How to Optimize Lead Generation for B2B Businesses?

B2B lead generation entails much more than a normal B2C or Business to Consumer transaction. Let’s learn more about it.

What is Lead Generation for B2B

Lead generation for a business is the process of finding the right people who are interested in purchasing your product or service for their own business.

However, unlike B2C lead generation, B2B lead generation tends to be a little complex.

In a B2B lead generation cycle, an entire organization is targeted instead of an individual. The decision-making process involves several people on different hierarchical levels in the organization. The final transaction is likely to be pretty hefty.

Since this process has a lot of people involved, prospecting the transaction, there’s a good probability that they’d never move forward with the transaction. In other instances, they might already be using products and services similar to those you offer. In such cases, it becomes a complicated task to convince the leads that your offerings are better than the ones they currently use.

Owing to all these negative possibilities, prospect lead generation for B2B becomes very challenging and that’s why it’s absolutely necessary to optimize the strategy to generate more leads and convert them into clients.

We’ve listed a few nifty tips and tricks that can help you optimize your lead generation process instantly. Let’s jump right in!

Lead Generation Optimization

The lead generation process is intricate with a long and consistent effort. Moreover, in the B2B sector, it can take weeks or even months before a prospect turns into a lead and a client. The whole cycle typically involves both, the marketing and sales team, along with all relevant teams, making coordination a hassle.

Nevertheless, when all the teams are aligned and collaborate to achieve the lead generation goals, they can pull off endless successful sales with no power weighing them down.

In this case, having a clear and optimized strategy and a common goal is necessary. Here’s how you can achieve all that and more in a few steps:

Define Stages, Delegate Responsibilities

Before starting off with the lead generation process, it is essential to define each stage of the sales funnel. The sales funnel spans the entire length of a sales cycle, starting with the initial marketing and ending at closed sales. While drafting the stages, it is important to define which department is responsible and accountable for which part of the process- delegating the task appropriately.

MQL, or Marketing Qualified Leads, is typically the point at which Marketing transfers leads to the sales team. The lead is deemed "warm" enough to be managed by Sales once it has been qualified from a marketing perspective. The SDRs will then be in charge of choosing whether to approve or reject it.

Correctly defining and elucidating the lead funnel can help each team to clearly grasp where its responsibilities begin and the KPIs it should be aiming for at each stage.

Automate Lead Generation

In order to generate leads, the teams need to research a lot, wasting substantial time and money. Instead, it is ideal to automate your lead generation process using a tool like Leadsly, which can scour the internet within seconds and come up with a list of B2B leads based on your persona. It has CRM integration that helps streamline all your data in one place. Leadsly also has one of the largest lead databases in the world, making it extremely optimum for generating leads in a click.

Tailoring Content to Stage

An MQL is passed on to the sales team when it is ‘warm’ enough, for sales engagement. However, cold marketing alone cannot nurture the lead appropriately, only content can do that job.

Based on the position of the lead in the sales funnel, the right kind of content must be targeted to them. Native ads, marketing emails, social media campaigns, eBooks, whitepapers, case studies, blogs, knowledge papers, and more are strategically placed so that the lead can come across them to gain knowledge and garner trust in the company to finally prepare for a purchase.

‘No’ is an Opportunity

It is absolutely normal to get negative responses from the leads even after spending weeks nurturing them, that’s how the B2B cycle works. While it’s not ideal, it’s inevitable. But getting disheartened by a failed conversion is not the right approach.

For every failed sale, evaluate what went wrong. Oftentimes, you’ll find gaps in your strategy that you can further improve on. Consider every rejected lead as an opportunity to finetune your process and ace the cycle.

Quick Turnaround

Inbound leads, the ones who initiate the contact with your business, tend to be warmed up already. They might even already be a qualified lead who naturally converts into a client. However, if they aren’t contacted quickly enough, they would ‘cool down’, making conversion extremely difficult for the sales team.

Make sure that inbound leads are contacted at the earliest possibility. In lead generation, every minute counts.

It's critical that you first clarify the terminologies, internal language, and delegate within your lead funnel before adopting the four optimization strategies mentioned above. Whatever structure you decide to use for your lead funnel, make sure it is clearly defined and effective.