Lead generation has never been more important for B2B businesses. That’s because it’s never been easier for top B2B customers to make the switch to other companies, and that puts extraordinary pressure on any company to maintain a constant pipeline of new leads.
According to the latest figures from Gallup, for example, only 29 percent of B2B customers are really engaged with the companies they do business with. That means that a majority – slightly over 70 percent – are wiling to walk out the door every year if there’s enough reason to switch.
So what can you do to generate more leads and keep your customer pipeline full? Here are four quick tips to generate more B2B leads – and keep the ones you already have.
Tip #1: Create customer personas
You have to really understand your key customers as people, not just as “accounts.” You need to understand what makes them tick, what their preferences are, and why they act in certain ways. The best way to do this is by constructing customer personas that describe the demographic and psychographic backgrounds of your best customers. When you understand them as people, you will be better able to meet their current needs – as well as understand the right types of “hot leads” who can become future customers. It might just turn out your best customers have very different needs and interests than originally supposed.
Tip #2: Align your sales and marketing operations
If the marketing and sales teams don’t have a good working relationship, you could be missing out on a key opportunity to understand the full customer lifecycle. In a best-case scenario, any feedback from the sales team will make its way back to the marketing team, and any insights about the customer from the marketing team will be part of the hand-off between the two teams. That’s why it’s critical to align the sales and marketing teams – it’s a way to close the loop and create a positive feedback mechanism.
Tip #3: Boost your social listening presence
Social media can be a goldmine of information about prospects and customers. The key is not just broadcasting out your own marketing messages, but also listening to what these prospects and customers have to say. “Social listening” refers to the time spent going onto platforms like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn and seeing what customers and prospects are saying about your products and services.
Tip #4: Take a closer look at your data
Most successful B2B companies have a very effective way of scoring prospects and qualifying leads. Theoretically, this makes it easier to understand who is likely to become a customer, and who is not. So if you find that the “hot leads” are not so “hot” after all, it may be time to re-visit your scoring system. It may turn out, for example, that you are only using demographic data (age, gender, geographic location) to score leads, and not other types of data that might be in your company’s CRM system. Getting a CRM solution that works for you, such as one from SugarCRM, could be the key to unlocking all the value in your customer data.
By keeping all four of these tips in mind, you’ll open up amazing new opportunities when it comes to B2B lead generation. And the more leads you have, the more sales you’ll eventually make. Who can argue with that?
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Dane
Dane Cobain is a published author, freelance writer, book blogger, poet and (occasional) musician from High Wycombe, UK. Before going freelance, he worked as a social media marker, now specialising in writing about publishing, technology and marketing.