When it comes to increasing B2B sales, modifying your lead generation approach can have a lasting impact on your performance. The challenge is identifying what part of your process needs to change. Here’s how to increase sales by refining and perhaps even transforming how your organization communicates with your prospects.
1. Know your buyers – and know them well!
Do you really know your buyers? We aren’t just asking whether you’ve created high-level synopses of problems experienced by organizations in your target market. Yes, it’s important to nail down those basics, but you need to actually have a conversation with prospective buyers and ask about their specific business problems.
There will be variation among the issues your targets are dealing with, and you’ve got to ask pointed, direct questions to find out what those variations are. By getting individual contacts on the phone and listening to their concerns, you’ll learn more about potential buyers than you know now. And the more you know about your buyers, the more effectively you can address their needs.
2. Qualify leads efficiently
Here’s another reason to call your prospects and speak to them directly: the opportunity to quickly disqualify unlikely buyers. Weeding “those” suspects out can help you avoid wasting time and money on companies that aren’t ready to become customers.
According to a recent survey by LinkedIn’s B2B Technology Marketing Community, 59% of respondents ranked generating high-quality leads as their biggest lead generation challenge. What if you could quickly filter out good from bad and focus only on the promising ones? The only way to get there is to develop a lead qualification rubric that covers, at a minimum:
- Whether the lead has a need for your solution
- Whether they have the budget to invest
- The lead’s anticipated timeline for making a decision
- A contact’s authority to choose a solution
And the process for completing the rubric is simple:
- Place calls
- Complete the qualification questions
- Separate the “not yets” from those “ready and able to buy”
- Send the leads along to sales.
It’s a winning formula!
3. Keep adding value
Not everyone you reach will be prepared to make a purchase, but that doesn’t mean you should abandon the prospect.
Prospects that fall into the “not quite ready” or “still gathering information” categories may benefit from additional resources related to your company and your solution. Depending on your offering and what will be most valuable to them , you might send an informative white paper or case study or schedule a brief demonstration of your product.
What matters is that you demonstrate value to the prospect. Then, when they are ready to make a purchase, they will likely remember you.
Intelemark can help you increase sales through smarter lead generation. Contact us today to improve communication with your future customers!