Generating leads is the most important part of your sales process. A sales lead refers to either a person or a company who may eventually become your client.
That person is the one who is our potential client. Businesses can gain access to sales leads through various ways such as outbound calling, email marketing, landing pages, trade shows, SEO, social media advertising, word of mouth, etc.
Let’s find out the best ways to generate leads:
What is the importance of lead generation?
Lead generation is essential for both B2B and B2C companies. Leads represent your prospects/ potential buyers in the early stages of the buying process. And the more leads you generate, the higher are the chances that you will be able to transform them into your existing clients.
What is a lead qualification?
Lead qualification helps identify the best sales leads. It is the process where both the marketing and sales team work together to predict or forecast what are the key attributes or characteristics that influence any person’s likelihood to buy a product or a service. Mostly, these attributes could be:
For a person:
- A person’s annual income
- Job title
- Demography
- Psychographics
- Geography
- This person might be using a competitor’s product or service.
For a company:
- A company’s annual sales
- Number of employees
- Website technology
- Marketing technology
- Industry/vertical
Top 12 ways to generate leads
Outbound calls:
When a call center agent reaches out to a potential client to convince him to focus on sales and convince him to buy a product or service it is Outbound Calling. It Majorly focuses on lead generation, telemarketing, fundraising etc.
No matter how inconvenient for sales agents, outbound calls will remain the main component in the lead generation process. Through it, agents can:
- Reach a mass of audience in minutes
- Collect information and verify it in real-time
- Leverage data
- Respond promptly to prospects
- Reinforcing contacts made through various channels
- Get immediate feedback from prospects and decided whether they are qualified for fit leads or not
- Understanding prospect pain points and their expectations from the product or service
- Promoting content to a targeted audience
Email Marketing:
The use of email to develop relationships with clients is in simple terms what email marketing means. Also, it’s a customized commercial message which is sent to prospects of the business. It has a huge scope and various dimensions under it.
Email marketing is one of the best ways to generate leads for many B2B and B2C businesses. But prospects receive lots of emails daily, so you need to adopt creative email marketing with your information being relevant and valuable, to grab their attention and get them to open your email.
Tips for Email Marketing for new business
- Introduce yourself
- Use the positioning statement
- Address their pain points
- Explain the value your product or service is adding
- Mention some big clients you are serving
- Include a product description
- The follow-up and the final reach
Search Engine Optimization
Improving the SEO of your website, to appear on the first page of Google search, for keywords that best describe your service, is one of the highly effective ways to produce leads. The strategy is highly effective because it exposes you to target audiences, who are looking for what you have to, and this would be an excellent opportunity for a higher conversion rate.
Develop your website
You can convert your website into a lead-generating machine if you maximize and enhance the user experience journey on the platform. Having an attractive, user-friendly, and interesting website helps you create a powerful lead funnel that converts prospects to actively interested high quality in making a purchase.
Tips for website development:
- Placing the right CTAs
- Using attractive images
- Choosing an intuitive layout
- And most importantly, fill the website with useful information
Landing Pages
Landing pages are standalone web pages, specifically created for certain marketing or advertising campaigns. Visitors land on these pages, for a distinct purpose, after clicking on an email or an ad from Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, or any other pages on the web. One of the most common uses for it is to capture leads through the use of forms.
Blogs
Maintaining rich content on the company website is yet another form to generate leads. Blogs usually engage with prospects, it reinforces trust, credibility, and confidence that often leads prospects to become customers.
Referrals
Referrals are brilliant when it comes to generating leads. Most of the time, people are influenced by what their colleagues/partners/customers/employees say about any business. So through implementing a referral program, you can guarantee that you will get a qualified lead.
Chatbots
By using chatbots for lead generation, you can collect contact information from visitors through live conversation, engage them at any point of their user journey, allow them to request a phone call, collect leads when you are offline, offer them fun, conversational and engaging ways to sign up for a newsletter or register their account.
Social Media
Social media is an enormous base of leads. More than 40% of the world’s population is on one of the following platforms – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, among many others. These armies of leads may be interested in what you are selling, so take advantage of this coverage and try to make as many connections as you can to acquire more leads. You can use the platform to communicate with prospects, get recommendations from existing clients, post offers, advertise your product or service, and much more. Social media is an effective approach to generate leads both through advertising or organically.
Content Marketing
People love content that is original, useful, and engaging. And by sharing content like infographics, video presentations, and any other high-value and creative content, you are increasing the credibility of your brand, gaining attraction, and increasing the chances of converting prospects into customers.
Paid Online Advertising
PPC ads (pay-per-click), display advertising, and re-marketing advertising are among the most effective paid methods for lead generation. Through it, you can guarantee instant search engine visibility and reach users who are actively looking for what you are selling.
Host webinars
Webinars have become very popular recently, especially for lead generation. These reciprocity online conferences motivate people to join and learn or know something new because it is for free, and you often offer them incentives.
Qualified leads can be divided into two categories, MQL and SQL
MQL:
A marketing-qualified lead (MQL) refers to a lead whose engagement level suggests that he is more likely to become a customer. For example, a website visitor has filled out a web form, downloaded content, or signed up for a newsletter, and then he left the site.
SQL:
A sales-qualified lead (SQL) refers to the lead who the sales team has qualified to become a potential customer. This indication is based on the lead’s immediate interest in a company’s product or service. And those leads typically act within the first 24 hours of discovery. For example, a lead signing up for a free trial on your platform.
Also Read : Top 11 sales team management tips you must know
What are the lead generation challenges that many salespeople encounter?
Despite the fact that there are various methods and channels to get leads, companies still struggle to get them. The following are some common challenges:
- The quality of a lead: You can generate a huge number of leads but still have low conversion rates because the leads are not interested in buying your product or service.
- The limitation of resources: Companies might be restricted by time, money, and/or manpower for lead generation.
- Tracking the ROI from leads: Tracking the effectiveness of a lead generation strategy can be a challenge as well.
- Converting leads to customers: Converting leads into customers might be a challenging task for an experienced sales team as well as around 96% of your website visitors are not ready to buy a product or a service.
Technology to be used for lead management
Using tech solutions like NeoDove, which is an end-to-end tech-enabled platform for communication and leads management, can help you with prospecting, engaging and retaining customers, and increasing the productivity of telesales agents. It offers solutions for outbound calling, inbound marketing, data management, and re-engagement.
Leads generation might not be an easy process, but it is a necessity for many businesses to survive. However, there are tons of methods and approaches to generate leads, you can maintain consistent communication with prospects on social media, attend networking events, or offer incentives such as free trials or products, and always focus on providing a unique experience.
Never rely on one source to generate leads and always strategically plan the process before deploying it.