Picture this out: You are in the process of launching a new product or solution. You need customers in your funnel and you are faced with a struggle in keeping your tank full. As the constant change in the marketing landscape already fueled the challenge in keeping your business on the run, launching a new product only adds to the number.

How will you generate buzz around your product and solution? How will you attract visitors and convert them into qualified leads? How will you gain that “traction” that you’ve been aiming for a while now? The questions of how’s are popping inevitably, it is not new – so are lead generation strategies.

There are several tactics that you can integrate into your business that would help you counter the said challenge, such is a deeper understanding of lead generation that is both art and science. It is a simple process, yet, it needs professional creativity to attract visitors, drive traffic to your website and gain some qualified leads whose interest was stirred by your product or service. There are many opportunities out there, but the question is how are you going to turn each opportunity into sales?

You will not achieve what you desire if you lack the sense of product awareness and understanding of your clients’ needs. As it is a stiff competition, you need to reach out to customers in order to have that competitive edge while maintaining your place in the industry. Plan your marketing activities efficiently and take advantage of the multi-channel available within your grasp. In short, make your clients know what you are offering – bring your product or solution to your customers on individual social media avenues. A cross-channel marketing approach will help you win visitors and convert audiences to leads. Dropped below are some of the helpful tactics that can help you create traction:

SEO

Optimization is key. Let online users find you in search engines as it is arguably, the most powerful long-term technique in generating leads. This goes along quality content and possible search keywords related to your service. You can also use some SEO tools that can equip your search marketing campaign for the better.

Online Presence

Position your product or solution where a big number of audiences are most likely to dwell. Widen your reach across the web as you provide your prospects with information relevant to their needs. Send them appropriate and time-saving messages in a touch point.

Live Chat Support

Focus on prospects who are potentially interested with what you offer by simply answering their questions. Provide real-time and convenient information as you drive you prospects to your sales funnel through a live chat that would put you quickly in front of them.

Content Marketing

Humanize your brand and come up with a buyer persona that will allow you to understand your customers better. When you relate your content that appeals to your target market, you are not only building a relationship with them but you also cultivate their trust towards your brand.

Affiliate Marketing

Considered as one of the key strategies for your business to prosper, affiliates are your business partners that would pave you access to different networks. Leave a part of the burden on promoting your service to them as they can reach and attract online users redirected to your website.

Email Marketing

A one-to-many medium, nothing beats a channel that stood the test of time. Emails are more direct and personal where you can establish a relationship with your clients. When managed effectively, it could generate great results for your business.

 
In addition, you can find your own lead generation company that will help you achieve your marketing goals. Leverage your marketing stance with their professional services that will save you time as manual works of your team will be reduced. Choose the one that works best for you, which coincides with your target market and your requirements.

If there is no traction going on and about, your product or solution will not gain the momentum needed to keep your business running. The higher the traction, the higher the sales – sales will fuel your business and lead generation will trigger your sales. So make your move, attract potential investors and close the deal while it is still hot!

Author Bio:

Dara Lin is a Marketing Specialist at Callbox Australia. She is a coffee trailblazer, general music fanatic, and an internet enthusiast. Follow Dara on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

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Sales and Marketing experts collaborated to give the best guide to proper leads handoff. Here’s some sage advice from them.

Automation

Hubspot suggests automating lead handoff from Marketing to Sales following a specific process, starting with determining the appropriate timing when a lead become “sales qualified’. The lead handoff process contains the important communication made between the two departments.

• In cases where a lead is returned from Sales to Marketing when further nurturing is needed or become unqualified, the marketing team may opt to continue to track the lead by sending content in order to get the prospect to give accurate information.
• But when a lead becomes an opportunity, utilize an email flow with useful content which is relevant to the decision making of the prospect.
• When a lead is lost, do not give up on that lead. Keep nurturing them, give them the chance to get back to your customer pipeline soon.

