Although B2B lead generation can be a difficult and exhausting process, the rewards can be worth it. In order to increase the number of leads coming in, you need to start using the right strategies.
What is B2B Lead generation?
B2B lead generation is short form of business-to-business lead generation, which explains businesses that sell their products or services to other businesses. This is exactly same to B2C (business-to-consumer) lead generation, where products or services are sold directly to customers.
A journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step.
And in a typical marketing world or sales process, B2B lead generation is the first step.
It involves collecting targeted customer’s information such as name, email address, job title and company name, which is very useful to personalize communication and make sales.
After collecting the information, these leads are passed to sales team once they are verified as a potential customer. In the end, the goal of B2B lead generation is to create a consistent channel of prospects that turn into customers.
See How The Market Is Shifting
In 2019, lead generation tools spending in the United States is estimated to nearly 2.6 billion U.S. dollars. With steady growth, this will reach 3.2 billion by the end of 2023.
The B2B lead generation market will be worth $19.3 billion USD worldwide by 2023 with a 28% CAGR (compound annual growth rate). The U.S. will generate around 40% of revenue.
Lead generation is a non-negotiable element of SaaS business growth. Without a sufficient supply of high-quality leads, you won’t have the raw material for sales to nurture, and you risk getting stuck in the “trough,” or valley, of the proverbial S-curve. Here are 15 strategic methods to generate leads as a start-up or growth-stage company.
#1 Set a CLEVER Goal
Before you follow some strategies for your SaaS business, set a goal.
A CLEVER stands for
These are the characteristics, which make a goal obvious and achievable. Setting CLEVER goal is important because it serves as a guide for everyone who is all involved to create the necessary steps to achieve them.
To make sure if the goal you have set for your SaaS business is a CLEVER goal, ask these following questions:
- What is want to achieve? (Clarity)
- What is your marked level to say that you have reached your goal? (Level)
- Do you gather enough experience in the field? (Experience)
- Do all your team members agree? (Value acceptance)
- When should you achieve the goal? (prE-planned)
- Do you have the technology, financial, and team members to reach the goal? (Reality)
If you have a CLEVER goal when you start the business then the goal will never EVER let you down.
#2 Make Sure You Are Reaching The Right Person – The Decision-Maker
Every business has a different phase in the business life cycle. Although there are three primary phases you should be aware of:
Sole Decision Maker
This person is fully responsible for everything including the final purchasing decision. The sole decision-maker is often the CEO, president, or department head, or project director depending on the organization structure and company size.
Board-Decision Maker
This person is also a kind of sole decision-maker who requires consent from the board. In this case, you not only need to secure sign-off from the sole decision-maker but also need approval from the board. This situation occurs in large businesses with higher value products.
Multiple Decision-Makers
An influencer who seek consensus from the different stakeholder’s decision before buying anything for the organization.
Having a business deal with other businesses is not an easy task. In B2C business, companies only have to face the customer needs and requirements but in B2B, companies have to fulfill other company's need and requirements. Who knows if you aren’t able to do that, you may lose huge sales.
#3 Segment Your Audience
Before you reach your audience, it is important to know the ideal companies for your service or products. If your business in the starting stage, there is no point in approaching the large companies unless you have a big brand name to show.
Once and forever you create a strong and well-known identity in the market, start targeting the large companies. Segmenting your audience is the foundation for marketing, you need to be obvious and targeted to filter your audience precisely.
A recent study shows that only six out of ten SaaS companies expressed confidence to create a list for their marketing campaign that precisely reflects their targeted audience.
Some points from the study:
• 71% B2B businesses targeting their audience based on the Geography (Environment).
• 59% B2B sellers targeting their audience based on industry source.
• 50% of businesses chose account-based marketing.
• 48% of businesses targeting the audience based on their online activities.
• 41% of businesses consider the company size while segmenting the audience as a primary factor.
Time consumption and challenges also include in these parameters for your sales.
#4 Using Live Chat and Chatbots
Live Chats are been around for a long time in the industry, but recently when marketers are seeing its true potential of this live chat software, especially when it comes to generating leads and sales conversions.
As well as a chatbot, there are no descriptions needed, it was a revolution in itself. Every company has to implement one chatbot for more conversational marketing and understanding website visitors to a great proportion.
Not only that, many companies have started to use conversational chatbots, which brings more traffic to the website and engage the visitors in an exciting way.
The main aim of live chat and chatbots is to prompt visitors to engage in a conversational way and of course, more sales.
#5 Product Listing and Review Site
We are a little bit lazy by nature and follow the lead. We won’t spend time searching for company products. We just want those lists by the eyesight.
It is the reality we are speaking here.
List out your products on your website for visitors. This easy-peasy method will bring their attention to the company and maybe, it will bring some sale also.
As I said before, we follow the lead. Review sites are one of the leads for good products in the market. Most of the SaaS products are listed on the G2 review sites for visitor’s reference and it promotes your brand to a huge audience. If someone is interested in your product, they will contact you via the contact forms of the site.
#6 Create Quality Blog Content
Having a blog on your company site is another powerful way to generate leads for your SaaS business. It gives you a platform to establish your business as an authority by sharing your expertise and providing your customers with your most pressing problems.
Most B2B businesses believe that content marketing campaigns generate more leads than traditional marketing strategies. A good blog content writing includes identifying the audience, categories the right content, content disturbing channels like social media, and map your content strategy.
