Lead generation is indeed the biggest challenge. Around 65% of businesses need help generating leads. In addition, qualification and conversion barriers challenge 54% of marketers.

Lead generation and, most importantly, closing on the leads is not a one-size-fits-all approach. A lot goes into creating the lead generation process that works (for you). Nailing down strategies, access to the right tools, having the execution chops, and being uniform & consistent are among the many other equal contributors to the process.

So today, we’re here to help! You’ll get all the information (plus tools) you need to elevate your lead generation and conversion at scale.

Is There a Thing Called “Winning Lead Generation Process”?

Returning to the question, there’s nothing called a “winning lead generation process.” Only one process works best for you, often discovered after multiple trials and errors.

Lead generation tactics like hyper-personalization, multi-channel approach, etc., are general knowledge. You can buy leads and create random lead-generation landing pages and forms, but they can only do so much. Conversely, if you find the right strategy to develop and promote the landing page/form, you will go a long way. 

What your team needs is meticulous planning, detailing, execution, analysis, and the ability to pick brilliant tactics apart from the mainstream ones and build on them. For example, it doesn’t help if you buy leads, but expounding on contextual data will give you an edge. Bought leads aren’t qualified leads, but contextual data will help you build a pipeline of strong interest.

Ultimately, it’s not about reinventing the lead generation wheel but finding better routes to the destination.

And the cherry on top? Giving marketers and sales representatives access to the right tools works wonders. Tools like, say, a digital sales room that gives you quite a shot at converting those leads. 

A Lead Generation Road Map to Get You Started? 6 Tactics You Can Test!

Lead generation is not confined to either the marketing or the sales team. It is a combined effort with individual contributions from everyone. So, the first and foremost step is to bring your sales and marketing teams together. Maximize on a combination of inbound and outbound tactics and get their buy-in with the tactics below.

Use Content Marketing for Lead Generation, and Do It Your Way

Like your clients, content comes in many shapes and sizes. Regardless, your core objective should be to address your ICP's pain points.

The hype around SEO is true. It is a great lead generation channel for the long haul, but if you do it right. Produce high-quality content that’s a feast for your customers and the search engine gods. Beyond blogs, there are testimonials, whitepapers, interactive flipbooks, etc. 

The more specific the content piece to the ICP’s problems, the better. For example, if your ICP is a project manager in a startup, you won’t want to only talk about task management. You’ll want to talk about task management when you’ve also got development teams with their sprints and Jiras and how to wrangle all the different tools into a central HQ that reduces headaches. 

Depending on your product, ticket size, and demographics, you can use educational videos, local SEO, freebies like product demos, audio content, newsletters, ebooks, guides, webinars, online courses, events, and more. Build content for different funnel stages and try to push leads down to the next stage.

Pro tip? Introduce gamification to content campaigns and landing pages rather than gatekeeping them.

Get Social With Your Brand

No amount of social media is too much social media. It is what you need. Choose your channel, define your goals, and pick your strategy based on your bandwidth. You can create founder-centric content, brand-centric content, and employee-generated content or engage directly with your ICPs.

Keep creating great content for social media and experiment with multiple formats. Track and analyze the metrics to find what’s working for you and do more of it. There are a lot of shortYou can adopt many short-term and long-term strategies in a video is a quick fix, while a consistent content calendar is for the long run. 

Use Mailchimp for your inspo spree. They are a fantastic source of inspiration for how unique design visuals, content formats, and humor can make a difference on Instagram, even for B2B brands. Mailchimp has a whooping 203k followers on Instagram. 

Other tips include partnering with brands and influencers to strengthen your reach and reduce the manual work needed to engage with your leads constantly.

Make It Easy With Automation

Rather than having a chatbot speak with your leads, have it match them with the right representatives. That’s how you can use AI and automation while retaining the human element.

Use chatbots to facilitate better navigation across your website and help your leads self-educate. Automate actions and campaigns to nurture new leads, segment them for personalization, and collect data for analysis and improvement.

One great example is HubSpot’s HubBot. This chatbot helps users navigate through the website seamlessly, but most importantly, it allows users (who are potential leads) to connect with the sales team instantly.

You can also check out sales intelligence tools like ZoomInfo, Bombora, 6Sense, and more that are built to make sales enablement a breeze.