Related: How Marketing Automation Increased My Client’s Appointments in 30 Days

Identifiable Touchpoints

Business2Community shares that a clear handoff process should have identifiable touchpoints at each stage for both departments. Using a spreadsheet or a central database that contains all activities done for such lead will help provide a clear handoff process:

• Getting everyone held accountable for distinct responsibilities, showing each department’s touchpoints
• It’s a guide that would let everyone know what has been done and what still needs to be done to a lead to complete its life cycle.
• It will help improve both Sales and Marketing’s ability to determine a sales pipeline entry point. Sales may use some triggers to get an MQL into an opportunity through a demo, free trial or consultation.    
• It holds value between Sales and Marketing, knowing where to look for the most updated list of MQLs.
• A tool that is rock solid, closed-loop reporting. This can be achieved by building a process that sits on the top of the CRM by clearly establishing an understanding of the proper handoff strategy.

Marketing-ready to Sales-ready

Marketo, on the other hand, has 7 ways to turn marketing qualified leads to sales qualified leads:

1. More consistent and better quality follow-up on leads would result in better or higher conversion of leads into opportunities.
2. Faster lead response times would give better conversion rates.
3. Better economics. Salespeople close deals with qualified sales candidates, not doing otherwise like educating raw leads or unqualified prospects.
4. The human touch enhances lead nurturing through personalized thought leadership and value based on the lead’s pain points.
5. Working with superior data or the most accurate information in the CRM.
6. Improved revenue cycle analytics, being able to identify where the problem’s root and resolve it faster with better follow-through process.
7. Talent development for sales means to have sales knowledgeable and skilled people in the team who understand the business well and can carry out quota while reducing hiring work.

Related: The Killer Way To Convert Leads Into Sales

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In a another post, we went over a handful of sales prospecting tips that top-performing Australian B2B marketers put into practice. Today, we’ll focus on the next crucial step in achieving pipeline growth: converting new business leads into opportunities and customers.

To recap, recent research findings about the B2B marketing space in Australia (such as Green Hat’s 2018 B2B Marketing Report) reveal what highly-effective marketers tend to do differently. Based on these results, we’ve identified 10 pipeline growth strategies that drive the performance of best-in-class marketers:

1. Document your marketing strategy the right way
2. Work with TIDY marketing data
3. Meet prospects where they actually are
4. Focus on conversations, not just content
5. Don’t do what everyone else is doing, unless…
6. Always be selling the next step
7. Help prospects find and use information faster
8. Bake CX into your marketing DNA
9. Separate the signal from the noise in your metrics
10. Align, by all means, align

We’ve already talked about the first five points in detail in the previous post. We now turn our attention to the five other remaining pipeline growth ideas, which relate to lead conversion.

Always be selling the next step

Best-in-class marketers understand that today’s buying process is a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why they’re twice more likely to have a lead nurturing strategy and process in place compared to average marketers. Keep in mind that the most effective lead nurturing programs produce 50% more sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost.

If you took the time to clearly document your lead generation strategy, then it’s going to be much easier for you to outline the steps in the nurturing process.

Marketing MO recommends going over these questions to define your buyer’s purchase journey (which you can then use to create your lead nurture path):

• When do buyers realize that they need help with a problem?
• What do buyers do to find potential solutions?
• How do buyers decide which solutions and vendors to evaluate further?
• What information do buyers need in order to make a decision?
• Who else from the buyer’s organization will be involved in the decision?
• How long will it take for the buyer to make a decision?

Help prospects find and use information faster

As B2B buyers control more and more of the purchase process, they need to quickly access the right information at the right time to help them move along the buying journey. Faced with an ocean of content and collaterals, buyers tend to prefer potential vendors that can help them easily find what they need.

Research from Aberdeen shows that targeting users with content relevant to their buying stage yields 72% higher conversion rates. At the same time, DemandGen Report finds that bundling lead nurturing content within a resource hub results in 400% increase in lead-to-pipeline ratio.

All this points to the fact that, not only does content need to be relevant to the buyer’s position along the purchase journey, it also needs to be easily within reach.

Here’s how to help prospects gain access to what they’re looking for:

• At each step in the purchase journey, what information or tool can you provide to help meet the needs of potential buyers?
• Can you assign persons from your team to be involved at each stage?
• Does your experience with past prospects help you identify how to shorten the time leads spend at each stage?

