7-step guide to successful B2B Lead Generation

How do I get more leads? How do I increase my sales? Where is my next high value contract coming from? How can I increase my average order value? How do I generate more profit?

Whether you’re a business owner, marketeer or sales professional you will undoubtedly have asked yourself these questions, in fact, you are probably pre-occupied by it! The answer to all of these questions starts with Data…

In order to generate more leads, drive new business and identify high-value prospects you need to be doing one or more of the following:

• Analyse your current customers/leads and their purchasing behaviour
• Operate a CRM system – the cleaner the better
• Buy prospect data for outbound sales and marketing

In this blog we will provide a 7-step guide to successful B2B Lead Generation.

Step 1) Improve your data quality

In order to run a successful lead generation programme, the absolute fundamental is to improve your existing data quality. The quality of your existing data will drive the accuracy of any customer analysis that you carry out as well as the performance of your outbound cross-sell and up-sell activity.

The data quality of your existing data comes in the form of data accuracy and its depth. In order to ensure your data is accurate you may need to look at an external provider who can audit your data for you. This will enable you to improve the accuracy meaning reduced wastage, improved ROI and better analysis/modelling.

The second area of data quality is its depth. You will probably hold basic company and contact information along with associated transactions. What you may not hold is firmographics such as their industry, employee size, turnover and other indicators relevant to your lead generation activity. This information will help you to fully understand who your customers are and how to target more of them. Using external databases, such as our Vista database you can append this information to your customer data.

The automated services available to both clean and enrich your existing customer data are fantastic, cost-effective, solutions to start getting your data into shape. Where capacity or budget allow you should also look to utilise your internal resource, or outsource to specialist telemarketing companies, to complete the gaps these services can't reach.

Step 2) Only purchase quality third-party data

For most companies, lead generation will involve purchasing external data to supplement your existing data. Purchasing email data, telephone numbers and mailing lists allows you to super-charge your programme with additional records.

It is important when doing so however, that you choose the right data partner – if a provider supplies poor quality data it can be detrimental to your overall programme as it can damage your reputation and even get your email service blacklisted.

The same considerations for data quality apply; accuracy, depth and coverage are all important. Most providers will allow you to see a sample of their mailing lists for you to measure this.

Step 3) Setting your objective - lead quality vs lead quantity

Q: “Do you want more leads or better leads?”
A: “Errr, both please”

Often the issue of quality vs quantity is presented as a binary choice. In reality, it’s neither. We all want more leads of better quality, but when conducting lead generation, we have to make a judgement call as to where the correct balance is.

Through analysis and propensity modelling of your existing customer data this judgement call is made much easier as it is driven by your data. Predictive modelling will allow you to forecast conversion rates/ROI and the question of quality vs quantity becomes a financial choice rather than a gut feel.

By adjusting which existing customers you build your model from you can weight the model based around customer segments. For example, you may look to build a model to drive more high-value customers or to drive high-frequency customers.

Step 4) Join up your marketing and sales processes

All too often we see that businesses sales and marketing efforts are disparate and siloed. You may be conducting PPC, Social, Telesales, Email and even Direct Mail campaigns but all are acting independently of one another.

With today’s technology these processes can easily be combined. For example, you can upload customer and prospect lists to Google, LinkedIn and other social platforms to use their sponsored adverts to support you outbound Telesales and Email activity very easily.

With proper Data Management you can bring all of your data together to centrally control who receives what and when. Models can be created and tested to optimise campaign performance, from targeting, timing and content.

Step 5) Use fit-for-purpose technology

Where possible use technology and software providers to help you achieve your goals. Clearly define your processes and understand where technology can be used and be careful to check it meets your needs.

For example, in the Email Marketing sector there are lots of companies but not all can be used equally. Some providers explicitly prevent you from sending to purchased data – doing so would breach their terms and conditions and could cause your account to be suspended.

Step 6) Adopt a test and learn strategy

The requirements to test, analyse, lean and adapt your strategy never goes away. Big changes like the pandemic or financial crises obviously have a big impact on all businesses, but your lead generation can be affected by all sorts of factors.

Seasonality, changes to the Google Algorithm, new products and services you launch, changes to how the social platforms allow advertising, even changes in consumer behaviour can all have an impact on the way any business will generate its leads.

The only way to make sure you are not being left behind is to continue to measure your performance, test new approaches and analyse the results. This returns us to the importance of your Data Management.

Step 7) Automate where possible

In order to maximise the efficiency of your lead generation programme it is best to automate as much of the process as possible. There are lots of ways this can be done, for example, many email service providers offering simple email automation and optimisation.

Most CRM platforms will have an API that allows you to push and pull data from your website, email campaigns and more into their ecosystem. Even better still, if you can bring all of your data into a Single Customer View you will be in a position to automate the complete process end-to-end.

At Data HQ we are aware that for a lot of businesses they are obstacles in the way of automating the process completely. It may be that your business lacks the technical capability/resource to do this in-house and/or the budget to outsource. That is why we will shortly be launching our new product, Dynamo, to bring all of these steps together in a much more accessible way for all businesses.

Combining our market leading B2B Vista database, Data Management & Analytical capability and 20+ years in delivering leads for our clients Dynamo will supercharge your Lead Generation activity. Dynamo will offer you the ability to automate your Lead Generation across email, social, direct mail and your CRM system with high quality prospect data and bespoke campaigns based on each prospects actions.

For more information, or to be part of the Beta testing get in touch.