What Is Lead Generation And How You Can Get Good Quality Leads For Your Business

What's On This Page?

• What Is Lead Generation?
• What Are The Types Of Leads?
• Why You Need A Lead Generation Strategy
• Understand How Buyer Journey Has Changed
• Prerequisite For Effective Lead Management Strategy
• Don’t Align Yourself With Just One Lead Generation Strategy
• Inbound Lead Generation - What Is It?
• Outbound Lead Generation
• Teamwork Between Sales And Marketing Is Key
• How To Find The Best Leads For Your Business
• Find Leads By Lead Scoring

What Is Lead Generation?

Leads are essentially potential customers with whom a company has not yet done any monetary transaction, but who have given reason to believe they may want to in the future. A good strategy for turning leads into sales is through following up your initial meetings with this person by listening very carefully and looking to build upon their unique needs rather than just throwing more information at them that they might not be ready for.

Lead generation is no less than an art, and getting it right starts with identifying the kind of leads you are getting fresh from the marketing oven. Let’s dive a bit deeper.

What Are The Types Of Leads?

There are several ways to know what kind of a lead has fallen in your bucket, and it always helps to get a salesperson’s perspective on how to qualify leads better. In general, however, all leads broadly fall into four specific buckets. Let’s go over each of them in detail.

Marketing Qualified Leads

To put it bluntly, Marketing Qualified Leads are essentially people who have signed up for some kind of an offer but do not necessarily need a sales team to approach them and bug them with upsells and product content. These are people who are intrigued about the product but not really looking forward to buy it.

It’s not absolutely essential that the people who signed up through the email need that product, but they are interested in one particular feature. How do we grub through these leads to find someone who’s interested? Keep reading to know more.

Sales Qualified Leads

Sales Qualified Leads are the people who inquire specifically about the product and how they can use it for their business. These are the kinds of contacts your sales team needs to go behind.

Product Qualified Leads

These are the leads that are already using your product, maybe on a free trial or a freemium version, and are looking forward to opening their wallet. All it needs is a little nudge here, a push there, and you’ve got money in the bank. For Fieldproxy, we have a seven-day trial, zero questions asked, cancel anytime policy.

This free trial version gives our potential clients a chance to get to know the product, and enquire about any additional benefits that they might like.

These kinds of contacts - that want to pay to have features and services that your product offers - are Product Qualified Leads. These are your most promising leads in terms of revenue generators.

Service Qualified Lead

These are mostly upsell leads. They’ve already been using your product for a while and are looking for additional upgrades immediately or in the near future. These leads are the easiest to convert, since they’ve been using your product for a while, and they know they need it for their business.

Now that we know what a lead is and what kinds of leads are out there to be poached, we can hone in on what leads to connect and how to generate the kind of leads that drive your business forward, save time for your sales teams, and bring in more revenue all the same.

Why You Need A Lead Generation Strategy

In the past, it used to be a little more difficult to generate leads. There was so much overlap in different industries and buyers were always changing their minds about what they wanted to buy.

Nowadays, there are companies that specialize in lead generation so you can immediately contact your desired audience without having to do all of the legwork ourselves. That kind of service is not only helpful for identifying what you should speak about during an outbound call, but it can help identify any other potential opportunities involved with someone who has already shown interest by filling out the lead gen form on your website.

This is exactly why, especially in 2021, you need a lead generation strategy. Blindly approaching any and every contact you come across is inefficient, strainful on every member of your sales and customer support team, and a waste of quality time. So here’s what you need to do instead.

Understand How Buyer Journey Has Changed

Traditionally, customers would research products by visiting brick-and-mortar retail outlets and reading catalogs. But today there are new ways to learn about products; customers can use their computers before ever contacting a customer representative. And they will continue learning more using many online resources (some of which are free) or special machines like tablets or smartphones before ever having to make contact with someone from your company.

The sales cycle is evolving significantly thanks to new technologies that allow prospects instant access to information. This also means that your typical “Hey John how’s it going? Got a minute?” sales cold calling techniques will have a lower chance of getting a warm response. You have to understand that the way a potential buyer approaches your business has changed, and getting leads depends heavily on user behavior. So study your audience carefully.