Make AI do the work for your marketing and sales teams so they can do what they do best: generate leads.

Do Google & Facebook, but Go Beyond Them to Generate and Educate Leads

Run paid media campaigns on Google and Facebook to promote your content and generate leads. But don’t consider them the only avenue to wow your leads. Many other niche platforms and communities have emerged where you can educate unaware leads or intercept qualified ones. Say, Slack communities, publishers, X, Q&A websites, podcasts, and more.

Send those ads out and collect their performance metrics, such as impressions, clicks, read-through rate, and more. Study what’s working for you and optimize for channels to increase ROI.

Communities like RevGenius can be part of your strategy. With 45,000+ members, RevGenius offers opportunities to accelerate growth using sales, marketing, and DevOps events.

Can You Do It Offline?

People want to be sold remotely, but it isn’t the only way. There are potential leads you can gather offline, take them online, and convert them later.

Industry events and conferences like Goldenhour are the best places to start. Sign up to speak at such industry events and showcase your brand & product. This is your chance to gather leads from among 100s of attendees. 

You can also rely on PR firms and their reputation to generate leads. Get yourself featured in major publications like TechCrunch via partnerships or create leadership content they would want to advertise. Podcasts, interviews, radio shows, and meet-ups are some other offline mediums to get yourself an audience. Optimize them all to turn them into lead-generation processes. 

Try ABM Marketing for Better Results

If you strive for exclusivity, try a targeted approach like account-based marketing. Squeeze your broad audience to carve out a more specific segment to target. Double down on grabbing their attention through hyper-personalized and tailored targeting that speaks their lingo.

Create value assets that offer clear solutions and send them over channels such as email, social media, or targeted advertising. You can even control the level of personalization as you please and choose from the three-tier segmentation, i.e., one-to-one for individual accounts, one-to-few for account clusters, and one-to-many for larger clusters.

For example, you can use tools like Drift to help identify user intent, which can then be used to create and send personalized email campaigns.

+6 Insider Tips to Better Your Lead Generation Efforts

• Lead generation form - Ask for as little details as possible

• Landing pages - Optimize your lead generation landing page. Iron out the value proposition, add social proof, and improve the UX

• Interactive collaterals - Use video marketing, graphic visuals, voice messages, and other interactive methods to capture and engage your leads

• Business network - Build a network that can vouch for you. Leads hearing about you in a podcast, LinkedIn post, webinar, or offline event builds trust

• Lead nurturing - Plan out your outreach process to nurture and convert your leads

• A/B testing - Use this method to test and choose from multiple tactics

  
  

Speaking of Scale, Do the Same Lead Generation Tactics Work?

It’s a mixed answer. Some channels can help you generate leads at scale, such as SEO and social media. But, if you are ready to take your lead generation efforts to the next level and bring leads in bulk, here’s what you can do:

Marketing Automation

Firstly, automation can give you data insights that can get lost in manual processes. AI then comes into the picture to find scopes, improvements, and gaps. Result? Better decision-making and improved results.

Secondly, you can scale your lead generation efforts by delegating the process of finding patterns in behavior and targeting relevant ads. Send out automated sales and marketing email cadences based on behavior and actions. Make the lead qualification process easy, seamless, fast, and effective. With the power of AI and automation, you can do much more.

Cross-Channel Approach

The idea here is to repurpose your old content, it is best to pick up your top-performing content. You can give it a new and better spin or promote it on other channels. Find the performance potential or change its format to fit the new channel.

For example - a blog post can be broken down into multiple LinkedIn and X posts or promote the blog’s link on all social media channels. Contrarily, you can also pick snippets from the webinars you organized and create how-to videos. 

Referral Programs

Word of mouth is powerful. Many startups scaled their business in the initial days solely based on word of mouth. Make the most of this benefit to scale and drive leads from your loyal clientele.

Elevate this function to build a process for your clients to refer you. This will make it easy for them to do so and also offer them rewards that convey “thank you for referring to us.”

Outsourced Service

If you can build and scale lead generation functions from the ground up in-house, you should go for it. But, if you lack success, outsourcing is an alternative.

You can get advisory support or simply delegate some of your lead generation efforts to industry experts. These experts have the strategies and tools to hit the ground running and generate leads on a large scale. 

