What is Lead Generation? How to Generate Leads Effectively & Close More Deals

Lead generation is the process of attracting new prospects to a company or individual. It usually occurs when an organization needs fresh leads in order to expand, replace old ones, or increase sales and revenue. The majority of high-performing companies will generate their own leads because they want to control both sides of the conversation that follows lead generation – acquisition and conversion.

Lead generation is a process of generating leads which are potential customers. It is important to close more deals with these leads. The “what is lead generation process” will teach you how to generate leads effectively and close more deals.

Lead generation is the initial stage in the sales process that attracts prospective customers and moves them through your sales funnel. You’ll discover proven tactics, a step-by-step procedure, and which software solutions will maintain your sales funnel continually full of prospects, eventually leading to a repeating cycle of new transactions done, in this article.

What Is Lead Generation and How Does It Work?

Lead generation is the initial step of the sales process, in which a prospective customer (qualified or not) is added to the sales funnel and begins their customer journey. It comprises promotion, marketing, and direct sales operations to raise awareness and gauge a person’s or organization’s purchasing interest.

Lead Generation Techniques

There is no one-size-fits-all strategy to lead generation, and to diversify lead sources and optimize possibilities, a mix of tactics will be required in most circumstances. Sales managers must examine their company’s budget, resources, skill sets, target market, expertise, and other factors when deciding which techniques to use.

Generation of Inbound Leads

One approach to consider is having potential customers come to you, known as Generation of Inbound Leads. Inbound marketing involves a high degree of knowledge and work behind the scenes to create referral pipelines or use online search-optimized marketing and advertising as a “lead magnet” to attract interested buyers.

A few specific tactics for Generation of Inbound Leads include:

• Develop a network and diverse collaborations with other individuals, firms, or even your present clients in order to encourage them to bring you leads. Referrals are one of the most effective methods to create leads since they don’t need a lot of extra effort, and each lead is instantly marketing-qualified, if not sales-qualified.
• Create articles, graphics, white papers, case studies, films, or podcasts for your website that are relevant to your target audience. To drive visitors to the page where the material is provided, this strategy works best when combined with search engine optimization (SEO) and paid advertising. Customer profiles let you identify what forms of communications appeal to different target groups, so you can personalize the types of content you engage different Leads of Various Types with.
• Traditional advertising: Direct mailers, newspapers, magazines, radio, television, and even billboard advertising are all options for reaching a broad audience, however they may be costly. Create a call to action in the advertising, such as “contact us at this number to learn more.”
• Paid search advertising: You may pay to have your company’s listing appear at the top of a search engine’s results page. Your ad will be one of the few at the top of the page whenever someone searches for your product, service, or solution on Google or another search engine. This strategy is just meant to raise awareness; in order to produce a lead, the lead must contact you or submit a website query.
• Website form submissions: This method is usually used in conjunction with another inbound strategy. The call to action takes the user to a website form, generally on your website, where they may purchase, download something, subscribe, seek a quotation, or otherwise enter their information to be reached by you, via content marketing, advertising, social media campaigns, and even referrals.
• Organic postings or adverts conducted on social media, such as Facebook Ads or LinkedIn Ads, are both examples of social media campaigns. This strategy works well with content marketing, such as when you want to promote a video, podcast, or blog via a campaign.
• Educational seminars or webinars: Hosting an educational seminar or webinar, which may be done in person or online, is another excellent technique to produce marketing qualified leads. It’s especially efficient for business-to-business (B2B) lead generation, such as workshops or webinars that teach company owners how to address common problems, but it’s also useful for long-process or high-ticket consumer products, such as a seminar for first-time homeowners.

Creating Outbound Leads

Alternatively, or more likely in conjunction with Generation of Inbound Leads, your business can actively find and engage potential customers using outbound tactics. This strategy is most effective for sales-centric companies that successfully personalize the buyer’s journey by connecting with them directly.

Outbound lead generation may be done in a variety of ways.

