8 Lead Generation Solutions
The most critical part of your sales process is the beginning. If there are no lead generation solutions in place, sales teams are left with blank calendars and a depleted pipeline.
We have summarized the major approaches to lead generation into the following 8 categories.
Choosing one or more of the following lead generation solutions will help your operation drive meaningful top-of-funnel success. Leading your team to win more business, more often.
What is a Lead Generation Solution?
A lead generation solution is a process or strategy used to attract and engage new potential customers for your solution.
What is the difference between active and passive lead generation solutions?
There are two forms of Lead Generation: Active and Passive.
Active Lead Generation involves your team reaching out to specific prospects. The goal of this outreach is to engage the prospect in a sales conversation.
Passive Lead Generation is typically implemented by your team, but left to run on its own, with little to no human intervention. Passive strategies often include more automation and static lead funnels.
Which Lead Generation Solution should you choose?
When considering which lead generation solution is right for you, it is important to keep your ideal prospect in mind.
- Where do they spend most of their time?
- Is your lead generation method overused for a prospect persona like them?
- Is your team capable and have the experience required?
Prepare your team for Lead Generation
1. Lead Generation Playbook Consultation
Organizations often hire experienced sales professionals, but they may lack specialized lead generation experience. For those teams or ones with a brand new lead generation division, a playbook consultation may be beneficial as a lead generation solution.
A Lead Generation Playbook is the foundation for a successful lead generation team.
If your sales organization has the right team in place to manage and execute the lead generation strategy, it may be important for you to keep sales in-house. Therefore, purchasing a custom playbook from an organization that specializes in lead generation may be all that is required.
Lead generation playbooks often include:
- Ideal customer profile
- Scoring criteria
- Outreach messaging
- Value propositions
- Features + benefits + Payback of your solution
- Qualifying strategies
- Sales funnel stages
In theory, a well-crafted lead generation playbook is easy to integrate into a company. New employees should be able to action the playbook to drive meaningful sales results.
The quality and the speed of delivery for version one of the playbook is the main benefit. Your team will spend less time revising and optimizing the playbook when created by specialists.
Is a Sales Playbook the final Puzzle Piece your Team needs to excel?
2. Contact List Generation
Purchasing a list of potential customers is a common lead generation solution.
This solution requires your team to outline what criteria the contacts should meet. Often, criteria includes:
- Title
- Seniority
- Industry
- Size of Company (revenue and number of employees)
- Geography
With a B2B contact list purchase, you receive a database of potential prospects that meet the criteria you outline.
Your team is responsible for all remaining steps of the sales process, including engagement, qualifying, meeting scheduling and winning the business.
Most Contact Lists will be easily formated for upload into your CRM. Making it more efficent and seamless for your team to begin generating sales pipeline from the target list.
Note: Anti-spam laws are now in place in nearly every country. Ensure your use of a purchase list meets the laws established in each region around the world.
Imagine what your team could achieve with a better Contact List.
Passive Lead Generation Solutions
3. Digital and Social Media Advertising
Social media companies like Facebook and TikTok generate their revenue solely from selling advertising.
Social Platforms combine the users profile information and their usage data to help advertisers target more accurately. The more specific an advertiser can get when targeting, the more expensive the ad campaign will likely be.
Traditional print ads in news papers and magazines lacked any real targeting. Plus, they could only have one version of the ad presented to the reader.
Now, social advertising campaigns can experiment with multiple versions of the same ad and when to display them.
Similar to email marketing, social ad campaigns for lead generation include a call-to-action. The lead is generated when the prospect provides their contact info, clicks a purchase link, or sends a message to the advertiser.
This lead generation solution is often regarded as being for digital solution providers or e-commerce brands. However, more and more brands are using it to engage potential customers with more targeted and creative ad campaigns.
4. Content Syndication
Companies may have a content creation plan in place. This often includes whitepapers, how-to guides, eBooks or podcasts. Content Syndication is a lead generation solution that distributes your content outside of your companies owned platforms or channels.
Syndication partners across the web provide an expanded audience for your content. They provide a platform and audience for your thoughts and content, and you provide helpful and valuable content for their network. Typically a win-win.
However, partners may ask for payment before syndicating your content. You will need to understand the value their audience brings for your solution. If the audience aligns well with your ideal customer profile, then the cost may be worth it.
