How to Generate Sales Leads: A Guide for B2B Business

B2B sales lead generation is a highly challenging task, and for marketers seeking an easy way out, witnessing positive outcomes will be an unrealized dream. The fact that 37.1% of marketers find generating high-quality leads a daunting task makes it a problem at hand for B2B businesses to be addressed immediately. It becomes a tough nut to crack when a strategy to generate sales leads is absent. Additionally, budget constraints and relying heavily on old lead-generation tactics are real-time bottlenecks preventing businesses from meeting their cherished business goals.

What are B2B Leads?

A lead refers to a contact a business generates through its marketing endeavors. A B2B lead can be a name, business email address, company name, or phone number. Furthermore, let us understand the two main types of leads B2B enterprises generate. A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is a promising lead interested in the enterprise’s product and holds immense potential to become a client, e.g., a prospect who has filled out the requirement form or downloaded a white paper. In comparison, a Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) is a genuine, relevant prospect ready to be contacted by the sales team. A prospect becomes an SQL via lead nurturing or through direct purchase intent (ex, by requesting a product demo).

How do you generate B2B sales leads? Strategies to transform contacts to clients and boost sales

Efficiency is the cornerstone of B2B sales. Big-sized deals require a great amount of effort from the sales teams. The subsequent sales productivity of a business depends on the number of qualified leads generated. Besides this, high-quality sales leads are vital to reduce the churn a venture encounters and to maintain a low sales-cost ratio.

Did you know 51% of sales teams struggle to generate leads?

Here are a few top-notch strategies that will make the uphill task of generating sales leads easier for marketers.

1.  Never Ditch Cold Emails

For years, sales teams have used the tactic of cold emailing. Email marketing campaigns usually fetch a reasonable engagement rate, nudging businesses to use cold emails to connect with prospects. Additionally, cold emails have a response rate of 7%, i.e., out of 100 emails sent, seven prospect buyers tend to respond. With around 93% of businesses finding email as the best channel to market their offerings, subject lines focusing on value or urgency, hyper-personalized content, shorter and concise emails, and follow-up emails when there is no triggered response can work wonders and generate sales leads with buying intent. Businesses can use merge tags, include the first name or company name in each email, and make every message entirely personalized for each lead to generate a quick response from prospects.

2.   Make Warm Calls via Telemarketing

Though telemarketing is an age-old lead-generation tactic, it is still effective. As a proactive approach, it allows businesses to develop successful leads and broaden their horizon. By being directly in a conversation with potential buyers, telemarketing gives businesses an opportunity to stick around qualified leads. Telemarketing creates avenues for marketers to address concerns or remove potential buyers’ reservations that prevent them from proceeding to the purchase phase and ultimately generate sales leads.

3.   Capitalize on SEO to Boost Website Traffic

Research insights from SageFrog suggest that SEO generates 34% of qualified leads. Hence, leveraging search engine optimization (SEO) to make their website climb up to the top of Google search result pages is something businesses should never deter from implementing. Using apt target keywords to describe the services and products the business offers and incorporating lead-capturing forms on website pages fetch positive outcomes and increase sales leads from SEO. Working toward building backlinks by creating good content that addresses the queries of their leads or provides valuable insights about how their offerings will benefit the users allows businesses to increase their SEO ranks and gain visibility. One more tactic marketers can exercise is targeting important keywords with relevant content to garner the user’s attention. Some of the tools businesses can use to optimize websites for SEO include Ahrefs, Serpstat, Screaming Frog, and more.

4.   Harness the Potential of Your Website’s Landing Pages

In B2B sales, landing pages are bountiful trees to source fruits as they act as transformative points in a buyer’s journey. By having landing pages that offer exact solutions to what the prospect or user is looking for, businesses can drive traffic to their website. Additionally, channeling a click for a specific keyword search or a Google advertisement to a unique landing page allows marketers to attract ample prospects to their websites. By employing tactics like discount offers or by sweetening the deals with incentives, B2B marketers can persuade visitors to make a purchase and generate sales leads. Adding a live chat functionality on a landing page helps businesses educate and eliminate any doubts prospects harbor about their offerings and convert them into leads willing to make a purchase. Catchy headlines and relevant CTA copy also pave the way for B2B sales lead generation on a website. Website personalization by incorporating dynamic pages and content that adapts according to the visitor’s name, location, and industry fetches quick lead generation wins for businesses.

5.   Prioritize Content Marketing

Creating content that strikes the right chord with the target audience and distributing it through suitable communication channels has proved to be an effective strategy to generate sales leads. As 93% of the B2B buying process begins with an online search, businesses should place content marketing at the center of the digital lead generation strategy. As B2B sales purchase decisions are usually not spontaneous, users prefer to first gather comprehensive information before even considering product, which gives businesses a remarkable opportunity to captivate a lead’s attention through various formats of content and transform them into sales leads. The fact that businesses that blog get 67% more leads corroborates this fact. 90% of B2B marketers across the globe prefer to use blog posts and articles as content marketing tactics to generate sales leads.