But, Is That All You Need? Tactics to Generate Leads?

You can go on to find and engage as many leads as you can, but closing them is a different ball game. 

You need a strategy that finds, engages, and, most importantly, closes deals. Optimize your lead generation efforts to close more leads and prevent them from failing. 

The Art of Sales Enablement with Digital Sales Rooms

Great salespeople with great persuasion skills are nice. But giving them the right tools and processes will upgrade them. Think Emirates business class of sales, just ‘better.’

36% of salespeople find it hard to close leads because their job is difficult. Reaching out to their lead, engaging them with their knowledge and charm, and pushing them to purchase. The emails only add to the trouble: pitches, decks, USPs, benefits, and tons of materials your sales folks want to share to inform and engage the leads. However, too many assets are challenging to navigate; one asset is insufficient, and many are ineffective. 

Enter - Digital Sales Room and Journey.

A DSR is your hub for creating a visually stimulating sales experience while giving out all your company and product information. It replaces many emails, calls, recipients, documents, and attachments with one link. 

Bring all sales collateral such as product brochures, case studies, demos or product videos, FAQs, white papers or reports, testimonials, pricing sheets, ROI calculators, contracts or agreements, implementation guides, and more in one space. Then, give as many stakeholders as needed instant access.

Journey.io does just that and more. Curious about more?

Its powerful analytics give you exclusive data gathered meticulously from DSR, an untapped potential you can use to close the leads by tailoring the offer to what interests them the most (or navigating their objections). That’s exactly what Journey did for UserEvidence. It helped their AE and CSMs teams get intel on data consumption to double down on high-performing assets and communications.

The Concept of Predictive Lead Scoring

Predictive lead scoring raises the bar of segmentation beyond standard demographics. Leads get a score based on their behavior, which can come in handy when your team is juggling more leads than they can handle or you have a problem on the advertising side sending you low-quality prospects. 

With lead scoring, your salespeople can prioritize the juicy leads over the window-shopping ones. 

The Functionality of Sales Follow-ups

Scouting for new leads is hard, and the potential of existing customers is not lost. That’s where sales follow-ups can do the heavy lifting because marketing to new leads can cost up to 25x the cost of marketing to existing customers, as quoted by Harvard Business Review. 

Build a follow-up email cadence to push your leads to purchase without annoying them. You can even send a thank you notice and keep the communication lines open for future collaboration. 

You can also explore retargeting campaigns. With retargeting ads and campaigns, you can warm up leads that showed interest, such as past visitors or people who interacted with your brand on social media.

Make sure these campaigns are more targeted than your initial campaigns. Use the results and metrics from the previous campaigns to learn and adjust or add better aspects to your campaigns. Make it personal and speak to them directly.

These campaigns shouldn’t be limited to engaged prospects but can be extended to leads with similar behavior. 

The Magic of Intent Data

Intent data is gold, and it doesn’t matter if you get it from your site or use third parties to access it. The sales team can use this data to make a good first impression with more context for cold calling, get an advantage over their competitors, make lead scoring easy, catch leads early in their buying journey, and innovate at scale.

Similarly, the marketing team can use intent data to optimize the website better, improve targeting, build effective ABM strategies & assets, and more.

The Benefits of Cold Email Marketing

Cold emails can have multiple goals. Starting right from the objective to generate leads, initiate conversations, build awareness & credibility, and educate and inform prospects, cold emailing can take any form for you and do the job just right. It makes an amazing strategy to generate and close leads at scale. 

That’s All, Folks? 

Lead generation is not a one-and-done. What worked for you many years ago might not work now, so you need to keep your data analyst lens on around the clock. 

Track and analyze every effort to find trends or patterns of efficiency and effectiveness. Surprisingly, you will find innovative ways, gaps, and other actionable insights.

Technology can assist you with each step in the process and enhance your functions and efforts. Journey, for instance, can help you create a unique selling experience via visual storytelling. With text, visuals, spreadsheets, and a plethora of integrations (Loom and SupaDemo, just to name a few), Journey offers the best of both worlds. Plus, you get data insights, so you capture prospects before they lose interest.

And doesn’t that just make it a hell of a lot easier for you to grow your pipeline and close more deals?