clients can be part of B2B and B2C marketing, since this process is developed through an active approach oriented to the growth of your company. Lead generation tactics allow your business to focus on building business relationships with qualified prospects, rather than dispersing communication to a group of consumers who are not potential customers and therefore will not become end customers.

However, in such a competitive environment, the work of generating leads becomes challenging for companies, since one of the first milestones when starting to work is to determine the key performance indicators or KPI’s, since choosing them is essential. to be able to keep track of the evolution of the demand generation strategy during and after its implementation. On the other hand, many companies have to deal with the difficulty of building a message that covers the entire target audience, since the challenge is knowing what type of information and format to send to each segment of the contact base. In addition, detecting what stage they are in is vital to generate a content map and thus add value at each key moment in a strategic way.

To create a lead generation campaign, the first action you must take is to analyze the needs and resources of your company. After this first step, let’s review the two paths and their tools in B2B and B2C campaigns to achieve good results in this competitive world of demand generation:

1. B2B campaigns

To start a B2B campaign, the first fundamental strategy is to have a good team of sales representatives, since thanks to the technological infrastructure itself and the people on the team, the process of capturing leads is easy to optimize and streamline. In addition, these sales representatives are trained in call management, so their work will undoubtedly be very agile, in addition to validating and qualifying leads.

This direct contact strategy must have a clear and defined objective. In the case of capturing leads, the objective will be the generation of valuable information for the brand, always based on its needs with respect to its customers. To do this, it is possible to start from the brand’s own databases or those acquired by it.

Another of the tasks of this team is to record all the interactions carried out in the process of capturing leads. Through this information that is generated in the interaction with the potential client, it will be possible to find out very useful information for the brand, which can give us data on the behavior of potential clients, their opinion regarding the brand, disagreements, availability of products and services, what are their current needs in the market, etc.

A fundamental support for the sales team is the pre-sales engineer. A professional who is in charge of explaining to the client which products or services are the ones that best meet their needs and expectations and locate the opportunities to improve a project; since there are clients who are unaware of the need to apply a specific solution to meet their corporate goals.

BANT: Quality vs. Price

The BANT methodology is the most proactive and effective way to find out if a potential client is really interested in the product or service you offer and was developed by IBM. But let’s see what this acronym means and its requirements:

• Budget (Budget): Does the client have an assigned budget for the project?
• Authority (Authority): Is the contact a decision maker or an influencer?
• Need: Is there a real customer need for our product/service/solution?
• Time (Time): Does the client have a project implementation deadline defined?

It must be taken into account that this methodology takes into account the budget and also explores in greater depth and interest the problem that has motivated the decision to evaluate a B2B solution. 

2. B2C: Digital Tools on the Path to Success

According to a survey of marketing leaders that generated HubSpot’s State of Marketing, 50% of professionals surveyed consider lead generation campaigns to be a priority in their marketing strategies. marketing. Likewise, in said report, the specialists were asked to name their main priority during the next 12 months. 34% mentioned lead generation as the most common answer. Lead generation outpaced increased customer satisfaction (22%), increased brand awareness (19%), and more deals closed (14%).

Given the above scenario, it is essential to be clear about the essential tools to take into account, and thus obtain that long-awaited success in the lead generation campaign, but let’s review as a second strategy what are those 4 key digital tools in lead generation :

Email

Email is an excellent starting point to reach people who know your brand, since it is easier to ask them to complete a specific action, because they have previously subscribed to a certain list. Compared to global email marketing campaigns, lead nurturing will help you get to know your contacts or leads little by little, so that when the time is right you will be able to send the right message to the right person. Email marketing messages must follow a certain logic, not only being optimized for direct conversions, but also for engagement. The commitment can be divided into emotional towards the brand and behavioral (with a present or future action).

Active recipients must demonstrate interactive engagement with emails (click on emails, read, reply). This activity is taken as a signal that the messages are interesting and cause a reaction. Each action should represent a step towards conversion.

Memorable Ads

If you want people to be moved to take your product or service, it’s critical to make sure your landing page and offer are clear and accurate about what you promised in the ad, and that the action is detailed. what do you want them to do

Content

A good starting point is to create a blog, because if it is eye-catching and with relevant and current content, it will arouse the interest of the user and, as a result, generate successful leads. Companies like  Impact found that 70% of the population prefers to learn about products through an article instead of an advertisement.

Social networks 

It is essential and key to decide in which social network the company will have a presence. It’s important to be strategic and only invest effort in networks that fit your industry and marketing goals. Aspects such as the dynamics of users in the social network, the brand and business objectives, the type of segmentation, the tone and language that we will use for our brand in digital media, in addition to conducting research on the industry and the metrics it offers the social network, will guide us to decide which are the best options to continue the course of the lead generation campaign.

Based on our experience in demand generation campaigns with our clients, we have reached the countries of the Latin American and Central American regions developing effective campaigns in which we have found:

• Qualified potential clients: In one quarter we have managed to capture 100 qualified leads for our B2B clients in Latam.
• Data management: We captured more than 2,386 quarterly companies around the regions of Latin America and Central America.
• We have generated around 120 quarterly appointments with potential clients and 180 scheduled appointments.
• The success rate of our demand generation campaigns averages 10% over an updated universe of accounts nurtured by marketing.

 What are you waiting for to implement a lead generation campaign in your company?

We know the importance of lead management in your company, and we also know that a correct strategy is one of the first steps to success. At Isource Marketing we are ready to help you start that campaign towards your business goals and a successful closing of sales. We have a highly qualified team and more than 15 years of experience as a strategic partner. Contact us!