Lead generation is essential for all brands, as a way to ensure the sales pipeline is always topped-up with relevant prospects. With an emphasis on relevant, because you don’t want your sales team spending all of their time speaking with people who aren’t likely to convert. That’s why quality over quantity really matters with lead generation. It ultimately saves you time, energy, and resources. Get your lead generation right, and it’ll have a lasting, tangible impact on your bottom line.
Effective lead generation
Effective lead generation starts very early on in your pipeline. Ideally when making initial contact with a lead (or even beforehand). If you pre-qualify and educate your leads before they reach your sales team, you can better assess their suitability for your company (and vice versa, they can work out if your product is a good fit for them). Meaning only highly motivated MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) are pursued by your sales reps. This time-saving is vital because on average only 36.6% of your sales team’s time is actually spent selling to the right prospects. By doing more groundwork early on to filter and qualify your leads, your sales reps can spend the majority of their time converting them.
Generally, 25% of leads are legitimate and will convert to a sale. At any one time, 73% of leads aren’t sales-ready and need to be moved along the sales funnel (and eventually, encouraged to buy). It’s vital to distinguish between the different groups and, with advances in technology and lead generation techniques, it’s now possible to target leads with tailored communications based on their group.
Why use a lead generation agency?
A lead generation agency can help you improve the quality of your leads. Given that 61% of marketers see generating leads as their biggest challenge, having a specialist on-hand can really boost your lead performance. Indeed, many in-house teams may wonder how to get leads in the first place – with an agency involved, your team won’t have to worry about generating effective leads. The heavy lifting is done by the agency, enabling your team to focus on converting as many leads as possible.
Finding the right leads
Our lead generation experts can help your team understand your various buyer personas, to filter and assign scores to each lead. This places them at different stages in the qualifying process, allowing for a personalised approach with each individual. The approach for a B2B lead, for instance, would be different to a B2C one and would require separate content and messaging. Likewise, it’s vital to determine organisation size, budgets, industry and other characteristics if they will influence your prospect’s likelihood to buy your product.
This approach will protect your brand and ensure you’re really providing value to your prospects. Typically, most people will avoid sales calls because they assume that you have nothing that will be useful to them. The goal of our lead generation campaigns is to convince them otherwise, making your sales reps’ jobs much easier.
No cold calling
We believe that effective lead generation follows the same formula: attracting, engaging, nurturing and converting, and that’s exactly how we work. We don’t cold call, we don’t use incentive trickery, and we don’t fool people into giving away their contact information. This keeps your brand reputation intact, and also ensures our lead generation remains compliant with GDPR and similar data protection legislation. We guarantee that all leads are legally and professionally obtained, processed and used.
Lead generation doesn’t exist in a bubble. Our wider digital marketing experience complements our lead generation activities, by continuously engaging with and moving prospects along the buying process. Through marketing automation and performance marketing techniques like email marketing, social media, PPC, SEO and content marketing. When a lead is ready to buy (as indicated by their lead score), they are then handed off to sales for immediate follow-up.
Our difference
We believe strongly in the effectiveness of our approach. Beginning with auditing and setting the objectives of your lead generation campaign, to set the foundations by understanding your ideal customers, your goals, and lead scoring criteria. We identify the key decision-makers within your target organisations, or the ideal buying personas for your product(s) or service(s). Then we locate those who match these traits as potential prospects.
Furthermore, we only provide 100% exclusive leads, we won’t sell their details to another client. So each lead your sales team reaches out to, won’t have received endless messages from other companies’ reps. You’ll only ever get high-quality leads because bad input produces bad output in lead generation. If your lead generation database is poor quality, it has lasting effects. You won’t be able to outreach effectively, your buyer personas will be skewed, your lead scoring will be inaccurate. You won’t be able to gather deep insights on your ideal customers.
Time to connect
Real-time delivery is also important as it gives you the best possible opportunity to make a sale. Leads who receive a follow-up within 5 minutes are 9 times more likely to convert. Leads that are reached within an hour are nearly 7 times more likely to engage in a meaningful conversation with a brand.
For lead generation to work well, sales reps need enough time to contact and build relationships with each lead. Yet, 27% of sales reps spend more than an hour every day on manual data entry and admin work. Our online lead management software will help your marketing and sales teams to manage leads, reducing the time spent on administrative work, and giving more hours to selling and converting.
Building a lasting customer relationship
Customers are being bombarded with sales calls and messaging every day. To cut through the noise, you need to offer the right communication and content, at the right time, to the right people. Our lead generation focuses on this, filtering your leads and qualifying them, so they only reach your sales team when they are ready to buy. This makes a big difference to your lead generation. Resulting in higher conversion rates, more effective sales conversations, greater cost-efficiency, and lasting relationships with a growing customer base.