No matter how revolutionary or good your offerings are, you need to be a great seller to succeed in your business, especially if you are a startup or an SMB for rapid business growth.
According to a review conducted by Forrester, it has been found that lead generation is one of the most critical challenges among 61 percent of marketers.
This is because generating leads for sales can be a challenging task for anyone, and so here we have some proven methods to share with you which you can implement for your business growth .
Lead generation is one of the most critical challenges among 61 percent of marketers. Click To TweetHence let get started.
Definition Of A Sale Lead
In sales, a lead is defined as a company or an individual that may eventually become a purchaser, even though it also refers to data (stored in CRM database) that represents a potential customer who is interested in your offering(s).
Now all leads can be broadly grouped into two categories:
MQL represent all those organizations or individuals who are interested in your offerings and are likely to be receptive to the marketing teams, although it may be that not all of them are ready to become your customers.
SQL represents all those organizations or persons who are not just searching for a specific offering(s) but are willing to purchase it/them right away.
Lead Generation Challenges
Despite the variety of methods and channels, it has been found that companies still struggle to generate sales leads. This is because; the reasons can be different, which ranges from constant and increasing competitions in the marketplace to incessant growth in customer demands to an overflow of information which is too hard to track in the ever-growing marketplace.
Here are some of the most common challenges that you face while generating quality leads:
Limited resources: You will always remain restricted by money, time and/or other similar resources (especially in small businesses) you can spend on lead generation for your brand and therefore you can will never be able to try every single lead generation methods and so should concentrate on strategies and tactics that suits requirements and fits within your budgets.
Quality of the leads: You can find a gargantuan number of leads and still have low sales rate if those leads are not interested in making a purchase. Therefore, once you are generating leads you must primarily focus on the target audience and ensure that they are ready to purchase your offering(s).
Tracking ROI (Return on Investment) from leads: Another most commonly found challenging task is to apprehend how effective your lead generation strategies are working, by trying to compare the cost of finding a lead vs. the amount of profit your business is generating, to find whether it is worth your investments or should you look for a cheaper strategy instead.
Converting leads to customers: This may be surprising, but the stark truth lies in the fact that 96 percent of visitors checking on your business website are not interested in making a purchase.
Therefore, nurturing and motivating potential leads to become the actual buyers of your offering(s) might be a daunting task even for experienced sales professionals, although this is also the top priority of 69 percent of marketers across all industries.
There are several businesses that run expensive marketing campaigns using marketing automation in their easy to use CRM and hire professionals to generate a steady flow of leads; nevertheless, this is not the only option since here are a few more creative ways to find sales leads that do not require marketing support:
According to Google, approximately more than 42% of the present world population uses some kind of social media to take advantage of its wide coverage across the globe.
Therefore if you are a B2B startup or a small organization try focusing on LinkedIn as it provides awesome networking for businesses and thereafter expand your lead generation efforts to Twitter and Facebook.
Using social media you can not only tell more about your company but also find recommendations from your existing customer. Additionally, post special offers, as social media is an amazing channel to reach your targeted audiences and thereby generate sales leads online.
The best way to vouch for your businesses’ professionalism is to allow your happy and satisfied clients speak about it. Hence, try to reach out your existing customers in your easy to use CRM and thank them for liking and doing business with your brand and ask them to share their experiences, reasons to see what can be improved in your work and finally use this interaction to ask for other contacts who might be interested in your offering(s).
Face-to-face communications still work exceptionally well even in this digital era and therefore you can take advantage of it to generate leads by attending networking events.
According to a report published by Marketing Charts, majority of the high-quality SQLs for B2B companies are generated while attending networking events and therefore, it is advisable that you should make such business events a part of your business growth plans.
It has been found that more than 88 percent of consumers abandon a website after a bad experience. Therefore, it is absolutely necessary that your business website must be attractive, user-friendly, intuitive, and filled with necessary information as relevant contents helps to generate 3X more leads compared to traditional marketing techniques in this ever-growing digital world.
Moreover, instead of investing in expensive marketing campaigns, you are required as a small business with limited budgets to optimize your website for the search engines to generate organic traffic.
Therefore to adopt a basic SEO strategy, update your information and blog, focus on delivering quality contents relevant to your offering(s) and thereby make your website rank higher naturally on the SERP (Search Engine Results Pages) which ensures generation of new and quality leads from visitors landing on your website.
If your small business is struggling to find qualified sales leads, providing free promotional offers can help you to attract more people to your brand.
Therefore use all the channels that you have to spread the word about your promotions among all your potential customers, create discount offers, free trials, and other promotional items to let your leads find advantage from free add-ons.
This is because these types of actions just do not attract customers, but it also boosts the loyalty of existing ones to promote business growth.
Finally- Adopt Easy To Use CRM
Businesses be it big or small usually have to deal with a large amount of customer data, so if you are a startup or an SMB you should use the best small business CRM software to organize this information in the CRM database, to automate simple workflows in your business processes which not only save money and time but using automation in the CRM software can increase revenue up to 10 percent in just six to nine months.
Hence to conclude, use an easy to use CRM to automatically collect email addresses, segment both prospects and customers and thereafter send relevant personalized messages to your consumers for generating new leads for rapid business growth.
