Lead Generation for B2B Businesses
Decrease your lead to close time and realize revenue - and commissions - faster.
When we discussed generating more leads, we were exploring both quantity and quality. We know sales is a numbers game...but if you aren't attracting the right leads in the first place, time and resources can be wasted by your marketing and sales teams.
In addition, data about your pipeline, roadmap for product development, insights about customer demand and financial projections impacting the company's cash flow can all be negatively impacted when there is just quantity without quality.
What we have found is that decreasing your lead to close time for deals is definitely related to improving the quality of the leads you secure. Less effort is required by your sales team, pipelines can be better forecast and the time from initial inquiry to signing on the bottom line can be cut.
Bonus? Upsells and increased price-per-customer also goes up!
So how do we do this?
- Persona Development
Who are your potential buyers? What matters to them? Who all is involved in the purchasing decision? Where do they go for information? How is each of their job performances' evaluated?
Really dig in to thinking about what motivates your potential buyers, what words and phrases they use, what pain points they have. - Buyers Journey
Once you have your personas clearly defined, think about the process they go through to reach a decision. What is/are the problems that trigger them to start searching for a solution in the first place? How do they phrase the challenge and what is the outcome they might be after. Chances are, there are multiple which segment into the personas you previously defined.
While not a linear path, this journey generally involves:
a) giving language to a problem in a way that will help advanced research and dialogue with industry professionals (and with Google searches),
b) providing options of solutions which might help address the problem and
c) comparing solutions, with the pros and cons of each. - Content Plan
Building our a Content Plan that is targeted on your Personas and addresses each stage of the Buyers Journey is labor intensive, intense, and incredibly valuable.
Once the topics are fleshed out, then it's a matter of organizing the flow and priority of what to develop. People move back and forth among stages. You want to prioritize the paths of either the lowest hanging fruit or highest profitability as the first path to see all the way to the end. - Lead Nurturing
Email marketing is a traditional way to keep your potential clients engaged. This step follows the content plan, as you want to ensure that the information you promote is useful, helpful and relevant to the individual prospect.
It will hurt your marketing and sales efforts if you send generic information, or content that doesn't align with the problems, challenges and buying process for the persona you are targeting.
A marketing automation tool like HubSpot helps you track the content which already peaked interest, assign people to that persona, then use that data to forward additional content which will relate to their concerns. - Remarketing
Employing remarketing, whether using Google Ads, Facebook Ads or another 3rd party tool can be a way to stay top-of-mind with prospects. The key in a B2B world is to continue to promote valuable content, rather than just brand awareness or price incentives.
The goal is to continue to woo prospects with tailored communications which show an understanding of the challenges each persona faces and help them see that your solution...and ideally yours alone...will help them solve their problem. - Up-Sell & Cross-Sell
In the midst of showing how the core solution will make life better and easier, it's a good idea to work in possible up-sells and cross-sells along the way. Don't do this in a forced way, but rather as examples of how people have gotten the most out of their investments.
For example, if adding a content library to a learning management system will help companies see an ROI 3-6 months sooner, that's a good example of the sort of up-sell that can be easily worked into content throughout the marketing cycle, and easy for the sales team to leverage once the hand-off is made. It won't come across as a greedy ask. Rather, the foundation has been laid for being a true partner helping clients get ahead.
Lone Armadillo recently did this process for an enterprise software company, resulting in a decrease from lead to close of 155 days and increasing the average deal size.
Ready to get started?
to see if Lone Armadillo can help you!
