Many small to medium-sized businesses rely on client referrals to grow their book of business. However, it’s not an incredibly reliable source of revenue because it’s not predictable for long-term growth. Lead generation services are a powerful way to fill your sales pipeline and generate new sales opportunities, but many companies minimize its impact.
Throughout this blog, we’ll provide answers to the following questions:
What Is B2B Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is a business growth process companies follow to engage potential buyers and convert them into customers.
Lead generation can be practiced through various business growth approaches, from outbound sales development to inbound marketing. Outbound lead generation is when sales development teams reach out to prospects in your target audience and pitch your product or service. They can do this through cold calls, sales emails, or connecting with prospects on professional networking platforms like LinkedIn. Outbound lead generation aims to secure a sales appointment between the prospect and an account executive on your sales team.
Inbound lead generation is a digital marketing approach companies follow to bring potential buyers to their business. Inbound lead generation involves practicing digital marketing strategies like search engine optimization (SEO), search engine marketing (SEM), and social media marketing. If an interested user sees the value in what your company has to provide, they can submit their contact information to schedule a sales meeting or sign up for additional sales and marketing materials. From here, sales development teams can follow up with the inbound marketing leads to explore if they’re also a qualified sales lead.
Not sure which approach to lead generation is best for your business? Read our blog here for insight on the best lead generation strategies for your small to medium-sized business.
Why Do Companies Use B2B Lead Generation Services?
B2B lead generation services provide growing businesses with significant benefits, including the opportunity to:
Build Their Sales Pipelines
Using lead generation services empowers growing companies to build and sustain their sales pipelines, and having a sales pipeline is essential for engaging potential buyers in your target market. With a sales pipeline, you find new prospects, build relationships with high-quality leads, and secure more sales appointments with qualified prospects who are ready to buy.
Learn what it means to build a sales pipeline (and how to do it) by reading our blog here.
Generate More Sales Opportunities
While many companies can generate interested leads, very few convert them into sales opportunities. That’s usually because they don’t have a lead qualification strategy in place to make sure the leads they’re connecting with meet their sales qualifiers. Lead generation services let small to medium-sized businesses generate more sales opportunities that will likely result in closed business.
Are you generating leads but struggling to close sales? Lead nurturing may be the missing piece of your B2B sales process. Learn how to nurture leads in the sales pipeline here.
Forecast Sales
When you use lead generation services, you have the opportunity to start forecasting what sales opportunities are on the horizon. Sales forecasting allows you to make crucial financial business decisions, so you don’t negatively impact your company’s bottom line.
Get a Higher ROI
Overall, using lead generation services allows you to get a higher ROI for your business. Building your sales pipeline and routinely interacting with prospects allows your company to keep new opportunities coming in so you can consistently to grow your business.
How Do Outsourced Lead Generation Companies Support Growing Businesses?
Implementing and sustaining a lead generation strategy isn’t easy. It requires a team of sales development and marketing experts to ensure high-quality leads don’t fall through the cracks. Additionally, practicing lead generation can take a significant amount of time and cost a lot of money if you want to generate long-term results.
Today, many small to medium-sized businesses outsource their business growth efforts to third-party lead generation companies. Outsourced lead generation companies provide continuous support to growing businesses because they’re tasked with the following:
Find High-Quality Prospects
Outsourced lead generation companies are responsible for finding high-quality prospects for your sales pipeline. While there are many ways they can approach this, they often find prospects by using list building tools like ZoomInfo and D&B Hoovers. Additionally, they use past campaign data from clients that serve a similar target market. This ensures that data is as up-to-date as possible, potentially reducing the time a prospect spends in the sales funnel.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our sales operations analysts use various approaches to get new prospects in our clients’ sales pipelines. While we use the best sales prospecting tools in the market, we also take data from past campaigns to ensure our sales development representatives (SDRs) pitch the right decision-makers for our clients. We keep all prospect contact information stored in our customer relationship management (CRM) platform so it can be accessed by anyone on the client’s SDR team in real-time.
Practice Lead Qualification
As we mentioned earlier, lead qualification is vital for lead generation. Lead qualification ensures SDRs set account executives up with sales meetings that meet their ideal customer profile (ICP) and are likely to convert into customers.
