Generating a consistent level of high-quality B2B leads has always been a significant challenge for sales and marketing departments. Companies often struggle to create and implement strategies that effectively target their ideal customers, resulting in sales funnels filled with leads that never convert.
Having a deep understanding of how B2B lead generation works, along with the best B2B lead generation strategies, will give your company a competitive edge. In this article, we will explore effective B2B lead generation strategies to assist businesses in generating MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) and expanding their sales pipeline.
Who Conducts B2B Lead Generation?
B2B lead generation is typically conducted by dedicated marketing teams within businesses that sell products or services to other companies. These teams can include in-house staff, outsourced marketing, specialised agencies, or a mix of all. The process requires a blend of strategic planning, creative thinking, and consistent effort to be effective.
At gigCMO, we elevate B2B lead generation through our Fractional CMO Service, driven by a growth playbook that incorporates proven best practices and methodologies. Our approach focuses on converting high-quality leads, ensuring your business targets the right prospects and delivers positive outcomes that drive conversion rates.
The Sales Funnel Model
The sales funnel model is a visual representation used by a business’s sales team to understand and manage the sales process in marketing. This model breaks down every stage of the buyer's journey. While different businesses may use varied labels for their sales funnels, a common structure includes the following stages, from top to bottom:
- Awareness: At this stage, the customer becomes aware of the business and its services due to effective marketing efforts.
- Discovery: The customer finds a product that piques their interest and becomes a lead.
- Evaluation: The customer evaluates the product, weighing the pros and cons, researching, and considering if they can afford it. At this point, they are considered marketing-qualified leads (MQLs).
- Intent: The customer decides to purchase the product, becoming a sales-qualified lead (SQL).
- Purchase: The customer completes the purchase.
- Loyalty: If satisfied, the customer plans to buy from the business again and may leave a review or fill out a survey to express their satisfaction.
This structured approach helps businesses understand the progression of potential customers from initial awareness to becoming loyal repeat buyers.
The Flywheel Model
The flywheel model is a visual representation used in lead generation, akin to the sales funnel but shaped like a wheel, emphasising continuous motion rather than a linear progression. It focuses on three core principles essential to the inbound marketing methodology: attract, engage, and delight.
HubSpot Flywheel
- Attract: Promote your brand to draw in prospective customers, similar to the awareness stage in the sales funnel model. Effective marketing efforts are key to gaining attention.
- Engage: Here, the customer considers, evaluates, and decides about the product. Engage them with tailored content that meets their specific needs, facilitating their decision-making process.
- Delight: Once the customer has made a purchase, they should be delighted with the product or service. A satisfied customer becomes a promoter, sharing their positive experience and attracting new potential customers.
As each stage of the buyer's journey is completed—from awareness to loyalty—the relationship between the customer and the business evolves. The cycle progresses from stranger to lead to customer to promoter. This continuous cycle ensures a steady flow of new leads, customers, and promoters, maintaining the business's revenue stream as the flywheel spins.
How Fractional CMO Service Helps with Sustainable Lead Generation
Generating a high volume of leads is insufficient for sustainable lead generation; it's crucial to attract the right leads and effectively guide them through the sales process. Here are some strategies that Fractional CMO Service employs for long-term lead generation:
1. Targeted Inbound Marketing
Fractional CMO Service generates qualified leads and positions your business as an industry thought leader through an inbound lead-generation marketing strategy. Unlike outbound lead generation, which involves reaching out to potential customers, inbound lead generation focuses on prospects coming to you. This means that your prospects initiate the conversation, giving you permission to send them marketing materials.
How an Inbound Lead Generation Works
Create a Valuable Offer: To attract prospects, you need to offer something valuable that your ideal customer finds irresistible. This could be a lead magnet such as an eBook, whitepaper, webinar, or exclusive content.
Exchange for Contact Details: Prospects trade their contact information for access to your lead magnet. They do this by filling out an opt-in form, which allows you to capture their details.
Nurture the Relationship: Once you have their contact details, you can begin to nurture the relationship by sending targeted and relevant marketing materials that further engage and educate them.
2. Data-Driven Decision Making
Fractional CMO Service leverages data analytics to monitor and evaluate marketing performance. This helps in informed decision-making and continually optimises strategies to maximise lead generation strategies. Data-driven insights ensure that marketing efforts are precise and yield the best possible results.
Data-Driven Lead Generation Strategy
A data-driven lead generation strategy leverages data to design a process that effectively attracts and converts leads. By using insights from client data, you can enhance your strategy to maximise ROI and minimise resource wastage.
Define Your Target Market: Identifying the decision-makers in your target segment is crucial. By focusing on the right individuals, you save time and resources, ensuring your efforts are directed toward those who can make purchasing decisions.
Gather Data from Multiple Sources: The more data you collect, the higher your chances of conversion. Gather information such as email addresses, client preferences, and behaviour from various sources, including client reviews, web analytics, social media, and competitive research.
Analyse Your Data Carefully: Examine the collected data for patterns and trends. This analysis will help you understand the buyer journey and identify what they are looking for at different stages.
Use Your Findings to Improve Your Strategy: Based on your data analysis, adjust your lead generation strategy. This could involve refining your messaging, changing your approach to reach potential leads, or personalising your communication to better align with the preferences and needs of your target audience.
3. Marketing Automation
Marketing automation tools and processes streamline lead nurturing, enabling quick qualification and conversion of leads without human intervention. Fractional CMO Service uses automation to personalise and scale marketing efforts, ensuring that each lead receives the right message at the right time, ultimately enhancing conversion rates and return on investment (ROI).
How to Automate Lead Generation
Marketing automation platforms add efficiency and scalability to your lead generation strategy. Although the process is rarely fully automated, especially in B2B and high-end B2C transactions, marketing automation can significantly enhance the lead generation process by streamlining and optimising various tasks. Here's a step on how to automate lead generation:
Select a Marketing Automation Platform: Choose a platform that fits your business needs and integrates well with your existing systems (e.g., CRM).
Design and Build Campaigns: Create campaigns with clear goals, workflows, and content offers. Map out the journey from lead capture to conversion.
Configure Lead Scoring: Set up lead scoring criteria based on actions that indicate a lead's level of interest and readiness to buy.
Integrate with CRM: Ensure your marketing automation platform is integrated with your CRM system to enable seamless data transfer and collaboration between marketing and sales.
Test and Launch: Test your automated workflows thoroughly to ensure everything works as expected. Launch the campaign and monitor its performance closely.
Iterate and Improve: Use insights from campaign performance to iterate and improve your lead generation strategy continuously.
Lead generation in B2B refers to the process of identifying and attracting potential customers (leads) who are likely to be interested in your product or service. This process typically involves various strategies to initiate contact with these potential leads and convert them into prospects who can be nurtured through the sales funnel. There are various methods to generate leads for your business, but the key is to find a B2B lead generation strategy that suits your business objectives.
With gigCMO's Fractional CMO Service, you can leverage a Growth Playbook for targeted inbound marketing, data-driven decision-making, and marketing automation to attract, nurture, and convert high-quality leads efficiently.
Contact gigCMO for a free consultation and learn how our Fractional CMO Service can transform revenue growth by providing ROI-driven marketing leadership. Let us help you turn potential leads into loyal customers.
