Whether your business is in one of its growth highs or lows, if you are wise, you’ll test different approaches and discover that special concoction of lead generation techniques that works best for you.
Some companies focus solely on their inbound marketing programs, but sometimes they completely forget about all the possibilities offered by B2B lead gen activities.
Other companies focus on their outbound sales programs, but they underestimate today’s power of digital marketing programs.
Yet both of these groups of companies fail to realize that you can combine and synchronize outbound and inbound lead generation and maximize your ROI!
Hitting Growth Heights
In our previous blog posts we spoke about using B2B lead generation to enhance your marketing efforts, however you can also use your marketing data to boost sales. Here are the three growth tactics that will have your ROI go up:
1. Newsletters Subscriber Base Can Fuel Your Sales Email Campaigns
One of the best marketing lead generation tools is building a subscriber database. Once you have the email database you can send regular newsletters, promote, sell and upsell.
However, subscriber databases are not quite an ideal high quality pool of leads and here is why:
1. People tend to leave their personal email addresses on the subscriber list rather than the company related ones. This is fine as far as digital marketing is concerned, but if you want your sales to reach out to these leads you’ll need company emails, among other pieces of info.
2. Most likely, the data in a subscriber database will be obscure. You will have either just an email, or just the company name, or just first and last names of the lead. Again, your sales department needs complete information if they are going to reach out – which is exactly where data appending (adding more data points do the data you already have) steps in.
3. Databases are gathered over time, so it is likely a significant percentage of the data will be outdated. Some leads might switch companies, change email addresses etc. You can also overcome this through data updating and appending – emails and other data can be re-verified and your old database can get a complete makeover and be as fresh as it gets.
You will easily notice if you need to update you data or append additional pieces of info – if you know your database is more than 6 months old and if you get a bounce rate of more than 5%, it’s time to refresh your database.
What helps greatly in this case is what is known as the reverse email data appending. Starting from the email you already have, an experienced B2B lead gen company can easily find other data about a lead – their exact title and role within a company, their professional history, current endeavors and aspirations. This approach can give your sales team a fair advantage both in terms of the complexity of data about a lead and in terms of when and how to pitch to them.
Moreover, your marketing team can and should forward this data to your sales team. In this way you will be feeding your sales team not just with any leads – but leads who are already interested in your services and want to find out more.
The one thing to note, just make sure your sales and marketing activities are not bombarding the same leads too often or you might find big percentage of the leads dropping off the revenue cycle.
2. Website Visitors Data Can Be Turned into Leads
The same as with newsletters, visitors to your website leave traces which should not be underestimated. While through inbound marketing activities you can target and retarget your website visitors through different approaches, B2B lead gen program and small but effective market research can help here too.
For example, if you are using a website visitor tracking tool such as Sales IQ by Zoho, Lead Feeder, LeadLander or any other, they unmask the visitors to your website and provide you with precious information about them.
However, this information is often limited to either the name of the company from which the visitor came, or it can also include the first and last name of the visitor, their IP address and so on.
In order to forward this data to your sales department you will have to make the data as complete as possible which is done through similar techniques as with newsletters – data updating and data appending.
While you are still trying to push your website visitors down the funnel through digital marketing, you’ll find your chances for conversion double or even triple if you find and verify the missing contact data and compile a list for a sales outreach.
In this way you have two teams – sales and marketing – working as one and getting the most out of the leads generated.
3. Referral Program – Use All Super Fans You Can Find
A slightly different approach is using B2B lead generation as a means to kick start a serious referral program.
Today, people switch jobs more frequently than ever, and you might just dismiss warm leads, old “fans” of what you do and how you do it, and decision makers who no longer work for your past or current customers.
This is another space where an effective B2B lead gen partner can shine! A well structured lead gen process can locate your old partners, find and verify their new business email addresses and – voila – you got yourself a referral force!
There is always a way to revive data sitting in your lead funnel no matter the way they are gathered. Having incomplete or old data is not good in many ways – there will be no conversion rates if you cannot activate or use them, The data will negatively affect your reports, plus you are letting your money go through the window.
Think about all the ways you can use an additional data appending or market research program to make the most of what you already have.
If you need some help with this, make sure to check our Growth Hacking and B2B Lead Gen services, or contact us to schedule a free consultation.
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