Lead generation tools have become the backbone of an exponential campaign, especially in B2B. However, it’s clear that the traditional ways of generating leads are losing their sheen and becoming ineffective. Generating qualified and targeted business leads from digital marketing channels makes your sales team more productive and increases throughput.
If you are thinking about starting your own business, lead generation tools meaning can be one of the most important factors that decide its future success. No matter what type of online business you plan to start, from selling products to providing a service, you need people to visit your website.
For B2B sales people the most important thing is to maintain business, because of a single all-consuming goal – to help customers. Therefore, they use different lead generation tools. Lead generation helps in achieving different goals of a business.
With the latest innovation in technology and a sea of business opportunities opening up each day, business owners from different parts of the world are coming up with innovative tools that can help you generate leads for your business. While some people are skeptical about paying for lead generation tools, others are convinced about its effectiveness.
What is Lead Generation?
Where traditional marketing methods such as email blasts used to be enough to draw customers, the increase of competition and information abundance is making it more difficult for companies to track, reach, and engage with potential customers. Lead generation, the marketing process of stimulating and capturing interest in a product or service for the purpose of developing a sales pipeline, allows companies to nurture targets until they’re ready to buy. Lead generation can be useful for any type or size of business, and for both B2C and B2B spaces. Sixty percent of marketers state that lead generation is a key pain point for their company. Determining a good lead is more complex than just targeting people who downloaded your white paper, and it’s important that your sales reps don’t waste their time cold calling unqualified leads when there are ways to narrow down the pool.
When you implement a lead generation program, you increase brand awareness, build relationships, generate qualified leads, and ultimately close deals. The higher quality leads you direct your sales team to, the more of those leads will result in sales. In doing this, you are helping your company grow, while also growing the credibility for your marketing department by showing tangible results and proving yourself to be a valuable part of the revenue team.
Lead generation has been around for a long time, but methods have changed from simply finding a customer early on in their sales journey and sending the sales team their way. The self-directed buyer is inundated with information, so it’s vital to find new, creative ways to cut through the static and reach potential customers. Instead of finding customers through mass advertising and email blasts, marketers must rely on being found and building relationships with their buyers. In the age of information abundance, marketing is going through a massive shift.
“Customers are now smarter, more connected, more informed, more influenced and influential socially, and less likely to respond to campaign-bait. Marketing has to create content people actually want.”
– Tim Barker, Chief Product Officer, DataSift
Common problems that lead generation can solve
Simple batch and blast advertising doesn’t appeal to the self-directed buyer, and having a solid lead generation program in place can help you navigate the new complexity surrounding lead generation. Below are a few problems lead generation can help solve.
- Problem: I need to generate a high volume of leads. If you’re just starting out, a lead generation program can result in increased brand awareness, new relationships, higher quality leads, and more sales. If you’re looking to optimize an existing program, you may want to reevaluate your audience profiles, buyer journey, channels, and tactics. Keep your goals, customer concerns, and challenges in mind, deliver content that solves their pain points, and keep nurturing those relationships—soon you’ll have a funnel filled with qualified leads.
- Problem: My sales team says that I’m not delivering high-quality leads. There are several reasons why your sales team is struggling to convert leads into customers. First, sales and marketing should be in agreement about what constitutes a qualified lead, and when that lead should be handed off, keeping in mind that 96% of people visiting your website aren’t ready to buy yet. If sales contacts them too soon, they may feel put off—buyers today do not want to feel sold to. Lead quality is important, but it’s a major challenge for marketers, so it may take some time to start bringing in qualified leads.
- Problem: I’m bringing in leads, but don’t have a strategy around what to do next. Generating leads is just one part of lead generation. Once you bring these leads in, you must utilize lead scoring and nurturing to qualify said leads before sales can do their job. According to Forrester, buyers might be anywhere from 75 to 90% of the way through their buying journey before they contact the vendor, after they’ve completed their own research. Keep this in mind when determining what point in the funnel sales should step in.
- Problem: I need to be able to demonstrate the return on investment (ROI) of my marketing team. To show the impact of your marketing team, you’ll need to plan out a strategy and determine what to measure, when to measure, and how to measure. Choose metrics that show how marketing is increasing effectiveness across the board, generating qualified leads, amplifying sales pipeline velocity, and improving sales and marketing alignment through leveraging lead generation software.
- Problem: My lead generation program isn’t working anymore. If your lead generation strategy has yet to catch up to the age of the self-directed buyer, it’s time to reevaluate. Using modern lead generation software can help leads find you by increasing brand visibility and capturing interest with informational content buyers can use during their own research before they’re ready to purchase.
Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL)
Marketing qualified leads are contacts who’ve engaged with your marketing team’s efforts but aren’t ready to receive a sales call. An example of an MQL is a contact who fills out a landing page form for an offer (like in our lead generation process scenario below).