Prerequisite For Effective Lead Management Strategy

Today marketers and salespeople work together to nurture leads throughout the sales cycle. Managing leads is no longer just a one-way street. Rather than just giving the sales team a batch of lead information, marketers are responsible for providing highly qualified leads that are better positioned for immediate sale.

Qualifying and scoring each lead helps give the most potential to each deal at hand, ensuring that they're ready to be passed on to the next step in the funnel where their involvement will decrease as time goes on.

Don’t Align Yourself With Just One Lead Generation Strategy

It’s common for businesses to use multiple strategies for gathering leads rather than relying on a single one. This is because it allows them to reach the target customer at different stages of the buying cycle. And that’s exactly what you need to do. Follow different lead generation strategies.

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Inbound Lead Generation - What Is It?

Inbound marketing is one of the most important lead generation strategies. It’s a process of enticing your target audience in your direction by means of content creation and promotion.

Content Creation

Content creation can be a very helpful marketing technique, especially for companies that are looking to expand their exposure. Content creators will need to develop a follower base over a period of time by sharing relevant information with their following. Once enough followers have been garnered, small businesses can begin selling their products or services through affiliate marketing and other means.

Content Promotion

Content creation means nothing if there’s no one in the audience to react to the content. This is why so many content marketers believe in spending more time in distributing content over creation.

With Fieldproxy, we wanted to be successful we need to make sure we promote our content – and that's why we've made use of different promotional techniques – such as SEO, PPC advertising and social media - as well as designing an all-round quality site.

Outbound Lead Generation

While inbound lead generation is when people come searching for your product, outbound lead generation is where you reach out to people with deals and offers. This could be through emails, digital promotion ads, event enrollments like webinars and sales pitches, and community programs. Let’s do an elaborate analysis.

Email Marketing

Email Marketing is the spice of your distribution channel. It’s often used to let your readers know about new post updates, invite them to events like seminars or workshops, send important announcements, and stay in touch with customers by sending featured offers or helpful tips for using certain products or services.

Event Marketing Using Communities

Event Marketing is a marvelous opportunity to interact with customers in a non-traditional way. It lets you create a personal connection with them and engage in a meaningful dialog that will endear your brand even further in the customer's mind.

Digital Ads

Nothing like a good Facebook Ad to attract potential buyers. Display ads can be targeted to prospects with certain habits. They allow you to share information about a specific product with a prospect who is likely interested in it based on their online habits and other demographic traits.

Teamwork Between Sales And Marketing Is Key

Marketing and sales must work together to create a successful lead generation strategy. On one hand, marketing is in charge of selling your product or service, so it makes sense that they might be considered the "front line" when it comes to lead generation.

But if your company's sales team isn't involved, they may miss out on professional networking opportunities and relationship-building techniques that can help them do their own share of lead generation via traditional methods such as social selling and outbound emailing. To effectively qualify leads before distributing them, marketers must first sort incoming leads into one of three buckets: A, B or C.

Also known as lead scoring. We’ll get to lead scoring in a bit, but this simple concept is essentially assigning each lead with an identifying point value that represents how likely they are to perform a certain action - ultimately leading to the sale of your product or service. Now, there's no standard formula for assigning points for this process so consider using past trends and statistical analysis to inform your estimation process. Like we mentioned earlier in this article, it's important to remember not all leads are created equal so never blindly push through every lead that comes your way otherwise you might find yourself wasting valuable time and resources on nothing but junk traffic!

How To Find The Best Leads For Your Business

Quality over quantity - that old adage goes for lead generation as well. If you’re going to be poaching for quality leads, learn how to generate leads first. Then learn how to filter through your revenue channels to find the best possible leads for your business.

Now how do you filter the best leads that check all the boxes for your product? That is where you use a couple of metrics and a lot of data to make an educated guess. Let’s dive a bit deeper into these metrics.

Click-Through Rate

A successful website will make a visitor want to return by offering a user easy ways to move around the information. The "click-through rate" is a percentage comprised of how many people click a site's links as a proportion of page views. Make sure your content makes sense and offers users clear pathways forward on your site - that’s how you meaningfully build leads.

