Quality Over Quantity: 7 Ways to Get Your B2B Leads to Convert
Attracting leads is one thing but are they turning into customers? It’s time to talk about lead quality and how to get those B2B leads to finally convert.
When it comes to sales, the better the quality of the lead, the higher your chances of converting. There is a growing emphasis in the world of marketing on the number of leads over their quality. And this is a serious problem, for many reasons.
Attracting huge numbers of B2B business leads in a month because of some genius new marketing plan is one thing. If you aren’t bringing in quality leads, they won’t convert, and that means makes the question of new business a dead horse. You’ve got to be in it for the right reasons, and when B2B leads lose site of this, they become much less effective.
Join us today, as we take a closer look why quality leads are important, and how to generate more of them within your B2B marketing plan.
Understanding Your Audience
In marketing of any sort, your first port of call should always be in understanding the audience you’re speaking to. After all, whether you’re B2B or client-facing, the act of marketing always amounts to speaking to someone. And what kind of conversation can you have when you don’t know who you’re speaking to?
When your audience doesn’t respond to your content, you need to be quick to recognize it, and even quicker to look at what you might have said wrong. Low conversion rates often mean you’ve misunderstood your customers. Consider some of the following approaches to improving your message:
- thorough research
- interviews
- focus groups
To understand your customers better, create a series of marketing personas. Each persona should allow you to approach your customers with a unique marketing approach and should be unique in their approach. Once you have a better overall understanding of your customers’ needs, you can work on targeted ways to address their pain points.
Define What A “Sales-Qualified Lead” Is To You
To put this point plainly, your marketing and sales teams absolutely have to agree on what a sales-ready lead is in your books. Obviously, every business is different, and some sales may come closer to what you need than other more easily. One company may need at least two calls to constitute a sale. Others may never conduct a call at all.
Whatever your definition of a sales qualified lead, only pass leads to sales that meet this definition. Make B2B lead generation a pass or fail process, and hold yourself to a high standard.
Lead Scoring
Lead scoring refers to the process of ranking any lead’s interest level and its sales readiness. This is done based off of an agreed-upon methodology and allows companies to rack up leads in various ways by consistently ranking leads.
And the fun part is, you can use any ranking system you like. Hot, warm, and cold not working for you? Try for a classic A, B, and C. Too plain? How about a more simplistic good, bad, better, worst, best.
The idea, however you approach it, is to rate your leads and identify where your marketing needs to be more nurturing. Conversely, where you find leads that are both good fits and have enough interest in them, it can mean your sales team has an area to focus on.
Lead Nurturing
Lead nurturing is a crucial process in your overall marketing plan. It refers to the building of relationships with qualified prospects. What’s important during this process is to understand that these prospects are qualified regardless of when they buy. The goal here is to earn their business when they are ready to commit.
Sometimes leads come in hot and turn into sales almost immediately. The sad truth is, however, that most don’t. This is why lead nurturing is so important. Companies who excel at generating B2B leads and nurture those leads generate 50% of their sales-ready leads at a 33% lower cost, per lead.
Marketing-Sales Feedback Loop
Communication is one of the central cogs in any marketing plan. When marketing sends leads to sales, both departments need to be in communication about what is happening and how it’s going.
A good system rests on constant updates between sales and marketing, especially in B2B setups where the sales cycles are more robust. Marketers shouldn’t have to wait until a sale is complete to assess the quality of a lead. The data will be out of date by the time this happens, and much less valuable in any real-time lead generation management program.
Marketing Automation
Improving lead quality shouldn’t be an issue of pride. If you have an opportunity to create a better system, and that opportunity comes down to automation software, take it! After all, would you rather spend your time working hard or working smart?
Automate your lead nurturing and scoring with highly-rated marketing automation software. Not only is this useful, but to be honest, scaling your sales is actually impossible without effective automation.
Marketing automation and online B2B leads platforms create analytics. These, in turn, help to measure and adjust according to the overall quality of your leads. These systems are also integrated, and you’ll need them to keep track of your leads as they scale up, grow, and multiply.
Remember To Make It About Them, Too
Marketing is a two-way street. It’s important to remind your clients to “Contact us” and “Visit us for 50% off”, or else nobody would ever know just how great your brand is, right?
Right. Absolutely, and you should absolutely never neglect this. Keep in mind, when your content becomes “all about you”, you’re neglecting another important part of your lead generation. Namely, the actual lead you are aiming for.
Spend some time focusing on your leads. Figure out how to make the sale an essential to them. Offer to do things for them – free evaluations, half price consultations on Thursdays. Whatever the offer, the gesture will help to prove you’re looking out for them, not just yourself.
B2B Leads: Better Marketing For Better Conversions
B2B sales is a competitive industry, with a lot of targeted marketing helping to drive fast-growing customer bases. As in any other sales industry, however, you can’t afford to sit on your sales process without streamlining it. No matter how good your product is, this usually amounts to throwing money down the drain.
Luckily, B2B leads can be sharpened, tailored and diversified to the point where they drive real, measurable sales. You just need to know what to look out for.
Looking for more lead tips from a trusted name in the industry? Check out the rest of our awesome blog content, for more on how to generate leads for B2B sales.
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