Sales Qualified Lead (SQL)
Sales qualified leads are contacts who’ve taken actions that expressly indicate their interest in becoming a paying customer. An example of an SQL is a contact who fills out a form to ask a question about your product or service.
Product Qualified Lead (PQL)
Product qualified leads are contacts who’ve used your product and taken actions that indicate interest in becoming a paying customer. PQLs typically exist for companies who offer a product trial or a free or limited version of their product (like HubSpot!) with options to upgrade, which is where your sales team comes in. An example of a PQL is a customer who uses your free version but engages or asks about features that are only available upon payment.
Service Qualified Lead
Service qualified leads are contacts or customers who’ve indicated to your service team that they’re interested in becoming a paying customer. An example of an service qualified lead is a customer who tells their customer service representative that they’d like to upgrade their product subscription; at this time, the customer service representative would up-level this customer to the appropriate sales team or representative.
Types of leads
Now let’s have a look at how to categorize leads. We’ve defined three main ways you can do it:
Lead type 1: Based on interest
Interest is the first point that helps you define leads and split them into two subgroups:
- Warm, or inbound leads, are the ones who showed their interest by themselves and found you on their own (for example, they came across your blog and subscribed to your newsletters).
- Cold, or outbound leads, are a subgroup of leads generated by you thanks to your targeting strategy and lead generation tools.
Lead type 2: Based on enrichment
The second type is based on the information you have on your leads. Depending on the amount of data you have, you can divide them into two subgroups:
- Non-enriched leads are thin on information. Most often, they only have a name and an email address or a phone number (one contact method).
- Enriched leads come with a set of additional information you can use for personalization and multi-channel marketing: secondary contact details, company name, location, job position, pain points, etc.
Importance of lead generation
The lead-to-customer conversion rate is never 100%. This is why filling in the sales funnel with quality leads is the main lead generation purpose. The importance of getting quality leads is obvious. It helps you:
- Target the right people. You focus your resources on specific customers who are more likely to buy your product or service. This results in saved time and money, streamlining your company’s processes and growing sales.
- Build brand awareness. Lead generation always entails educating your leads on your company and its product — both when they get to know about you on their own or when you reach out to them with the information about your product’s features. Leads can then spread information about your brand by word of mouth, bringing you even more clients.
- Get valuable data. As a rule, generating leads means collecting information about your prospective customers, their wants and needs, and your competitors. This helps you improve your product or service so that it has a competitive advantage in the market.
- Grow revenue. With an effective lead generation strategy, your company can get 133% more revenue than you’ve planned.
Who should conduct lead generation in my company?
Lead generation is a step-by-step process conducted by two groups: sales reps and marketers:
The sales group usually focuses on generating cold leads and then using them for cold calling, cold emailing, and cold marketing campaigns. They go for quantity first, qualify leads, and then work closely with the most engaged ones.
The marketing group focuses on generating warm leads. First, they acquire business leads through different marketing channels, warm them up with relevant approaches, and then forward hot leads to the sales department or make the sale right away.
Sales and marketing have different methods and needs, but the goal is always the same — a client, a deal, a sale.
Types of the lead generation process
The lead generation process depends on the marketing methodology, i.e., how customers get to know you: whether they find you (inbound lead generation) or you find them (outbound lead generation).
Inbound lead generation
The inbound lead generation process is permission-based, meaning that your potential customer finds and decides to interact with you on their own. It consists of the following steps:
- A potential customer discovers your company by visiting one of your marketing channels (your website, blog, social media page).
- They react to your call-to-action (CTA) by clicking on a button or a link that contains a message encouraging them to take some action.
- They are sent to your landing page, where they fill out a form in exchange for a valuable offer (any lead magnet you create), this way becoming your leads.
Outbound lead generation
Outbound lead generation is interruption-based, meaning you find those people who are more likely to become your customers. You contact them directly with the aim of communicating your brand and delivering your sales pitch. It embraces the following stages:
- You identify your leads (people who match your ideal customer profile), determine their needs, and think about how you can help them.
- You do research: look for leads’ contact information, collect it, and keep it organized.
- You reach out to your leads via cold emails, cold calls, or social networks.
Conclusion
Lead generation is a process that helps in expanding business and the most important thing is to know the right tools (lead generation tools ) for right creation and management of leads. If you are planning to run your own business then you will definitely need leads. Without it, your business is nothing but a dream that could never become a reality. And without a solid plan, there’s no way your business will grow.
Lead generation is a key step in the lead management process. Generating leads is often easy; it is qualifying and closing them that can be difficult. A well-thought out marketing strategy will typically include lead generation tactics to not only create leads, but also to filter out those that are not interested in your product or service. As such, we should always consider a variety of tools to assist us with the task of generating leads and filtering them out before they become a time-sink. Performance metrics