Time Taken To Convert

This one is rather simple. As the name says, it’s the time taken for a lead to convert to a paid customer.

Return On Investment

ROI is essentially the revenue brought in by a customer in proportion to the amount spend to gain that customer. In a B2B SaaS company that’s just starting out, try not to pay too much attention to the ROI, because it builds with time.

Cost Per Marketing Qualified Lead

We’ve already mentioned what marketing qualified lead is earlier. The CPMQL is essentially the amount you spend to get one MQL. This helps in identifying how much you’re spending on leads and how you can cut down on that cost.

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Find Leads By Lead Scoring

In sales, you evaluate your leads or prospective customers based on a potential level of business they could do with you. This lead scoring process lets you put different types of leads at different levels according to what they've said or done.

By setting a number range for each type, you can prioritize the most likely people to buy from you over those with a lesser likelihood of conversion. When they're handled effectively, lead scoring can be a highly cost-effective strategy for nurturing business from qualified buyers and most importantly converting them into profit-generating clients.

There are two ways of using lead scoring:

Explicit Lead Scoring

Explicit lead scoring involves matching your ideal customer profile with the leads you’ve collected, to find and extract leads closest to your ideal target audience. This saves sales teams from needless cold calls and a lot of unnecessarily forced negotiations of customers that were just window-shopping.

Implicit Lead Scoring

Implicit lead scoring is a method of obtaining knowledge of whether a potential lead has trust in a business through detecting implicit interactions with the brand. By monitoring some activities, such as visits to the company website, actions used on that site, and responses from email marketing campaigns, there's an idea as to how much that customer trusts said brand.

Whether you’re dealing with B2B or B2C leads, successful lead scoring depends on a number of factors: Outreach and inbound marketing, well-defined buyer personas, and sales involvement in the form of phone calls or emails.

Lead generation software can be a useful tool when it comes to automating lead scoring based on actions such as high-quality content, relevant interactions, and buyer persona matching.

A Little Bit About Fieldproxy

As businesses expand and operations grow more complex, managing field teams can be a daunting task. From managing tickets to scheduling jobs and everything in between, keeping track of everything can be time-consuming and inefficient. That's where Fieldproxy comes in - an end-to-end field team management solution that aims to simplify these tasks and streamline operations.

Ticket Management Solutions

One of the key features of Fieldproxy is its ticket management system. With this feature, businesses can create, assign, and manage tickets, ensuring that issues are resolved quickly and efficiently. This means that customers get the service they need, and businesses can maintain their reputation for quality customer support.

Schedule Jobs For Field Agents

Another important aspect of Fieldproxy is its job scheduling feature. With this tool, businesses can schedule jobs and assign them to field teams in real-time. This helps ensure that the right team is on the job at the right time, which can save businesses time and money.

Generate Quotes And Estimates

Fieldproxy also offers a mobile application that allows field teams to generate quotes and estimates on the go. This feature is particularly useful for businesses that operate in industries where quotes and estimates are necessary, such as construction or landscaping. With this feature, businesses can provide accurate quotes to their customers quickly and easily.

Raise Invoices And Collect Payments

In addition to generating quotes and estimates, the Fieldproxy mobile application also allows businesses to raise invoices and facilitate payment collections through integrations with popular payment gateways. This can help businesses get paid faster and with less hassle.

Collect Valuable Customer Feedback

With features like customer happiness index, and historical customer data, ensure your customers are always satisfied with your products and services. Know exactly how your customers operate and provide better quality services.

Dashboards And Reports

Fieldproxy’s easily-presentable data dashboards and reports allow managers to make sense of all the data their field teams collect, in real time. Create, curate, and manage different dashboards and reports to help make better data-backed decisions for your service teams.

Closing Thoughts

So why should businesses consider Fieldproxy? With its comprehensive set of features, Fieldproxy can help businesses save time, streamline operations, and improve customer satisfaction. And with a free demo available, there's no reason not to give it a try.

If you're looking for an end-to-end field team management solution that can help you manage tickets, schedule jobs, generate quotes and estimates, raise invoices, and collect payments while also providing customer feedback support, then Fieldproxy might be the solution for you. Book a free demo today to see how Fieldproxy can help your business improve its operations and customer satisfaction.

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