Get a bunch of B2B marketers together and ask them what keeps them up at night and you’ll hear some variation of “lead generation” or “demand generation.” Much of this is driven by the needs of their sales team and is often at the heart of sales and marketing conflicts. Like the characters in the classic salesman movie Glengarry Glen Ross, sales people are always looking for the good leads, the fresh leads. The next big sale is right around the corner, only if marketing could deliver on the leads. Unfortunately, many marketing organizations focus on feeding the beginning of the sales funnel to the detriment of nurturing the leads they already have acquired. Marketing departments are judged and measured by the amount of leads they are cramming into the system. More often than not, expensive-to-acquire leads languish in a CRM system and are never even contacted.
There are many ways to generate an initial lead though media companies, content syndication and web casting, but that’s only the first step. The key to this process is to further qualify the lead by determining purchase intent/responsibility and where the potential customer is within the buying process. This could be done by your inside sales force or a telemarketing firm that specializes in lead qualification. After learning those facts the prospect should be nurtured with additional communication and content that can support an informed buying decision.
Marketers should be using all the tools at their digital disposal—audio, video, social media, ebook downloads—to feed the leads in their database with meaningful authentic content to build a permission based relationship. By building their tolerance for your content, you build trust—which may get you closer to an actual sale. In all of the worry and concern about generating leads, don’t lose sight of the fact that the end goal is to acquire a new customer. Generating leads for your sales people is only the first step in what should be a long-term process. It may be time to call “lead generation” “profit generation” instead.
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