Growing a business is tough today. B2B organizations deal with intense competition, crazy-busy buyers, and long sales cycles. Today’s B2B sales process requires a much higher level of cultivation and engagement. With multiple buyers, conflicting priorities and complex decision making-processes, focusing on awareness is just not enough.
The B2B sales process requires perseverance and tactical planning in order to get in front of key decision makers at the right time.
Often when we start working with a new client, we find that their marketing efforts are out of balance. They may have invested heavily in lead generation, but don’t have a strong program for nurturing those leads and turning them into sales. Or, they attend lots of trade-shows, but they don’t have a follow up plan for engaging those new prospects.
As someone who’s worked with mid-sized businesses, I’ve learned a thing or two about bootstrapping growth initiatives. Over the years, I’ve found three effective strategies for supercharging B2B lead generation efforts:
- Put More Focus on Lead Generation
How well are your lead generation programs performing? Be honest.
Need more leads for your sales pipeline? You are not alone! Most B2B companies find that generating leads is the biggest challenge they face. The purpose of lead generation is to start your sales process.
Ae you dramatically increasing your lead generation results? It’s vital to keep a constant flow of highly targeted leads. More quality leads, means more sales.
It’s really important to spend more energy and reallocate resources (if necessary) to lead generation and lead management. Improving the quality of your lead generation is a very valuable leverage point when looking to accelerate your growth.
Solving your lead generation issues and building a consistent, predictable lead generation machine requires a holistic approach that ensures your strategies and sales and marketing processes are all aligned towards a clear objective.
- Increase Your Focus on Nurturing Leads
You need to align your customer acquisition process to the journey of your buyer. This means you need to develop and implement effective nurturing programs and processes.
Lead nurturing increases the likelihood that a prospect will buy from you, and the average value of what that customer will buy. This means higher closing ratios that allow you to meet your growth targets without adding to costs!
- Leverage The Use of Content In Your Sales Process
The B2B sales process is too complex to rely on people alone. The Zero Moment of Truth has radically changed how customers assess their situations and pursue potential solutions.
Content Marketing Increases Lead Generation, Sales, and ROI. If you’re not developing and utilizing content to leverage your sales team’s efforts, there is no way to grow without dramatically increasing the cost of growth. Content marketing should be customer-focused, not brand-focused. It should seek to answer questions across the buyer’s journey.
Delivering content your audience wants.
Developing a successful content marketing strategy requires a degree of diversity and experimentation to understand where the biggest growth opportunities are for your business.
Develop content for different stages of your buying process. From email campaigns to blog posts, your audience is consuming your content from all over your sales funnel.
It’s important to deliver content that your audience wants. Figure out what your audience needs/wants and position yourselves as the solution. The offer really is key. So if you want to improve your marketing–for lead gen or anything else–that’s a great place to start.
Think about the questions your prospects might be asking before they ever consider your product or service as a possible solution. Then, articulate the impact that problem (or issue) has on others. Regardless of which tactic you use, the focus of your message needs to be on the results you create, and it must challenge and provoke the curiosity of your desired target.
Whether you use microsites, blogging, or case studies, the important thing is to test what does and doesn’t work so that you can gradually refine your lead generation over time. The messaging in your content must be refined to match buy cycles, market maturity, personas, value props, etc.) to yield the best result.
I think the best form of content is the blog. A blog, is more likely to appear in search results than any other form of content. A blog is a great tool for engaging and building your audience.
Blogging makes it easier for search engines to find your business and makes it more likely people will like or follow you on social networks. By the time a potential lead is ready to engage with your content –– he is looking for information. Provide it. Establish yourself as the expert by providing a steady stream of value, and the leads will come to you.
Blogs can help you nurture leads and relationships throughout the customer lifecycle. If the content you post is great, you will receive repeat visitors. Providing regular, valuable content to your network will increase awareness.
Need blogging ideas? Try brainstorming blog ideas with your team members who are in the closest contact with your customers.
Exceptional lead generation results come from a relentless willingness to experiment with different tactics, and to combine tactics across multiple channels. You’ve got to employ numerous lead generation tactics, working together, in order to create lead momentum. By experimenting, you will truly know what does and doesn’t work, and when you know this, you can use your time and budget more effectively to generate higher returns on your investment, and better lead generation results.
If you want to grow and grow fast, you need to prioritize your lead generation strategies and use tactics like the ones we’ve recommended above to get as many qualified prospects as possible into your funnel.
As you start to take advantage of these insights, you will start to find the good leads in your audience, and your teams will start taking better care of them.
Please join the conversation. We‘d love to hear how you’ve supercharged your lead generation efforts! Leave any questions you have in the comments!
My blog helps B2B businesses who want to get more clients.
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