• Purchasing leads: Purchasing leads is more of a precursor to other Creating Outbound Leads examples like cold calling or email introductions. By purchasing leads, you get a list of contacts with their information to start the outbound sales process. While there are many reputable places to buy business leads, these leads will be unqualified to start because they’ve had no prior engagement with your business.
• Cold calling: For individuals who have never done it before, cold calling might be frightening, but it is the quickest method to qualify a lead and evaluate interest. When cold phoning, you introduce yourself and get a quick answer. You may get started with cold calling by reading our how-to guide for building scripts and our beginner’s guide to cold calling.
• Email introductions: Another approach of creating awareness and maybe qualifying a lead is to send a cold email. If you use email introductions to give samples of your work, such as a project portfolio or case study, and you have a creative approach to stimulate the lead’s interest, such as a free trial or demo, or a downloadable industry white paper, they will be more likely to respond.
• Attending networking events allows you to acquire other people’s business cards and interact with them in person or through video conference sessions. You may present your sales pitch about what you do and discover whether your solutions are attractive to the folks you meet at these events.
• Expos, conferences, and trade shows: Setting up a booth at an expo, conference, or trade show puts your company in front of hundreds to thousands of people. Finding the ideal events to go with your target demographic and creating an attractive booth by conducting raffles and giving away swag are the keys to success with this strategy.

Use lead scoring to assess and identify leads who are most likely to convert into paying clients. Where they came from and how often they engage with your marketing material are two factors that contribute towards a high lead score.

Six Steps to Generating New Leads

A large part of the lead generating process is trial and error to evaluate what works. For example, you can discover that the target demographic you had in mind isn’t the one who generates the greatest chances. The general market may shift, new rivals or alternatives may arise, and the strategies that work well for one audience may not work as well for another.

There are six stages to building a lead generation campaign for your company, which are outlined below:

1. Figure out who you want to reach out to.

Knowing what an outstanding lead looks like is the first step in producing leads since it affects the channels and methods you utilize. Creating a client persona is one technique to figure out who your target audience is. Personas are fictional representations of your ideal customers based on demographics, hobbies, habits, jobs, and work duties.

You’ll be able to choose which channels, messages, and calls to action to employ to attract each sort of ideal consumer as you construct personas. Check out our tutorial on how to construct a customer persona for more information and a free customer persona template.

2. Plan Out Your Approach

Once you’ve determined who you want to target, decide if you want to use an inbound, outbound, or hybrid approach. You may also narrow down the exact strategies you want to use, keeping in mind that various personalities may need different approaches.

If one of your target groups is younger than the other, you may need to employ social media campaigns to appeal to the younger demographic while phoning, emailing, or using conventional advertising to attract the older generation. How you intend to produce leads is also influenced by your team’s skill sets, expertise, and resources.

When employing various forms of lead generating concepts for business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) suppliers, the following criteria are required:

3. Put Your Strategy Into Action

It’s just as crucial to choose the appropriate technique as it is to execute it with excellent message and communication. Each technique will define what the message is, how it is delivered, and where it is delivered based on the target demographic. When cold calling, for example, the message is an opening elevator pitch delivered over the phone utilizing a cold calling script.

The message in content marketing is the primary point or theme of the material given, which may be consumed by a lead on a website or social media platform. To communicate your message at trade exhibitions, you may utilize branded merchandise, posters, and signage. Educational seminars or webinars need the selection of a venue (online or off), the creation of audience-valued material, and the construction of a call to action that relates back to your company’s unique value proposition or offers.

One final thing to think about when it comes to the execution stage is whether you want to perform it in-house or outsource it. A lead generating firm, for example, may make cold calls and send introduction emails on your behalf.

Similarly, marketing companies or freelancers may be hired to provide content or adverts, design pages for your website, and manage social media. While outsourcing methods to specialists may be more costly, the return on investment (ROI) may be well worth the expense.

4. Issue a rallying cry.

No matter what methods are utilized, or whether they are executed in-house or by a third party, they must be followed with a call to action. A good call to action is one that prompts the prospect to express interest and convert into a qualified lead. Based on the approach used, below are several ideas of how to start a call to action:

