What’s more important than increasing the volume of leads pouring into your sales funnel? Widening the base of the funnel and finding more leads who actually convert into customers. Quality, not quantity, matters most with lead generation, yet it’s not always where shareholders and executives are focused. Using these tips, you’ll not only turn up the volume on your overall lead gen figures, you’ll also pump up the base on the leads who matter most – the ones with the potential to become lifelong customers.
Assess Your Web Presence
Does your digital presence work for you or for your visitors? Some B2B organizations have a minimal web presence and don’t feel they need more because many of their customers contact them through other channels, but you also need to think about how new leads perceive you. At this point, a company that leaves a meager digital footprint is seen as one that hasn’t made an impact. Strengthening your social media communication skills, upgrading your website’s functionality, adding more complete contact information, and developing your blog are vital to your leads’ perception of you as an authoritative presence in your industry.
Connect with Leads – and Their Contacts
Leads aren’t just isolated data points; they’re people. They forge relationships with others in their own industry and in adjacent ones. Sometimes they refer your name to colleagues. These connections are incredibly valuable to B2B marketers too because they let you leapfrog over some of the initial lead gen steps. Prospects and customers aren’t always going to volunteer information, though, so build requests into your lead gen process. Emailed surveys and reviews give customers an opportunity to offer testimonials that in turn can be powerfully persuasive to new leads. An occasional email asking customers to recommend you to others is a simple step that often pays significant dividends.
Respond to Reviews
Reviews are persuasive, but when leads see that you’re personally invested in responding to them, you have a chance to turn them into even better marketing tools. Your reviews might all be perfect, and if they are, that’s great; even the not-so-perfect reviews are important, though, as they give you a chance to showcase your outstanding customer care skills. Don’t be afraid to address a customer’s concern in a review, especially if you’re also able to outline the steps you took to make it right. All too often, customers share negative feedback in ways you can’t address, so take full advantage of the chance to offer visible solutions in review responses.
Link Your CRM with Your Marketing Software
Better leads come from better customer knowledge, and one of your most important customer knowledge tools is your sales team’s CRM. Marketing automation systems that synchronize marketing data with CRM information give you far deeper insight into your past and current customers, which then helps you know more about your leads as future customers. Use marketing and CRM data to generate buyer personas you can use for lead scoring so you invest your marketing efforts where they matter most on high-priority, high-value leads.
Get the Timing Right
How well can you assess where leads are in their transition from first contact to a buying decision? It’s a vital question to answer accurately if you want to give leads the right information at the right time. If you’re giving entry-level leads in-depth information, they may not be ready for it; if you’re offering top-of-funnel content to prospects who are close to making a purchase, you aren’t giving them what they need to know to go the final mile. Tailoring automated messages as part of a drip nurture program is an excellent way to get both the message and its timing right.
Find the leads who are most ready to do business with you, not just larger numbers of leads, and you get meaningful, sustainable growth from your lead gen strategy.
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