Just as consumers use data to scout companies and products before buying, businesses should also utilize data in their lead generation campaigns. Done right, companies who do this achieve data-driven sales and marketing.
Today, data is widely accessible across businesses and their departments. However, according to Forbes, 85% of B2B marketers still consider a lead generation to be a challenge. The issue lies in the way data is used to produce revenue – starting with high-quality lead generation.
The Problem With Lead Generation
The problem with only relying on your email or signup forms to push lead generation is that you don’t fix your primary business challenge.
Not every lead converts to a sales opportunity, especially when sales and marketing are not aligned. For instance, a marketing team may bring in more leads (that are of low quality) and pass them to the sales team. The sales team will actually get discouraged that they can’t close them. This is because both teams fail to utilize their data to the fullest. Most marketers and sales professionals use cold calling and cold emailing – quite a traditional approach. This is why data-driven marketers care about qualifying the leads they get and maximizing sales opportunities – not just top-of-funnel lead generation.
If you are also following the same practice, you need a new plan to utilize the data to generate more qualified leads.
The Right Model for Opportunity Generation
There are three aspects that data-driven marketers use to classify leads that are likely to generate revenue opportunities: qualified, interested, and engaged.
Qualified:
Do the leads you are passing fit your Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) and Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) criteria?
When you are planning to create a lead generation strategy, you need to look at the bigger picture and generate leads that can be a good fit for the sales team. Thus, defining your MQL and SQL is crucial. If you do it right, you are going to achieve your target. However, failing to define your qualification criteria can lose your leads and prospects to your competitors.
Intent:
Are your leads looking to buy or still in an awareness phase?
Your prospects are on the internet, searching for the solution to their business challenges you would be able to solve. They browse online, access content, explore solutions, and find ways to relieve their pain. By recognizing the intent of your prospects, you can determine the buyer’s journey stage they are in. This will help you to produce the right educational content to give them a little boost to progress in their buyers’ journey until they reach the buying stage.
Engage and Nurture:
Have your prospects engaged with your brand or product? If yes, are you nurturing them?
Tracking and analyzing a prospect’s interaction with your marketing campaigns is crucial to identifying their possibilities of becoming a qualified lead. Once you have identified how they have interacted with your campaigns, you can create a nurturing strategy. Why are engagement and nurturing so important for generating qualified leads?
Let’s take an example. Suppose you are selling a SaaS product and running a LinkedIn ad promoting a blog that focuses on how to spend more time selling and less time prospecting. The people who will click on this sponsored content are likely to struggle to spend more time prospecting and looking for a solution. That means people who have landed on your blog are the ones who can become your potential customers. Here, you have identified their pain area. You can again filter them to get audience-specific content, such as a free eBook on sales productivity. Here, you can convert them from unknown prospects to known potential leads.
You need to connect the dots with your data around each of these dimensions to define the highest value leads and to differentiate between leads and subscribers.
Top 5 Data-Driven Lead Generation Hacks Using SalesIntel
Customer acquisition requires an effective marketing strategy. However, lead quality is more crucial than volume. You need to ensure that sales reps can feel confident when they approach your leads that they can meet their needs and make sales.
Since we have been in the B2B business for a long time, we have helped a lot of clients who have a great product or service but missed a lead generation. SalesIntel helped them create a revenue spike that never came down.
Here’s how SalesIntel supports B2B lead generation.
1. The Shorter the Form, the Higher the Chances of Conversions
Asking for too many details in a contact form can drive your prospects away. Marketers often ask a number of questions on their forms to learn more about their leads. By keeping your form short, you are making the first hurdle low so that it can encourage prospects to complete the form. Keep it simple: name, email, and a message box.
SalesIntel helps you to keep your forms short. You can add an email, name, and message field and SalesIntel will automatically append human-verified firmographic data, technographic data, and the direct dials using database enrichment.
2. Understanding the Buyer Intent
Understanding the actions of your prospects and their behavioral triggers helps companies understand what makes them buy and when. Marketing and sales teams may target specific accounts based on buyer Intent Data information and take a tailored approach to increase the probability of closing a deal.
SalesIntel’s Intent Data will help you uncover your prospects’ buying signals by identifying and learning the intent topics that specific accounts are actively researching.
3. Bring Accuracy to Your Account-Based Marketing and Sales Approach
As account-based marketing and sales develop from a cutting-edge strategy to a refined and widely-trusted B2B strategy, more marketers will understand its value and begin to implement it.
Each step you take to implement ABM is data-driven. If your data is poor, unorganized, or inaccurate, you will never have the information you need to make your ABM strategy a success.
SalesIntel provides you with all the valuable information you need about your contacts and accounts to run ABM successfully. You can also add new contacts and accounts using our extensive human-verified B2B data with direct dial numbers and a host of other contact details. Our research-on-demand helps you with the data that you are looking for but missing from our data.
4. Boost Prospecting
You need to make sure that you get reliable B2B data to meet the right decision-makers at the right time. Arming your B2B data intelligence email strategy is by far the strongest combination of old-school marketing and new-age technology to generate more sales in the digital age.
SalesIntel helps you identify and reach the right prospects so that you spend more time selling and less time prospecting or chasing the wrong leads.
5. Boosts Overall Sales Process
Last, a sales process that complements your business, sales representatives, customers, and products or services will allow you to boost sales. SalesIntel helps you get additional information based on firmographic and technographic B2B data, Intent Data, and direct-dials to boost the overall sales process, save time, and reach your revenue goal.
In closing, if you have reliable and accurate B2B data as a base for all your marketing campaigns and sales processes, your lead generation funnel will be filled with leads who are genuinely interested in your products and services.