• After a video, article, or podcast, inform the audience that they may learn more by contacting a phone number, emailing your company, or filling out a website form.
• Traditional advertising: Include a phone number, a website URL where they can fill out a form, or an email address where they may contact your company in the advertisement.
• In paid search advertising, use buttons to direct the audience to the next step. It might say things like “shop now,” “learn more,” or “make an appointment.”
• Use buttons in social media campaigns to direct the audience to the next step. It may say something like “follow us on @accountname” or “for more information, visit our website.”
• Inform guests how they may contact you by phone, email, or your website during educational sessions. Make sure you capture guests’ contact information on a sign-up sheet to utilize for direct marketing follow-ups later. Online webinars, on the other hand, enable you to get sign-up information from all individuals who are interested, whether or not they attend, for future prospecting or lead nurturing operations.
• Cold calling: Set up product demonstrations, sales presentations, or get their email address to provide them additional information about your product or service during the call.
• Email introductions: Tell them they may learn more or take the next step by visiting your website, calling you, or responding to the introductory email.
• Give leads your business card or other marketing materials with your contact information during networking events and trade exhibits. You may also take their business cards or get their contact information and then contact them personally after the event. Incentivize information sharing with giveaway prizes or a post-event lottery for a highly wanted item, such as an iPad, to collect a large number of contacts at events like these.

5. Evaluate the effectiveness

Measure the efficacy of your strategies based on how many people react to the call to action as you execute tactics and create calls to action. For all sorts of channels, there are several techniques to assess their performance.

Consider the following metrics:

• The proportion of leads interested in learning more in a presentation, demo, or getting price information in direct sales activities such as cold calling or emailing is known as the sales qualifying lead (SQL) rate.
• If you buy leads, the actionable lead rate is the proportion of contacts where the contact information is correct.
• If you’re running an ad or a social media campaign, the cost per engagement is the total amount of money spent divided by the total number of individuals that engaged with the campaign. Responding to the call to action or clicking on the ad are examples of interactions.
• The entire money spent on a lead technique or campaign divided by the total number of leads created is the cost per lead.
• The proportion of income gained by a lead strategy or specialized campaign divided by the cost of deploying it is the total return on investment (ROI).
• The proportion of transactions concluded based on the total number of leads produced is known as the lead-to-sales ratio (closure rate). This is a crucial indicator since it shows you how many leads you’ll need to complete a certain number of sales. If your closing rate is 5% and you want to complete 40 sales, for example, you’ll need to create 800 leads.

6. Modify Your Approach

It’s pointless to measure the efficacy of your efforts if you’re not going to do something with the results. As previously said, determining the ideal techniques for your organization requires trial and error, with analytics revealing what works and what doesn’t. You may modify your strategy and tactics as a result of this knowledge.

The data might indicate that an overall strategy isn’t working, or that one strategy is more effective with one consumer persona than another. Let’s imagine you’re conducting a cold calling campaign and an internet ad with video content that’s aimed at company owners and information technology (IT) directors. Your sales qualifying lead rates throughout each of those campaigns are as follows:

• The percentage of people who make cold calls to company owners is 3%.
• The success rate of cold phoning IT directors is 7%.
• The percentage of company owners that watch video material is 5%.
• For IT directors, video content accounts for 2% of their time.

This means that cold phoning IT directors is more effective, while video material is better for corporate owners. As a result, you should change your approach and acquire new contact lists for cold calling IT directors, as well as adapt your internet marketing campaigns to target more company owners.

Leads of Various Types

An important part of lead generation is lead qualification, which allows you to organize and identify different Leads of Various Types. As you generate leads, each of them will fall into one of four categories depending on their interaction, interest level, and where they came from.

The four main Leads of Various Types include:

• Unqualified lead (UQL): Any contact who may be a suitable match for your company but has yet to demonstrate interest or interact with you. When you buy a lead list, you’re getting unqualified leads.
• A marketing qualified lead (MQL) is someone who has shown interest in your company by engaging with a marketing campaign. Clicking on an email link, completing a web form for a special offer, signing up for your newsletter, downloading something, or participating in a social media campaign are all examples of actions.
• Someone who has shown a strong interest in your company’s services by seeking pricing, signing up for a free trial, consenting to a presentation, or speaking with a sales representative.
• A lead that has utilized a product as part of a free trial or a free-forever plan and has indicated interest in becoming a paying client is referred to as a product qualified lead (PQL). When someone takes advantage of a software free trial and contacts a sales representative about a feature or cost, they have become product-qualified.

Use the budget, authority, need, and timetable (BANT) technique to rank and score your leads while doing lead qualifying. In our post on how to utilize BANT to locate qualified leads, you can learn more about how to apply this method.

Tools for generating leads

When you have the necessary tools to organize information, simplify processes, automate operations, and assist plan implementation, lead creation becomes much simpler. You’ll be in the greatest position to create leads, maintain your sales pipeline filled, and move prospects through the phases of your sales funnel if you use the right software solutions.

