Use these 6 B2B lead generation activities to grow your customer base and avoid wasting time and money in creating content that no one reads, or running ads which only dig deeper holes. 

If you ask an entrepreneur about what he desires the most when it comes to his business, more often than not, he would mention generating leads as one of his primary focuses. 

Getting prospects in a B2C environment is more accessible, but it becomes all the more difficult when you are running a B2B organization.

In today’s blog, we have tried to de-concatenate the basics and list six ways that will help you generate leads even when you are on a thin budget. 

Let us get started without wasting any more time.

Table of Content

Step#1: Do the base for your lead generation strategy

Before you fly off to execute your lead generation techniques, it is imperative to set up a solid base. 

Here are the steps involved:

FIRST: ANSWER THE QUESTIONS BELOW TO UNDERSTAND YOUR AUDIENCE PAIN AND TRULY IDENTIFY HOW YOU CAN SOLVE IT. 

You  must seek the following answers for it –

• What’s your ideal customer’s current situation?

• What are they frustrated about and why?

• How much does it cost them to stay in that situation?

• When it’s the EXACT time when they start looking for solutions?

Once you have answers to the above questions, look for desired solutions to them which may allow you to convert them into leads. 

To allocate the right solution, here are the question that you should answer:

• What’s your ideal customer’s desired situation?

• How does your product bridge the gap? (Between their current and desired situations)

• What’s keeping them from taking action? 

• What questions/objections come up when you try to show them a solution? 

The next step involves finding the USP of your products/services.. 

Your team is generating new leads and only a few convert. The rest 95% of the leads are being wasted, there must be some reasons for it. 

The following questions will help you ascertain the same – 

• Has any company solved the same problem? Make a list of them below.

• How have they fixed the problem? Or at least tried?

• What’s missing from their current process? What made people switch to your tool instead?

• How do people describe/recommend your product to other people? 

The last step of the base setup is to figure out the relevant costs associated with each of the steps involved. It will help you create urgency among them and give you a higher chance of finding the leads for you. 

To ascertain the same, you must answer the following questions – 

• What’s your ideal customer’s current solution? How much does that cost?

• What’s the opportunity cost of not switching to your product?

• How much time and money would it cost to move to your tool? 

• How are you minimizing these costs?

• Identify the right channels.

SECOND: IDENTIFY THE BEST CUSTOMER

You best customer are The people who buy fastest, spend the most, and return most often  

Identify your best customer using this data driven approach:

Go to your CRM or excel sheet data and collect the below data from your 2019 data.

• Sales Total
  
• Total # of Closed Won Deals
  
• Deal Create Date for each deal
  
• Deal Close Won Date for each deal
  
• Total # Closed Won Deals & Total # Closed Lost Deals data

Categorize this data by industry.

Use these formula:

Avg. Deal Size

Sales Total / Total # of Closed Won Opptys

Avg Time to close

Won Date - Create Date

Win Rate

Closed Won Total Opptys / Closed Opptys (Won + Lost Opptys)

Create a spreadsheet and fill in this data. Your spreadsheet will look like this:

Now score your industries - score logic is below:

The industries with the highest total rank are your top clients 

"Highest ranking industry is your best customer"

THIRD: FIND THE RIGHT KEYWORDS/Seed Keywords

Seed keywords are the top keywords for your product/service. For example if you are software development company, your top seed words would be:

Software development

Web development

Software design 

Software developer

Brainstorm a few ideas and find at least top 10 seed keywords.

Convert these seed keywords to seed topics around which you can create content.

Go to moz keyword tool , 

enter your top seed word, select these two filters:

and find more relevant keywords

Add those keywords in a spreadsheet

Now to choose the top most influential keywords, you have to get their volume:

Go to semrush, keyword difficulty tool

Copy all keywords from seed keyword spreadsheet and paste it in the tool

You will get all keyword volumes, export the list and copy paste keywords along with volume column

Paste it back to seed keyword sheet (the keywords will be automatically sorted by high volume on top)

You should start creating content for these top keyword topics.

FOURTH: CREATE THE RIGHT POSITIONING

Your target is to create the positioning for your identified best customer.

Here’s how to create the right messaging:

• Identify Best Customer: The people who buy fastest, spend the most, and return most often.
  
