Business-to-business (B2B) Lead Generation can create extra work with unqualified or uninterested leads or prime potential leads and enhance the sales experience. The key to using B2B lead generation to produce company results comes from the processes and strategies used during the demand generation process and how you use these assets to inform and guide interested parties to the sale.  

What is B2B Lead Generation and How Does It Work?  

When we look at B2B lead generation, we first need to understand what it is and how it works. Lead and demand generation often get confused, which is understandable because of demand generation’s role in informing interested parties about the product and brand so they can become quality leads, whereas Lead generation is the process of collecting contact information from interested parties

Marketing-qualified vs. Sales-qualified Leads 

During the lead generation process, there are two types of leads; marketing-qualified and sales-qualified leads. Marketing-qualified leads include parties that have repeatedly engaged with your content. These businesses are likely starting to look into your products and services but need additional information and buy-in from decision-makers before moving forward with the sale. 

Sales-qualified leads are comprised of prospects including decision-makers in their communications with you. Most sales-qualified leads start as marketing-qualified leads. They then transition to sales-qualified leads after receiving more information about the products, services, brand and any concerns they have. 

What Processes and Strategies Should You Use in B2B Lead Generation

The processes and strategies you implement determine the success of your B2B lead generation efforts. To set yourself up for success, define your target audience with customer personas early. Then, use those personas to inform your touchpoint strategy. 

Define the Target Audience And Create Customer Personas

Your target audience includes the businesses you are selling to or the types of organizations that have expressed interest and already purchased from you. Once you have determined the types of businesses that would find the most value from your company it’s time to learn everything you can about them.

Every business would love to have a perfect customer, one who knows what they want and enters the conversation ready to purchase. However, the reality is leads often have concerns, information gaps and varying degrees of uncertainty. When you build a customer persona, the process helps marketing and sales teams determine these gaps and address them so they can turn these leads into sales.  

Determine The Touchpoints in Your Sales Funnel Cycle

Strong content enables a clear introduction to your brand, product and other industry-specific education. Supplied early through nurture campaigns quality content helps fill information gaps, accelerating how leads move through the sales funnel.

When building out content, focusing on creating materials for your target personas’ needs will result in quality leads. Avista PR focused on targeted content for Commvault, which doubled inbound lead traffic and led to 15% more closed deals. 

It also helps if your content is spread and recycled across multiple touchpoints. These touchpoints might include but are not limited to, white papers, blogs, webinars, infographics, social posts, gated content, email lists and contact forms. 

Content For A Qualified Customer Base

If you can only choose one touchpoint to focus on; we recommend building a few thought leadership pieces. Articles from high-authority websites in your industry and vertices, authored by your leadership and experts, will build trust and authority for your brand, which yields a larger qualified customer base. One example of this touchpoint creating significant waves was when Avista maximized Netwrix’s coverage by focusing on targeted thought leadership pieces to promote Netwrix surveys into vertical industries. 

Moving the Needle with Email Nurturing and Lead Activation

Another high-impact touchpoint that helps companies generate leads is email lists. You can leverage your company newsletter or contact form submissions by emailing these interested parties content that addresses gaps or concerns. Implementing a fine-tuned email nurturing campaign will help activate these potential leads. 

Don’t just take our word for it. With Eagle Telemedicine, we used email nurturing to activate leads. It helped drive lead activation, which resulted in a 125% sales pipeline increase. 

Tech and Resources that Make B2B Lead Generation Easier

While you can manually disseminate the content you’ve created, making it an automated process will increase productivity. Some automation platforms to consider include HubSpot, Pardot and Mailchimp. 

HubSpot: This platform has free and premium plans that automate marketing, sales, customer service, content marketing and more. For B2B Lead Generation, its content creation and management tools and marketing automation tools can make implementing your B2B Lead Generation Campaign a breeze. 

Pardot: Salesforce Pardot is a marketing automation platform. It’s commonly used for lead generation, cross-channel journeys, prospect nurturing, engaging accounts, lead scoring, personalized lead communication, AI data insights and increased conversations. 

Mailchimp: Intuit’s Mailchimp is an email marketing and automation platform. It recommends ways to get more opens, clicks and sales so you can get the most out of your email marketing aspect of B2B lead generation and nurturing. It also has a free and 14-day trial option if you want to try it out before deciding to pay for the service. 

Need Help? Avista PR Can Do It For You

B2B lead generation can be an overwhelming undertaking. If you don’t have the bandwidth or personnel to make a B2B lead generation campaign successful but feel it would help your organization fine-tune its sales funnel and expand your customer pool, Avista PR can help. We offer demand generation services; the backbone of a successful B2B lead generation campaign, and can design and carry out various lead generation campaigns for you. Contact us today and set up a meeting to discuss how we can support your goals and make your vision a reality.  

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