Databases of Leads

Databases of Leads allow you to purchase contact lists to reach out to on your own. UpLead, for instance, is a provider of high-level B2B leads lists. Users can filter leads based on job titles, location, industry, and the technology the organization uses.

Contact filtering using UpLead technology (Source: UpLead)

Salesfully may be used by businesses mainly involved in B2C selling to produce consumer lead lists. To guarantee you locate the precise personas you want to target, Salesfully gathers data from personal variables such as location, age, ethnicity, employment, and income.

Filtering leads for sales purposes (Source: Salesfully)

Landing Pages for Websites

Create a professional website with landing pages that send leads to a page where they can submit a web form enquiry using a website builder. Squarespace, for example, allows you to create lead-generating web pages and forms using hundreds of readymade themes tailored to your industry.

Web page template for Squarespace (Source: Squarespace)

Management of Reputation

Management of Reputation includes acquiring reviews. This is essential as it gives buyers a way to evaluate your business and its offerings before becoming leads. Podium Starter is Management of Reputation software that helps you get Google and Facebook reviews by sending your current customers texts that lead them to the review page.

Leave a review for Podium (Source: Podium Starter)

Software for Customer Relationship Management

Customer relationship management (CRM) software allows you to organize your leads’ information, monitor their progress, and communicate with them. Salesforce, for example, is a widely used CRM system for storing lead information such as contact information, pipeline status, and activity history.

Lead record in Salesforce (Source: Salesforce)

Lead scoring capabilities are available in CRMs such as Freshsales, which allow you to assess the quality of leads produced based on specified criteria such as where they originated from and how they interacted with you. As leads come in, you’ll be able to focus your efforts on the hot prospects that have the highest potential of becoming clients.

Customization of Freshsales lead scoring (Source: Freshsales)

Freshsales has the highest lead score. (Image courtesy of Freshworks)

You may regard each new lead as an opportunity as SQLs are created. Deal management capabilities in HubSpot CRM, for example, allow you to follow the status of each lead. Deals are shown in a Kanban-style format under the applicable stage of each lead in your firm.

Deal management using HubSpot (Image courtesy of HQ Digital)

Power dialing solutions in CRM systems may be very valuable for businesses doing high-volume cold calling campaigns. When a call is concluded, power dialing allows you to preset a list of people to call and automatically dials the next call.

This eliminates human mistake and saves time spent manually dialing calls. It also enables your sales representatives to concentrate only on the dialogue. This functionality is available in Freshdesk, and it is integrated with the Freshsales CRM platform.

Power calling at Freshdesk (Source: Freshworks)

Some CRMs offer the ability to manage lead generation campaigns using social media platforms. For example, Zoho CRM allows you to set up automation rules for conducting social media marketing campaigns like a Facebook ad. Leads created as a result of your campaign are immediately uploaded to your CRM system as leads.

Management of social media lead creation using Zoho CRM (Source: Zoho CRM)

Email Tools for generating leads

Email marketing software allows for the bulk distribution of emails for cold introductions and brand awareness campaigns, both of which may result in leads. With features like a subject line assist, predesigned campaign templates, and a drag-and-drop editor, platforms like Mailchimp make it simple to produce successful email communications.

Set up workflows to automatically launch email campaigns for new sign-ups and embed forms on your website or Facebook using Mailchimp’s form builder. Mailchimp also helps with digital advertising, such as Facebook and Instagram advertisements, as well as retargeting display ads on Facebook, Instagram, and the Google Ad network.

Email automation processes in Mailchimp (Source: Mailmunch)

Email templates for Mailchimp (Source: Venture Harbour)

CRM systems may also employ similar email facilities as built-in features. For example, HubSpot offers email marketing solutions such as prepared templates, email scheduling, email automation, and analysis of email campaigns to determine which ones are the most successful.

Email templates from HubSpot (Source: HubSpot)

Conclusion

It’s vital to have a plan in place for raising awareness and increasing interest in your goods and services if you want to increase income. Implementing these methods, evaluating their efficacy, going through the trial-and-error process, and utilizing the appropriate software tools can assist your sales force in keeping the pipeline full with high-quality sales possibilities.

The “the importance of lead generation” is a process where companies collect leads through various methods. These leads are then used to close more deals and generate more revenue.

Related Tags

• what is lead generation in digital marketing
• lead generation examples
• lead generation tools
• lead generation campaign
• b2b lead generation meaning