These 7 tips will hopefully get you thinking about what was successful in the past and how to build on that for the future.
1) Review What’s Worked
One of the best ways to improve B2B lead generation is to look at what works and what doesn’t. I know it sounds obvious but it’s amazing how many marketers don’t do this. It’s important that you can attribute activity to results and also costs. However, to do this you need to understand what your goals were, were they just to increase sales or build your subscriber list, raise awareness or sell more to customers?
If something worked last year, try to understand why and how you can repeat it and importantly build on it this year. Likewise, if something isn’t working understand why and change it or stop doing it.
2) Know Your Market
Again this sounds simple, but how many companies truly understand their market, not just who they are, but how they buy, why they buy, when they buy and what their motivators are? Once you have this information creating content, targeting and engaging them is so much easier. You don’t need to have just one target market, you may find that you create buyer profiles for different segments of your target market.
3) Data analysis
Your database is the life blood of your direct marketing and lead generation campaigns. It’s also the biggest asset of your marketing department. The value of high quality data is huge and at the same time poor quality data and data management can not only waste time, money and effort, but can damage your brand and, in some cases, see you end up in court.
Many companies don’t understand the data they have; its age, source, quality, whether it meets the target market, how clean it is and how relevant the contacts are.
One of the best things you could do this month to help your B2B lead generation is analyse and improve your database.
4) Keyword research
For me, keyword research isn’t just about SEO – it covers all areas of your B2B marketing and lead generation.
The mistake many make is that they think it is about them, but no, this process is purely about your prospects; the keywords and terms that they use to look for your products and or services.
It’s important to talk to your sales team, marketing teams, customer service teams, read trade publications, forums and comments. Once you have your keywords, these will be the subjects for emails, blogs, whitepapers as well as SEO.
5) Sales Loss analysis
Successful sales is all about bringing key elements together to beat your competition, this includes marketing, lead generation, sales support, sales documentation, the sales team and managing the sales process. If any of these are wrong, then at best you are on the back foot and at worse you lose the sale to your competitors.
This is where good sales loss analysis comes in, it’s a tool for you to use to understand what you did well and what you could have improved in each of your previous sales situations. It has one goal, to help you generate more leads and close more sales going forward.
Many companies get feedback from the sales team, however the most effective way is to get an independent 3rd party to contact prospects at all stages of the sales and marketing process and ask for feedback. The results can be illuminating.
6) Fall back in love with telemarketing
I believe telemarketing is still the greatest tool for B2B lead generation. Link
Lead generation is quite simple; communicate the right information, to the right people at the right time. Unfortunately, it’s very difficult to know the right time, information and in some cases people. Telemarketing gives you this.
By having well trained, experienced and professional telemarketing staff integrated into the rest of your marketing and lead generation activity your ROI is increased greatly.
7) Don’t Believe the Hype
There are many companies who only survive by selling you lead generation services, yes this includes us. Many of these will tell you that the old methods are dead and that they are selling the future. Some of these techniques will help you and some will waste time and money.
The key to knowing what methods to use is what we talked about earlier, knowing your market. If you know how your market buys, then you are more likely to use the right tools to engage them.
8 is a bonus) Use Shortlist Marketing
Obviously, this is the most important element to improve B2B Lead Generation! But if you are looking for any help or to outsource any element of your lead generation please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
Tell us what you think: why should you be doing sales loss analysis? Leave a comment and tell us your opinion. Feel free to share this blog and don’t forget to follow our social media sites for the latest updates! We’re on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Pinterest.