  
• Change & Stakes: How can your product/service change your customer’s world and why your solution is imperative.
  
  
• Villain: The thing standing in the way of change. What's holding them back from reaching the promised land.
  
  
• Promise Land: The end state for customers. The result you'll create
  
  
• Simple Promise: A one sentence promise for transformation. Your market knows it. So does your team
  
  
• Superpowers: The key features that create transformation. The "how" you do what no one else can do.
  
  
• Proof & Results: The essence of great marketing is “people like us do things like this. Show your best customers that others like them are experiencing the promised transformation.

Once you are able to answer these points above, you will have full clarity in your mind to build that right message.

FIFTH: SET THE MATH - HOW MANY LEADS DOES YOUR BUSINESS NEEDS

To work on your monthly lead target, you will need seven pieces of data. 

If you don’t have all this data, use what you do have and begin to collect the missing data:

1.  
2. 1. Monthly revenue target – your monthly sales goal from all revenue sources
3.  
4. 2. Marketing driven revenue – the portion of the total monthly revenue that marketing is responsible for, not counting cross-sales, up-sales and revenue that comes in (regardless of what marketing does)
5.  
6. 3. Average sales price (ASP) – the average revenue contribution from each new sale
7.  
8. 4. Number of marketing-driven deals – this is the marketing-driven revenue divided by the ASP
9.  
10. 5. Opportunity-to-sale ratio – the percentage of pipeline opportunities that you close
11.  
12. 6. Qualified lead-to-opportunity ratio – how many qualified leads it takes to produce one opportunity
13.  
14. 7. Inquiry-to-qualified-lead ratio – how many inquires it takes to produce a qualified lead

Here’s an example:

In this example, the number of inbound inquiries/leads required to meet the revenue target is 700 per month. 

If each lead costs an average of $30 to acquire, the total marketing programs acquisition cost is $21,000 (700 x $30). 

Your ability to quantify these numbers and then deliver them to the sales team will make your marketing budget be seen as a critical investment, not as just another expense.

Step #2: Identify the best channels to use

Now let’s talk about the best lead generation strategies and lead generation techniques that you can apply without spending big budgets. 

No surprises here, the best channel to use for b2b lead generation is Linkedin.

Without fail we all know it, but why don’t we do it.

---because it’s hard.

It is also true that linkedin alone won’t get you the results you are after.

Hence we’ve built a proven formula that helps you identify the best prospects and promote your work to the right audience. You can skip the trails and errors and get straight at applying these strategies.

• ORGANIC LINKEDIN MARKETING +
• COLD EMAIL OUTREACH

OPTIMIZE YOUR LINKEDIN PROFILE PAGES:

If you want to know how to get business through LinkedIn, all of it starts with profile optimization. For all those who have experienced their peers getting new prospects out of but they have nothing to show, 

Read this amazing guide here on How to use Linkedin Analytics to optimize your content strategy and grow your personal brand 

Step#3 Build a landing page that converts 

The next step in the B2B lead generation is to create a high converting landing page for their linkedin and outreach campaign.

I would not comment on how great or good your landing pages are, 

but I will share the top 7 elements a high converting landing page should have:

#1- Your One-Liner

Let your team describe the product/business in one short paragraph.

Narrow it down to:

Most business struggle with [main problem], that’s why created a [explain your solution here] so they can [get the desired result]

Unlike our competition [USP goes here]

#2- The Big Problem

What’s the #1 problem your product solves?

What’s wrong with their current tools/process?

How much is not fixing the problem costing them?

Why can’t they fix it themselves?

#3- Your Solution

How does the product solve the big problem in 3-5 steps (max)?

Why is your product better, faster or more user-friendly than the other options they have on the market?

#4 - The Costs

What are the costs of switching to your product? I.e. Migration, setup time, learning curve.

How Can You Reduce Those Costs? i.e. Onboarding, free setup, training, special offers...

#5- Social Proof

Use result driven testimonials from current customers that are the most similar to your ideal customer. (Write examples below)

What are some of the desired results your product has generated for customers?

These will be your best social proof ;)

#6 - The Call To Action

What call to action will you be using? I.e. “Get Started”, “Schedule Demo”, “Contact us”...