Generating leads with this solution is often a longer-term strategy. You will need to build trust with the new audience to bring them into your brand bubble.
As they get comfortable with your messaging and brand, the new audience will be more likely to “raise their hand” and indicate their readiness to engage with your sales organization.
Read More : 16 Content Syndication Platforms (Free and Paid)
5. Email Marketing Automation
Some sales organizations opt to engage a list of contacts with (fully or partially) automated emails, as a lead generation solution. Companies with established email lists will schedule a steady cadence of sales emails, in the hopes of generating a lead.
Each email directs the contact towards a “call-to-action”. If the content and message of the email is compelling enough, the prospect may engage the call-to-action.
Modern technology tools allow sales and marketing teams to monitor the activity of contacts as they open and engage with marketing emails. Once a contact engages with the brands call-to-action, the sales organization may consider them a prospect.
These prospects, once identified by the tech tools in place, may be removed from the automation and get direct to a sales person. Thus, allowing the sales person to engage the prospect with a more personalized outreach.
Depending on the call-to-action, your sales and marketing teams may still have a lot of work ahead of them to convert the contact into a meaningful lead.
Active Lead Generation Solutions
6. B2B Telemarketing
Telemarketing is a lead generation solution that adds horsepower to your existing team. If your team is challenged to complete a set number of calling activities, or there is a need to engage a wide audience quickly, telemarketing may be an answer.
Outsourcing telemarketing removes the personality and industry experience your current team may bring to the project, but adds scalability and repeatability.
Modern sales organizations usually require a diverse approach to connecting with prospects. Outsourcing just the phone calling aspect of your team’s outreach oftens creates challenges if your team also leverages social media and email strategies to engage with prospects.
Organizations have built their entire business model around providing outsourced telemarketing services for sales organizations. As a form of lead generation for a modern sales organization, it likely feels outdated. Despite its popularity over the past few decades, this lead generation solution is rapidly declining.
If your organization has a large (and we mean REALLY large) potential customer base, then telemarketing to generate leads may be a viable solution. Telemarketing removes the repetition of continuous outbound calling from your existing sales team and allows them to focus on more critical and specialized tasks.
Read More : The Pros and Cons of Telemarketing
7. Inbound Lead Qualifying
If your sales organization has dedicated resources to attracting inbound leads, those leads need to be engaged and qualified.
If your sales team is more specialized in the mid and later stage of the sales process, it may make sense to partner with an external team to engage and qualify inbound leads.
This person (or team) receives the initial notification from the lead and begins to reach out to understand the prospects’ needs and interests. The goal of reaching out is to schedule a meeting, demo, or discovery call.
This Inbound Lead generation specialist works closely with the sales team to ensure the hand-off process is smooth from lead qualification and meeting scheduling, meeting attended, and next steps.
Outsourcing this activity keeps your Sales Team focused on the most critical stages of the sales process – Closing.
Our Team was BUILT to Qualify – We can handle your Inbound Leads
8. Outbound Lead Generation
Many organizations have a team dedicated to outbound lead generation. These individuals usually hold the title of Sales Development Rep (SDR) or Lead Generation Specialist.
An outbound lead generation specialist focuses specifically on the beginning of the Sales Process. Typically, they would complete the following stages:
- Target Account Identification
- Contact Sourcing
- Individual Research
- Sales Outreach
- Lead Qualifying
- Appointment Scheduling
Simply put, Outbound Lead Generation Specialists are responsible for going out and hunting for new sales opportunities.
How does Outbound Lead Generation Work?
Tactically, there are many ways to approach outbound lead generation. Teams may choose to focus more on social outreach and emailing, others utilize cold calling. However, high performing B2B sales organizations use a mixture of all methods.
Your team should engage their prospects where the prospect prefers, not where it is convenient for your sales organization.
After the prospect has been engaged, the remainder of the process varies based on the outsourced partner. Some teams have their lead generation team solely focused on booking meetings for more senior sales team members (Account Executives, for example).
Others may ask the Lead Generation Team to qualify the opportunity, and begin to engage the prospect in the earlier stages of a discovery process. Leads that have been qualified (partially or fully) and handed over to the AE have a greater potential to close.
Your Sales Organizations (whether mature or in its infancy) may choose to partner with an outsourced sales team. This team will manage the initial phases of the sales process, keeping your experienced sales team focused on critical stages of your sales process.
Your Team deserves the Highest Quality Sales Leads