63% of the companies consider lead generation as their biggest challenge, in fact, the big fishes in the market even use lead nurturing specialists to acquire new customers.
For any B2C or B2B organization a proven lead generation strategy must be required and if done right, it will become a fruitful tree for your business.
Before we start with optimizing lead generation let’s understand the whole concept of lead generation and its obstacles you need to overcome.
“If you’re not taking care of your customer, your competitor will”
-Bob Hooey
What is Lead Generation?
The process of identifying people who have expressed interest in your product or service through a lead funnel and converting them into customers is called lead generation. A simple lead funnel works as :
[mks_icon icon=”fa-star” color=”#000000″ type=”fa”] Any visitor enters the lead funnel when he expresses his interest in your Lead Magnet (gated content or E-book or a Tutorial) and ends up submitting his details to access the resource.
[mks_icon icon=”fa-star” color=”#000000″ type=”fa”] Various Marketing Outreach activities such as remarketing ads, Newsletters, follow-up emails are used to nurture the leads.
[mks_icon icon=”fa-star” color=”#000000″ type=”fa”]Then the marketing team assesses each lead and checks the probability of converting customers. At this stage, the Marketing team determines whether the lead has to be nurtured more or to be extracted from the funnel and passed to the sales team.
How to Optimize Lead Generation Process?
The lead generation process is very simple yet complex, it can take from a week to several months before leads turn into paying customers.
There are sales, marketing, and various other departments involved in the lead generation process, this makes it quite complex.
However, when all the players pull together towards an aligned goal with a clear strategy can definitely lift up new revenue sources.
1. Be Definitive & Set Accountability
A full-fledged internal sales funnel is managed by the marketing and sales department, making sure to have clear distinctions and each team has accountability for their roles.
In this example, We have divided the sales funnel into two parts: lead management and Sales Management.
There are 3 stages in Lead management:-
- MCL ( Marketing Captured Lead)
- MEL (Marketing Engaged Lead)
- MQL ( Marketing Qualified Lead)
The 3rd and last stage in lead management are Marketing Qualified Lead where the marketing team hands over the lead to the sales team.
Once the marketing team analyzes that the lead is sufficiently ‘warm’ to be managed by a sales development representative it is transferred over to the sales team.
After the lead is transferred to the sales team, the sales team first decides whether a lead is warm enough to accept. If it needs more nurturing than the sales team rejects then leads and sends it back to the marketing team.
If you properly define and illustrate the lead funnel to each player everyone understands where their responsibility begins.
2. Offer the Need
As we mentioned above, the whole lead generation process is divided into two teams, the marketing team and the sales team.
The role of the marketing team is much similar to the fisherman. The marketing team is responsible for capturing leads and warming up the leads and moving them below to the sales funnel.
Mostly, this is achieved via content marketing offering e-books, cheatsheets, newsletters, and social media marketing.
It’s the job of the marketing team to craft content according to the user’s need to move them towards the golden MQL stage and beyond.
3. Learn from rejected leads
If your leads are rejected don’t feel bad because every rejected lead is inevitable – and even valuable. Whenever your lead gets rejected from sales it becomes an opportunity to analyze and optimize your campaigns.
Examine the leads with the sales team, this will give you an important insight to tweak your sales funnel.
If you take the right decision at the right moment, you will be able to push your lead qualification rate to new heights.
4. Strike while the iron is hot
Every lead has tried to connect or interact at some point in time with your business. The interaction may be different in nature, they may have subscribed to your blog, liked your blog, shared your posts on social media.
This means the leads are warm-up to some extent. You just need to follow up with them ASAP.
According to InsideSales.com, marketers who follow up with online leads within 5 minutes are 9 times more likely to win them. When it comes to the lead generation process, every minute counts – literally!
Remember:
“Lead generation is a fair core activity to Marketing”
-Chris Brogan
If you need a specialized lead funnel for your business don’t hesitate to connect with us.
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