Lead qualifiers vary from business to business. As SDRs qualify leads in the sales pipeline, they confirm the prospect:
- Company name
- Company location
- Company size
- Decision-maker name
- Decision-maker email address
- Decision-maker direct phone number
Gathering this information ensures that the prospect is qualified for a company’s product or service offerings. Without a lead qualification process in place, SDRs risk wasting time chasing prospects that have no opportunity to convert into a customer.
When a client signs on with Abstrakt, our implementation managers take the first month of the partnership to explore what kind of sales opportunities they want from their outbound appointment setting efforts. We take this information and train their new SDRs on what a qualified prospect looks like to the client. This allows the SDR to effectively qualify leads and move them to the next stage of the sales cycle. If a prospect doesn’t meet the client’s sales qualifiers, they’re suspended from the sales pipeline so SDRs can prioritize leads who are likely to generate an ROI for the client.
Nurture Qualified Prospects
Not every qualified prospect is ready to buy from the get-go, making lead nurturing an essential part of the sales development process. SDRs at lead generation companies are trained to nurture leads in the sales pipeline to ensure they reach the end of the sales funnel.
Lead nurturing takes many forms, like routinely sending additional sales and marketing materials via email and making follow-up phone calls when the prospect is closer to the end of their buying cycle. Lead nurturing emails should be sent with a purpose and give additional value for the prospect. This could include sending relevant blog posts on your website that align with their needs or case studies highlighting how your company has impacted other businesses in similar scenarios. This is a good time to send eye-catching content marketing materials like company brochures, infographics, sell sheets, and more so they can grasp your brand identity and remember it when they receive more assets in the future.
SDRs at lead generation companies are also tasked with making follow-up warm calls to qualified prospects who are closer to the end of their purchasing funnel. During these phone calls, SDRs remind the prospect of previous conversations and strive to set the sales meeting between them and a client’s account executive.
One of the best warm call techniques our SDRs use to drive prospects to agree to a sales meeting is to present them with relevant client case studies that empower the prospect to envision themselves in the shoes of a customer. Case studies give prospects an inside look into a customer’s experience with a business and how they’ve been able to provide short- and long-term solutions to their pain points.
Streamline Sales and Marketing Efforts
When you collaborate with a B2B lead generation company, you have a greater opportunity to streamline your sales and marketing efforts. While many companies often separate the two departments from one another, growing businesses can achieve better results when they join forces and use sales to enhance marketing and marketing to accelerate sales.
Sales and marketing are big time investments which many small businesses don’t have the bandwidth to take on themselves. To streamline sales and marketing, both departments must work together on how they plan to reach and engage their target audience for long-term success. Hiring a lead generation company empowers businesses to spend more time prioritizing everyday business rather than focusing on what new opportunities are on the horizon.
At Abstrakt, we work with B2B companies to help them generate leads through outbound sales development and inbound marketing. These services are offered separately for clients, but we’ve seen the most success with our partners who use both lead generation service offerings.
Since our outbound appointment setting service empowers companies to learn more about the wants and needs of potential buyers in their target market, we use this information to create website content and marketing materials that align with what they’re looking for in a product or service provider. Once these inbound marketing assets are developed, they can be distributed on the company’s digital marketing platforms (such as their website and social media platforms) for greater engagement from interested buyers who aren’t in the sales funnel yet. If they see the value in what the client has to offer, they can submit their contact information and be voluntarily implemented into their sales pipeline for a maximized lead generation strategy.
Key Takeaways
Lead generation services empower growing businesses to build their sales pipelines and generate new sales opportunities. While building the sales pipeline itself is important, so is sustaining it. Without continuously putting work into your business growth efforts, you risk creating a sales development process that results in few (if any) closed business opportunities.
If you don’t have the time or money to put towards your business growth efforts, it may be worth considering hiring a third-party lead generation company. At Abstrakt, we help B2B companies across the nation grow their business through outsourced sales development and marketing services. When you’re ready to achieve predictable and sustainable business growth, contact the lead generation experts at Abstrakt!
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