6.   Social Selling Must Be a Go-ahead

A social networking platform like LinkedIn is an advertising platform for B2B businesses for big deals and high-value sales lead generation. Though the competition is rife, the tradeoff is the hyper-targeting ability the platform bestows markets, making LinkedIn B2B marketing a tactic to generate sales leads worthy of pursuit. With relevant content in the loop, businesses can make appropriate connections, initiate a dialogue with their target audience, and position themselves as an expert in a niche. It creates an avenue for interested parties to approach the business, or someone will recommend the enterprise as they’ve seen it several times in relation to a topic. This way, businesses can take their product where demand lies and generate sales leads for profitability. B2 marketers can generate sales-qualified leads by posting user-generated content on non-conventional channels like Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok.

7.   Advertise and Generate Sales Leads

As Google represents 75% of desktop searches and 89% of mobile searches, Businesses can deliver relevant ads to users who are aware of what they are looking for at the right moment through Google ads. By targeting intent–driven searches, businesses can effectively convert these interested prospects into sales leads. While intent-driven searches can be converted to sales via Google ads, businesses still have a question at large, i.e., what about online users who are unsure or unaware of what they need until it is placed precisely in front of them? It is where LinkedIn ads take the lead over Google ad targeting. Via LinkedIn ads, businesses can promote their offerings to clearly defined and refined audience segments that align with their buyer criteria and capture sales leads even before they have shown intent. Additionally, enterprises can augment their advertising campaign with PPC ads for a continuous influx of leads for as long as their ad appears online.

8.   Avail Marketing and Contact Databases

One more effective method to generate sales leads is leveraging contact databases available in the market. As the information in these databases is collated by the data solution providers using reliable sources, businesses are able to reach the right audience interested in their offerings. Owing to this, businesses can quickly jump into a transactional dialogue as they have taken their product where the demand lies and generated sales leads. Additionally, as the data can be customized per the enterprise’s product and marketing demand, it helps businesses quickly discover sales-qualified leads.

9.   Broaden the Horizon With B2b Lookalikes

If businesses reach their sales targets without having to wait for leads, it could work wonders! B2B marketers can make this a reality by exploring the facet of B2B lookalikes. A lookalike audience is a list of prospects, contacts, or potential users assembled based on the critical factors generated from an ideal customer profile. B2B organizations can approach parties or users similar to their existing clients, use advertising or cold calling for marketing to them, and generate sales leads.

10.   Drive Sales Through Webinars

Businesses should capitalize on the aspect that B2B prospects usually need more advice about products or services than their B2C counterparts. B2B prospects tend to compare several providers or businesses before making a purchase decision as they want to make a judicious call about making a suitable investment. Hence, webinars become the best option for businesses to nurture their leads and transform them into clients. According to research insights from Monster, 20 to 40% of webinar audiences turn into qualified leads. A webinar that addresses the prospect’s buying challenge with compelling content or product demo efficiently grabs their attention and even commits them to buy the product a business offers. Owing to the lead nurturing and transformative capacity webinars hold in B2B marketing, 73% of companies consider it an effective tool to generate sales leads.

11.   Ask for Referrals and Expand Your Network

21% of the sales leads businesses to generate come from the referral channel. Hence, businesses should always ask their existing customer to refer them to their peers. By building trust with their existing clientele and incentivizing referrals, companies can ask for an introduction to their acquaintances, offices, or other vendors. Whenever a user has a good experience with a product or service the business is offering, they respond generously and refer them or recommend them to others; thus, such referrals often result in B2B sale leads.

12.   Focus on Account-based Marketing

Account-based marketing fetches high-quality sales leads for businesses. However, to accomplish this, companies need to use high-quality. By availing of data cleansing services, businesses can have immaculate data at their behest, discover valuable assets, target ideal accounts, and rope them in as potential clients. They can also leverage data about c-suite and key decision makers of specific industries, collaborate with them, offer personalized experiences for selected accounts, strengthen connections, convert them to high-value sales leads and engage their venture’s profits.

Additional Tactics

Along with the abovementioned strategies, businesses can include these tactics for quick wins in sales leads.

• Get listed on company directories: B2B firms offering tech-based products or services should list their company on online software directories. It allows them to gain the required visibility, showcase themselves to prospects seeking similar products, and drive leads with purchase intent to their website.
• Warm up cold leads: Businesses can remarket by showing ads on other websites to past visitors, warm up cold prospects, and convert them to sales leads.
• Use video marketing: With videos, B2B marketers can repurpose content and create informative videos to target buyers and win more business.

Wrapping Up

Generating ample sales leads is the basis of any successful business. Without chalking out a clear-cut strategy to generate quality leads that convert, B2B marketers will be stumbling around in the dark and leaving business growth and profitability to chance. Accurate data, combined with the abovementioned tactics, will empower businesses to improve sales lead generation and create a sales pipeline always brimming with action.