#7 - The Alternative

If they are not ready to sign up NOW how can you convert them long term? I.e. Demos, Webinars, Lead magnets ...

Write a copy for these 7 ways and incorporate them in your landing page layout. This will skyrocket your lead submissions. 

Step#4 Create valuable content, publish and manage it on a calendar

The aura of social media may leave you overwhelmed. Instead of being in awe, it is time to empower your thoughts and push it across to the relevant people as innovative B2B marketing strategies. You can use additional tools to help responsiveness, visibility and boost your efforts overall.

Image Source - SproutSocial

For marketers who want immediate leads, using social media to leverage their services is a must. You must create valuable content regularly to improve engagement and reach. After that, understand how your audience operates. It will help you to figure out the most appropriate time to publish your posts.

There are several B2B tools that  allow you to manage your social media on-the-go and lets you choose the right time for every post, be it a shout out or a promotional offer, or a giveaway.

Step#5 Set up relevant tools to boost your B2B lead generation strategies

Most of the marketers would require a plethora of tools to help them attain their marketing goals. 

Here are the knights in shining armor  that may alleviate your overall effectiveness –

Moz Pro

A marketer needs the appropriate keywords to target the desired audience and gain their attention. With Moz Pro on your side, you can understand your visitors, track rankings, crawl and audit your site, and a lot more.

SEMrush

Not every keyword that is on fire currently is easy to rank, and a layman marketer will have no clue of that. Thankfully, SEMrush will help you with your keyword research, find out what your competition is up to, look for backlinks, and much more.

LinkedIn Sales Navigator

LinkedIn Sales Navigator accentuates the efforts of marketers by inducing social selling and leveraging the power of LinkedIn, which consists of over 675M profiles, including more than 179M in the Asia Pacific alone. You get a standalone sales platform, an advanced search option along with Lead Builder, real-time sales update, and much more.

Lemlist

Lemlist is an email outreach platform that  allows marketing personnel to send cold emails to their target list. With its help, you can achieve a high level of email personalization, automate your email sequences, custom tracking domains, integrations with most of the tools you would most likely use.

Seamless.ai

Find the best sales with the help of Seamless.AI. With its help, you can find everyone you need to sell your offerings and gather their credentials too. Get insights that will help you scale your relationships and import it all to your favorite  CRM.

Step#6 Track, analyze, and optimize

After setting up all the requisites, it is time to track them and draw insights from them. Train your workforce to understand the metrics and draw actionable results from them. Once the data concerning several profiles are ready, accumulate them together and save them in a customizable state.

After that, compare your performance with that of your competitors and figure out any possible opportunities. Marketers can use advanced filters to utilize historical data to benchmark the current results and understand how they stack up in comparison.

Results

If your team  has succeeded in implementing the above action plan properly, here is what they can expect after that –

Get Quality Leads

A combination of activities right from building the perfect messaging, & positioning, creating relevant content, a high converting landing pages and using tools to create the outreach system to target the right users with the right solution.

Reach New Prospects

Identify customer audience that can get you immediate cash flow business, identify similar prospects and build a database. Reach them via emails and social connection requests with hyper personalized messaging

Grow Your Relationship With Your Current Customers

Create content for your existing customers that provide them value. Offer educational information which they can use in these uncertain times – No selling please!

If you talk numbers, here are some tentative figures –

Average Lead Generation Rate

from LinkedIn Organic is 2% - 5%

Average Lead Generation Rate

from Cold Email Outreach is 4% - 8%

Conclusion:

To summarize what we discussed above are:

• Identify your best customers, your best keywords and your best positioning for that customer
  
  
• Create specific content for your customer and target them with valuable information in the form of blogs, social posts and email
  
  
• Combine the a combination of Linkedin Marketing and Cold email outreach as your lead generation strategy
  
  
• Create a highly optimized linkedin profile and the type of content you should create to get known to your users.
  
  
• Build a database of your targeted audience via linkedin sales navigator and target them via cold email outreach lead generation strategy
  
  
• Top 7 elements of a high converting landing page
  
  
• Results you can foresee if you do all the above things

All the best!

P.S: Learn more about how we can help you build your lead generation plan 

Or reach out to nish@pinkpowerco.com