When you are out of quality, you are out of business. – Phil Crosby
The success of content marketing is entirely depending on the quality of the content. If the content has high quality, it will engage your customers and capture interested leads.
#7 Highlight Your Competitive Advantages
When your prospects started to evaluate the tools in the market for their problem, they have a large pool of vendors to review. You need to explain the differentiators using studies, statistics, and customer references to gain a competitive edge. If you can convince them about how you are more efficient and affordable than others, they are likely to close the deal with you.
Clearbit Prospector vs LeadMine
#8 SEO for Your SaaS Business
I completely agree that you must need quality content, but you still need SEO on your site, especially if you want to generate leads for your SaaS business.
SEO is short for Search Engine optimization, a set of guidelines to make it easier for search engines to find your site so that they can display it on their search engine results page. No matter how great your content is, if the search engine couldn’t find you, then your target audience won’t be able to know you.
Make sure that you use Meta tags on your website. There are two important Meta tags to note down on your page:
- Title Tag – Title of your page.
- Meta Description – Factor for search engine to determine your site.
#9 Email Marketing Campaigns
Email is one of the online marketing strategies which has stood the place by time test. In fact, it’s been 50 years since Ray Tomlinson invented email, and it still holds the top spot on many B2B marketing lists of B2B lead generation strategies.
At the moment, one of the trends in email marketing is marketing automation, which helps many B2B businesses with great results. Most US adults prefer to communicate through email with your business.
Email marketing automation cuts out the manual workload of the sales team by targeting user behaviors and a whole bunch of tasks that can turn your email marketing strategy from worst into recovering abandoned chances and increase more sales.
#10 Offer a free trial
Offering your visitors complete access to your product in exchange for their contact information is another lead generation strategy for SaaS business. This gives your visitors the opportunity to know the full potential of your product or service for themselves and helps them to decide.
At this time, customers often take advantage of free trials. Users can check out how your product works, and see if using it will bring a solution for their business. Whenever a visitor sign-up for a free trial, they provide you with information such as contact information, and company name. This information can be used later on to sell your product once the visitor’s free trial is close to expiry.
#11 Provide Deals and Discount
The lead generation’s best strategy is to offer attractive deals and discounts to boost businesses. When people receive a coupon or discount, they become happier and show interested to continue the business.
Giving discounts helps to attract customers every time and hold them in business deals. Loyalty reward programs and bonus discount offers help to increase loyalty in customers.
Types of discount you can offer to your customers:
- Free shipping
- Free gifts
- Dollar value discount
- Percentage based discount
Offering good discounts on the next purchase is also the best way to hold your customers, which makes them share their positive reviews and stories.
#12 Use Social Media
Social media is a great way to generate leads because it gives you the opportunity to connect and communicate with your customers. According to the study done by the Content Marketing Institute, 92% of B2B businesses prefer social media to distribute content rather than other platforms.
You can engage your customers across social media channels at every stage of their journey with re-targeting, conversations, ads, etc. Also, you can expand your customer count and build an active audience on social media to share content with them, interact with them, and respond to their feedback. It could be a brand awareness among businesses.
Social media marketing is considered to be a strong pillar for sharing the content to gain customers. It helps in generating a huge amount of traffic on the website and prompt your company.
#13 Google Ads
Using Google AdWords may be an expensive side for SaaS startups, but still a worth a shot strategy to invest in if you are in the place to generate more leads. Using the right keywords and right planning, Google AdWords can position your ads on the search results page. So that they can easily attract potential leads for your products and services.
There is no single keyword in Google AdWords, you can use long text as a keyword. Google changed its capability by making its keyword match type less strict.
Just, for example, you can set the keyword like “lead generation tool for better results to increase sales” or “B2B lead generation tool to increase sales growth”.
So you can put longer define as a keyword and don’t need to worry about your ads are only seen by people typing that exact query into Google.
Many businesses have been using Google AdWords to increase sales. Google has included itself as the go-to-search engine and has capitalized 91.38% market share on today’s calculation.
#14 Update Your Old Content
One of the most important strategies that B2B businesses forget is to update old content.
An old thing becomes new if you detach it from what usually surrounds it. – Robert Bresson
When content gets old, many bad things will happen such as broken links, inaccurate information, rankings may drop, etc. Most importantly, your content will never be going to generate any leads if it’s not up-to-date.
Updating your old content should be your content maintenance routine. If you don’t go through your old posts regularly, then you are in a trouble sooner or later. You might give incorrect information to visitors and damage your ranking. Having too many pages about the same topic will increase keyword cannibalization.
Therefore, check your old posts and decide whether to update or merge or delete them.
The content should be addressing the needs of your audience today like right now, not for their historical problems.
#15 Call-To-Action (CTA)
We are all attracted while crossing something like “Get started for free” or “Sign up and get free trials” buttons. These things are the call-to-action (CTA) button that includes the lead generation strategies.
The CTAs can able to do some tasks such as connect via social media, subscribe to the email list and add comments, etc. A good call-to-action can generate more leads.
There are many ways to include CTA. But through emails is the best way. Replacing the URL address of your SaaS Company with a clever written CTA will make them do the action by clicking the button.
In conclusion
Generating leads and increase B2B sales is a tough one but not impossible.
Now you know different strategies that you can apply to your SaaS business for more sales. These strategies can deliver results on their own, also can combine some of these strategies for better results.
Now, it’s your turn to let me know, which strategies I have talked about are you going to implement in your business? Share it with LeadMine.
