4 Helpful Tips for your Lead Generation Efforts

As a business, your marketing efforts mean a lot to helping boost your sales. The better planned your marketing strategy, the better the possible results from your campaign. After a successful run, you'll have generated a good amount of B2B leads and can pass them over to your sales team in order to start closing deals with your prospects. However, the folly lies in the process of you generating those leads. Why is this so? Well, it's because of what your sales team could possibly be doing during the course of the campaign. So, to follow are some tips and advice on what you should and what you should NOT be doing during the lead generation process.

Establish connections with your prospects – What many salespeople fail at doing is forgetting that their target prospects are people too. Sometimes you just can't help but keep your eye on the prize and not be able to look at your prospect as nothing more than cash bags. In your sales team's efforts to generate more income and profit for your firm, you must make sure that during the lead generation process that they are able to establish meaningful ties and relations with your B2B leads. This is the first step in generating B2B leads of good quality. If you can connect with your prospects and gain their trust, as well as establish your credibility, then you're on your way to finding good business leads and establishing valuable business contacts.

Understand their needs and work from there – In your lead generation efforts, you need to make sure that you understand the needs of your prospects. If you understand their problems, then you can provide them with one of the possible solutions you offer. And if they know that they can rely on you to help them with their current and critical issues, then surely enough they will not be hesitant to do business with you in the long run. The thing to remember here is that your prospects don't always want to talk to you, however, they do want the answer to their questions and will so far as to get them. So, with that in mind, understanding your prospects needs and working from there should prove to be part of a good lead generation campaign.

Patience is a virtue: Don't push for sales – The appropriate thing to do upon making initial contact with your prospects is to NOT try and make an immediate sales pitch. Why? Well, because if they realize that you're only calling to start shoving costs in their face then you most likely hear a beep on the other end of the line, especially if you're using B2B telemarketing to generate sales leads. Upon making first contact with any of your prospects, don't go for sales right off the bat. Make sure to introduce your company, establish your presence within your client's “inner-circle” and then nurture them as a sales-ready lead.

Don't hesitate to buy lists – During their campaigns, some like to believe that they have all that they need in order to have a good run. If you think you have all that it takes to have an excellent campaign without outside help, well you may be wrong at one point in your venture. Sometimes, you just can't help but hit a bump in the road and well, that's when the going gets tough. So when you run dry, don't hesitate to buy business lists from list providers. Rather than see your campaign plummet to the ground because of a pipeline that is dry, then keep it filled with business contacts by utilizing a business list.

These 4 tips should help you out in your lead generation efforts. What do you think are more things to do to achieve the best results in these types of campaigns?

Get the Best Bite for Your Buck when Buying Leads!

Small companies and new businesses do not always have the budget they need for large-scale marketing activities. In light of this, they limit their spending to only the most important activities, some of these being lead generation and improving their marketing efforts. When it comes to their marketing issues, sure enough they can handle it. As for lead generation, well, therein lies the problem. Not every company has the capacity to do effective lead generation, and thus is why they rely upon B2B leads providers or other such companies.

When you buy leads, you can get them in lists, entire databases, and even individually. As your business grows, you'll find yourself having an increasing need for more B2B leads. That being said, you'll want to get the best leads your money can buy. Let's now talk about how you can buy B2B leads of quality and get the best bite for your buck!

• Buy qualified leads – When you're buying leads, buy nothing but qualified leads. Based on your own qualification criteria, you can purchase business lists containing the contact information of prospects that have already been qualified by a leads database/leads list provider. So, what should you be looking for in a qualified lead? Well, aside from using your own criteria as a basis, look for B2B leads that have been qualified through BANT (budget, authority, need, timeline). Ask your provider how they qualify their leads and build their lists to see if they meet your parameters as well.

• The price is NOT always right – You'll find dozens of providers flocking towards you in order to sell you their leads. Also, they'll be pitching you different prices and all sorts of offers. However, in choosing a B2B leads provider, you must keep in mind that the price of each individual lead, or the price per list and database does not always denote the quality of the leads being sold. You could buy a business list for cheap and still get good results out of it, and in opposition to it buy a much more pricey one but not even get a single warm reply from your business contacts on that list! So to speak, you can't base everything on prices.

• Quality or quantity? – It is quite obvious that we want to get both quantity and quality when we buy leads. However, that is not a luxury we can always hope to have. Even if leads providers say that they can provide both quality and quantity, we must not forget that they too are businesses and can encounter problems with their production rates. So, that being said, would you rather go for quality or quantity? The answer to this question is quite subjective. If you have a solid marketing strategy in play, then you can live with buying more and more leads and turn them into warm sales-ready prospects. But if your own marketing scheme doesn't seem to be able to reel in the fishes, then quality may be what you need in order to start closing deals with your prospects.

Getting your money's worth means getting results; you'll need to see a positive ROI before you can say that buying B2B leads has proven effective to your campaign. All you need to do is pick a reputable leads provider, work with them and consult with them, then plan your marketing approach to be able to utilize the leads you bought to the best possibility.

2 Tips for Better Direct Mailing Campaign Results

Email marketing yields a good amount of B2B leads. A large percentage of marketers agree to this, and even statistics show that it is more effective at generating revenue and finding new B2B leads. That being said, it looks like direct mail is about to be left in the dust as it is expensive and inefficient. However, some marketers are seeing a revival in direct mail and other still use it for marketing purposes. If you’re using direct mail, then here are some tips for your campaign.

• Proper targeting for better results – When using direct mail for marketing and generating B2B leads, it is important to know which industry you want to focus on. You can’t just randomly send mail to every business contact listed on your direct mailing list, no, you have to be precise and accurate just like a sniper with a single shot left in his rifle. Although you have a lot of chances to do so, metaphorically speaking, your single shot should matter and get results. So when you’re using direct mail to generate leads, get yourself a direct mailing list that is targeted to the industry you want to focus on. If you’re targeting C-level executives, then get a mailing list of C-level executives. Accuracy matters in direct mail as you will have to really be visible in the correct mailbox, and not just to everyone else.

• Relevant content for high chances of success – A large percentage of direct mail remains unopened, and there’s no telling just how much of it has been tossed out the window or into the trash by prospects who don’t want to even bother with such mails after getting past the first few lines. That being said, if you are using direct mail and sending them out to your B2 leads; make your content relevant and interesting to your prospects. Your content should capture their attention when they scroll their eyes over the first few lines, something that keeps them reading on and wanting to finish the letter. If a prospect is interested, he/she will most likely respond to your direct mail and you may have yourself a warm B2B lead on your hands.

Direct mail is still worth giving a shot, even if it does turn out to be expensive and sometimes inefficient in lead production, as well as getting feedback from prospects. However, as a marketer, every avenue for marketing that is available counts and can help in producing both leads and sales.