Bake CX into your marketing DNA

When it comes to converting new business leads, best-in-class marketers understand the value of optimizing customer experience (CX). In fact, this is a clear point of distinction between top-performing marketers and the rest of their peers.

According to Green Hat’s survey of Australian B2B marketers, around 48% of overall respondents have implemented customer journey mapping and developed personas, while 50% are targeting specific segments. By comparison, 67% of respondents classified as best-in-class have already undertaken customer journey mapping, and 74% are personalizing content.

Part of the reason for this difference in the level of CX focus is the multi-channel nature of the customer buying process. This is why a full 95% of B2B marketers find optimizing CX very challenging.

As PWC notes, buyers expect these four key qualities in any CX effort: speed, convenience, knowledgeable help, and friendliness. This is even more important now that 46% of B2B researchers and decision makers are millennials.

B2BMarketing.net lays out the specific steps in order to make CX a seamless part of your lead generation process:

• Audit your lead conversion process and set metrics for success at each touch point
• Plan for every stage in the customer life cycle, from acquisition to retention
• Make sure your marketing team (and only your marketing team) owns CX
• Get everyone’s buy-in and understanding
• Leverage influencers and customer champions
• Listen and respond to feedback

Separate the signal from the noise in your metrics

Highly effective marketers also excel at another crucial ability that their peers struggle with: measuring what matters.

As Bizible mentions, while both best-in-class and average marketers have largely the same marketing priorities, they differ in how they use marketing metrics. Top-performing marketers are 10% more likely to point to down-funnel metrics such as lead-to-opportunity, pipeline growth, revenue, ROI, etc. as gauges of their performance.

Best-in-class marketers are also more likely to claim they can reliably measure marketing results. Green Hat finds that 95% of top-performing marketers measure overall marketing ROI to some degree. In addition, almost 3 out of 4 highly effective marketers can accurately measure lead conversion and pipeline performance, 2 out of 3 can measure sales lead follow-up and more than half can measure campaign attribution.

One pressing reason why average marketers struggle with marketing measurement is that they tend to be inundated by an overwhelming amount of data. With so many data points to monitor and analyze, it can be hard to separate the signal from the noise.

An article from Forbes breaks down the steps to help you analyze marketing data more effectively:

• Start with clear objectives
• Assess the quality of data
• Answer specific questions
• Acknowledge and correct possible biases
• Analyze data in context
• Apply the right data visualization
• Organize and crunch the numbers using a reliable tool
• Assign the right person to the data analytics role

Align, by all means, align

Among the things we’ve mentioned so far, it’s the ability to align sales and marketing that starkly contrasts top-performing marketers with the rest of the pack.

Bizible uncovers a correlation between high marketing performance and marketing-sales alignment. Top-performing marketers are more likely to rate their sales-marketing alignment highly than average marketers.

Green Hat also observes a similar relationship between marketing performance and the degree of marketing-sales alignment. According to their study, sales-marketing alignment is the B2B area that sharply differs between best-in-class and average marketers.

Sales and marketing alignment is a core element of pipeline growth. With alignment, more leads are converted and followed up by sales, and both sales and marketing share a unified view of the prospect’s purchase process.

For alignment to happen, the following five areas need to be covered:

• Shared goals and KPIs
• Mutual lead management process
• Common lead definition
• Clear service-level agreements (SLAs)
• Open communications and regular collaboration

 
Conclusion:  Now that we’ve seen what top-performing B2B marketers do to get the most from their marketing programs and campaigns, it’s time to put these ideas into practice. Building and growing your sales pipeline is all about finding the right approach to capture sales prospects and convert new business leads. Hopefully, the things we’ve covered in this series can point you toward that direction.

Author Bio:

Dara Lin is a Marketing Specialist at Callbox Australia. She is a coffee trailblazer, general music fanatic, and an internet enthusiast. Follow Dara on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

Exceed your growth and revenue targets.

BOOK A CONSULTATION

Dial +61 2 9037.2248

Grab a copy of our FREE EBOOK, By the Numbers: Marketing Stats that Drive Top B2B Industries in 2019! Get an in-depth look at marketing trends in nine (9) key B2B industries.

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