If it seems like B2B companies are having a hard time getting high quality leads, that’s not an illusion. It really is getting harder for B2B organizations to attract, reach, and engage with potential customers.
The reasons for this are easy to understand. Competition is tougher than ever before, and information is abundant. Customers routinely cross paths with multiple providers before settling on the one they choose, and never go back and give feedback to the second- and third-best options.
At the same time, sales development representatives have to spend more time and effort to make sales, dragging production down. The biggest B2B marketing challenge in 2019 is lead quality – increasing numbers of sales development representatives find themselves losing customers mid-way through the sales funnel.
This means that B2B marketers have to be highly resourceful when developing B2B lead generation ideas. They need to address their weaknesses and consolidate their strengths in order to reach new customers and overcome B2B lead generation challenges. The key is delivering the right marketing messages to the right people at the right time.
For marketers who need to find out how to get B2B leads that close deals, qualifying leads properly might seem like an insurmountable obstacle. What can a marketer do to ensure the leads sales development representatives talk to are legitimately interested in the services or products a company offers?
In fact, marketers can do quite a lot. But to do this, they need to filter out low-quality leads and focus exclusively on the people who truly do need the services or products in question.
There are three main ways that B2B marketers can do this. Overcoming lead generation challenges in 2019 requires paying more attention to the customer than most marketers have ever done before. Lead generation is no longer a “set and forget” discipline like it was in the days when the pinnacle of technology was putting a contact form on a website’s contact page.
In the world of B2B, high quality leads are people who hold relevant, decision-making positions at companies that are likely to become customers. High quality leads also have high quality contact data – delivering the world’s best sales pitch to the wrong person at the wrong time is still a waste.
The best way to find and develop high quality leads is by establishing buyer personas. Buyer personas represent categories of buyers who are demographically likely to become customers. These descriptions fill out customers’ stories so that marketers can accurately predict what they are thinking, feeling, worried about, planning on, and looking for.
Sales research give marketers the ability to match specific individuals to buyer personas. By focusing exclusively on the individuals who are likely to become customers and delivering targeted content that speaks to their needs, marketers can overcome the B2B marketing challenges that generalized contacts lists fail to address.
Generic contact lists may offer thousands or tens of thousands of contacts, but the quality of each lead is generally poor. Out-of-date contact information from a business that is unlikely to become a customer does not help improve the B2B marketing or sales processes. One good lead is better than ten average ones, and better still than a hundred poor-quality ones.
With a contact list comprising the highest quality leads categorized by buyer persona in hand, marketers can now start targeting those leads specifically. This is where the time and effort that would normally be dispersed among hundreds of non-performing leads can be laser-focused into obtaining results from the highest quality ones.
This is where high-ROI marketing channels like email and LinkedIn can offer best-in-class results. Every $1 spent on email marketing generates an average of $38 in ROI. By opening up a conversation with leads, marketers stand a far better chance of helping them along the sales funnel and generating value for them in the process.
Developing customer personas, performing sales research, and targeting potential leads is all more involved work than simply buying a contact list and hoping for the best. However, it is work that produces results, and it forms the backbone of today’s most successful B2B lead generation tactics.
Marketers and B2B companies that need to improve lead quality can no longer take shortcuts when it comes to finding, addressing, and qualifying leads. Amplify’s marketing expertise can identify opportunities to maximize the effectiveness of each step in the lead generation process.
Want to generate higher quality leads right now? Talk to a lead generation specialist at Amplify to find out how!