As with anything, quality is more important than quality. If you focus on quality but do not qualify this new influx of leads your sales team will be stuck making countless phone calls and emails to companies that have no interest in your offering. Or, even worse, reaching out to people who have no decision-making ability.
B2B lead generation can be tough, there can be lots of legwork and lots of chasing down the wrong lead. The majority of B2B marketers consider B2B lead generation to be their biggest pain point. After all the work you do to find the right business for your product and/or service you could be stuck trying to get a leg in the door. But, there are ways to help.
Legwork Can Work
Just because the process is long and tedious doesn’t mean that it can’t work. A lot of the more tedious and long avenues to collect a B2B lead can generate leads, you just need to balance the time spent in generating leads with dollars won.
Emails
Send cold emails to your list of qualified businesses and the corresponding contacts you were able to discover. The key here is to not just send mass emails hoping someone opens and responds or goes to your site. But, personalize the email to the best of your ability. It is still apparent that someone is sending you a cold email, but if there is effort there to personalize the subject, email message and offer, they are more likely to respond or visit your site.
Live Chat
Setting up a live chat on your website can be a great way to field inbound leads. Now, this may not be the right choice for every business depending on their offer and the resources available. But, for those for whom it is a good fit, it is a great way to collect lead information, answer any questions or concerns, and schedule a meeting to go over information in greater detail. Live chats are also very easy to add to your site and implement, there is a good chance that the CRM you are currently using offers a live chat feature.
Business Directories
Listing your business on directories and review sites such as G2, Capterra, and more is a great way to get in front of your target audience. The Amazon effect has penetrated the B2B market where reviews are king. So when someone goes to consider a new product or service they are very likely to look at reviews. These business directories allow you to see the business you are interested in, get information on their offering (that you put on your profile), see competitors, and compare their pricing and reviews to competitors.
Email Signature
Everyone uses email signatures, and if you aren’t… you should be. Your email signature shouldn’t only contain your name, email, phone number, and position. You should also include a link to a promotion, content from your site, or a way to connect “face to face” to learn more. If someone wants to contact you they already have your email, but what they don’t have is information on who you are or why it matters, so point them in the right direction.
Q&A Websites
Q&A websites such as Quora are a great way to get in front of people looking for a solution to their problems. The best part is you can filter by their problems and look for the ones you and your product and/or service can solve. By answering these questions (with a minimal emphasis on promotion) you can build yourself up as a knowledge leader in the space. By building trust in these communities more and more people will look at what you sell. Of course, there are times and places to promote your business, but this should be an afterthought. Your profile and title will say where you are from, so there is no rush on promotion. Become a leader and others will follow.
Blogging
Even in 2024 blogging is a great way to get information you are looking for and answer questions you may have. By helping boost your website’s SEO score and generating more website traffic you will in turn generate more leads. This is not an overnight solution as SEO is a long game and requires continuous commitment. As becoming a leader on Q&A sites brings people back for answers, a well-crafted blog will do the same. The content does not have to be specifically relevant to your offering, but issues in the general industry you’re in are a great way to cast a wider net of relevant traffic.
Webinars
Webinars are immensely popular and we saw a surge in popularity during COVID. These are a great way to immediately see who is interested in what you are offering, educate your attendees, see who has questions, and follow up with them afterward. There are dozens of tools in the market that help you with webinars. These tools let you set up, host, and run your webinar, all you need to provide is the content you wish to discuss.
As you can see, there is no shortage of ways to generate business leads, but many of these methods take a considerable amount of leg work, planning, effort, and creating content. These efforts should be undertaken by most businesses as regular campaigns to passively generate qualified leads. It should be mentioned that each of these methods creates not only different amounts of leads but also different types.
Business Leads
There are three types of leads and these types of leads can be formed by any of the B2B lead generation methods but certain methods are more likely to generate a specific type of B2B lead. The three types of leads are:
- Hot Leads – The lead is ready to purchase, they have a need and budget.
- Warm Leads – The lead is fairly confident they are going to purchase. They have the need and budget and are sampling other offers.
- Cold Leads – The lead is not ready to purchase or is unaware of you, your offering or that they have a problem.
All of these types of leads are able to be birthed from any method of generating business leads. However, some methods have a higher percent chance of generating a specific type of lead. For example, a webinar is a great way to generate warm leads. In this scenario, the lead is aware of who you are, and what you offer, and is interested, but may be in the webinar for more information while they trial competitors.
How Cleanlist Helps
As you have come to see there are multiple ways you can generate business leads for your sales team. But, we left out another way. You can obtain a business list. This is a process where you find a business that specializes in lists and you give them the criteria you are interested in (geographic regions, number of locations, revenue, etc.) and then you buy that list of businesses. This way you make sure you are targeting the businesses you should be targeting and you leave out some of the leg work.
This is a great strategy if you don’t have a large database currently, you are making a new campaign for a different business type, or you want to have a large list to target. This is what Cleanlist specializes in, generating business data for you and your business. As Cleanlist has the largest database for Canadian businesses we can help you supercharge your marketing efforts. Additionally, we can update, enrich, and provide regular maintenance to your list to ensure you always have the most up-to-date data for your sales team and never run out of leads.
