Sales pipelines can make or break a business. Companies that aren’t actively pursuing business opportunity leads are missing out on significant revenue. By investing in a sales pipeline, you’re setting your organization up for future growth.
To prospect leads effectively, you need to support your process with technologies and strategies that maximize productivity and shorten the length of your sales cycle. Keep reading to learn how your sales and marketing teams can benefit from high-quality lead generation services.
What Is B2B Business Lead Generation?
Lead generation has a simple goal: earn new clients to grow your company. Organizations interested in B2B business leads need a sales and marketing team to build strategies that find potential customers and move them through the sales cycle. There are many ways to create a B2B business lead sales pipeline. To be successful, your strategy has to help your sales reps qualify leads, start discussions, nurture contacts, and close deals efficiently.
With a refined lead generation process, you can market products and services to prospects who have a genuine interest in your company. You won’t waste time on false leads, which shortens your sales cycle and increases productivity in your company. If you’re interested in pursuing business sales leads, there are a few things you first need to understand about lead generation.
What Is Inbound Prospecting?
Inbound lead generation is when the potential client reaches out first. A person who’s interested in your products or services offers their email or phone number as a point of contact, which you can use to follow up. Intelligent prospecting uses different kinds of collateral to attract potential customers and persuade them to reach out.
For example, your content marketing plan could involve a digital marketing campaign that includes brochures, custom landing pages, and video content you send out to potential buyers. You need marketing materials that align with your branding and illustrate your products and services.
What Is Outbound Lead Generation?
In outbound lead generation, you reach out to customers first. You introduce your company and its services to potential clients through methods like cold calling and emailing. When you’re pursuing quality leads, it’s vital to curate a list of potential buyers who are most likely to be interested in a purchase. This requires your sales and marketing teams to conduct research and collect and verify names, emails, and phone numbers before offering products and services.
Not all leads become customers. However, you need to take the time to refine your prospecting process as much as possible so you don’t waste time on business sales leads that lead nowhere. A refined process requires up-to-date sales data your sales and marketing teams can use to prioritize their efforts and find the right opportunities for your business.
How To Qualify Business Opportunity Leads
If you want to implement a successful B2B business lead generation process, you need to take it step by step. Every stage of the process is essential. Taking a shortcut negatively impacts the rest of your strategy.
There are many ways to structure a business sales lead generation program, and it may take time before you land on a winning combination. Here are a few guidelines to follow when building your lead generation strategy:
Create an Ideal Customer Profile
Before reaching out to potential buyers, you need to establish a customer profile. Identifying a target demographic or market means you can focus on potential buyers you know would be a good fit for your company. As a result, your sales reps waste less time and resources pursuing unsuitable leads.
When defining your customer profile, look for industries with high conversion and order rates. A customer relationship management (CRM) tool provides relevant sales data you can use to guide your efforts. Look at the characteristics of potential clients and make sure that pursuing the lead will be profitable.
Find Your Prospects
After you have a customer profile, start building your list. There are many resources you can use to identify potential customers. Job listings, Linkedin profiles, and Google are good places to start. Investigating industry groups and trade show directories can also lead to valuable business opportunity leads.
If that sounds like a lot of work, you can also use online prospecting tools to gather information or partner with a firm and let them handle the heavy lifting for you.
Prioritize High-Quality Sales Leads
Organizing your lead list helps your sales and marketing teams focus their efforts. When sales reps have criteria to follow, they can finetune their messaging to communicate with business opportunity seekers more effectively. The more detailed your customer profile is, the easier it is for your sales and marketing teams to rate prospects based on factors like revenue and their interest in your organization.
Research, Research, Research
Research is about knowing who you’re talking to. When you take the time to research, your sales reps can impress the potential client with information and messaging that’s relevant to their specific business. If you know the company has a clearly defined challenge they need to address, you can tailor your messaging to demonstrate your knowledge and maybe even pitch a solution.
Follow Up
Your sales rep has reached out to a potential client and knocked it out of the park. Your rep had all the right answers and ended the call on a high note, but the prospect wasn’t ready to make a purchase. This should come as no surprise. Moving a prospect through your sales pipeline in one cold call would be an extraordinary feat. That’s why it’s crucial to follow up on your connection.
If you don’t follow up, you’ll lose the sale. Having multiple touchpoints with business opportunity seekers is the best way to move toward a deal. By strategically calling and messaging a prospect, you deepen your relationship with the individual and ensure your company is at the top of their mind when they’re ready to make a purchase. When it comes to closing a sale, persistence is key.
DEC International Offers Cutting-Edge Lead Generation Services to Atlanta Businesses
Lead generation is expensive and time-consuming. To generate leads consistently and effectively, you need a flexible sales pipeline that has all the tools you need to qualify leads and develop relationships with those individuals. You also need sales intelligence that helps your sales reps organize lead lists and identify the most promising business sales leads.
DEC provides quality lead generation services to Atlanta companies. Our platform allows sales and marketing teams to build prospecting strategies for new deals and increased business growth. We give you access to up-to-date market research data and leads, with tools that let you filter prospects based on your ideal customer profile. With the touch of a button, you can narrow a pool of hundreds of potential leads down to a handful.
Ready to build your sales pipeline? Let DEC International show you the way.
