This may seem like a very obvious question, but I was on a well known social media site for businesses recently when there was a post saying “I am looking for a B2B lead generation company to help us get new sales leads.” It wasn’t long ago that this would have prompted telemarketing, data companies and perhaps email marketers contacting them offering their services.
Not for this post though; there were SEO experts, web developers, data providers, video makers, social media experts, telemarketers, email marketers, event organisers, marketing agencies, direct mail companies, online lead generation organisations, PPC experts, bloggers, copy writers, article publishers all saying that they can help with B2B lead generation.
So it got me thinking, what is B2B lead generation and how does a company decide which activities it should undertake to achieve best results?
“Lead generation (commonly abbreviated as lead-gen) is a marketing term that refers to the creation or generation of prospective interest or inquiry into a business’ products or services. …” en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lead_generation
To me, this, along with many other definitions doesn’t go far enough. It isn’t just the generation of initial interest or enquiry but;
“B2B Lead generation is the management of your target market from initial communication through to point of sale.” Phil Richardson, Managing Director, Shortlist Marketing.
I think that there are 2 key elements: generating the initial enquiry and managing that enquiry until they are ready to move into the sales process.
This then makes the process harder for successful marketers; you should have two different strategies, one to engage prospects initially and the second strategy to progress them through the pipeline. Both strategies take a lot of knowledge of your target market and they will probably utilise the same communication mediums. The first strategy should be around capturing their initial interest, the second around building relationships and demonstrating that you would be good to do business with.
As I said earlier, there are lots of options for companies today in B2B lead generation. If you understand your market and how they buy, you’ll be in a much better position to understand which services to use.