THE LEAD

GENERATION
ROAD MAP
7 Steps to Getting Leads
and Closing Customers
with Inbound Marketing

FROM LE ADG2
 TAB LE O F CO NTE NTS

INTRODUCTION
STEP 1: PLAN
Target Personas
Content Brainstorming

STEP 2: CREATE
Content Mapping
The Blog Manager’s Role in Content Creation

STEP 3: DISTRIBUTE
3 Ways to Promote Your Blog

STEP 4: CAPTURE
4 Common Ways to Capture Leads
Remember Where a Prospect is in the Buying Cycle
Contact Forms and Place in the Funnel

STEP 5: ANALYZE
5 Metrics to Analyze Each Month

STEP 6: CULTIVATE
Social Media
Automated Workflows
Templated Emails
Personal Emails

STEP 7: CONVERT
Segmentation and Lead Scoring
What to Do With the Rest of the Leads

ABOUT LEADG2

© Copyright 2017, LeadG2. All Rights Reserved

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INTRODUCTION
 I NTRO D U C TIO N

Developing a solid inbound marketing and

content strategy is something that most
companies struggle with. In a recent study, 46%
surveyed said that the lack
In fact, a recent study from Ascend2 and its of an effective strategy and
research partners revealed that 46% of the the creation of content are
marketing, sales, and business professionals the most challenging
surveyed around the world said that the lack of obstacles to reaching the
an effective strategy and the creation of content next level of inbound
are the most challenging obstacles to reaching marketing performance.
the next level of inbound marketing performance.
-Ascend2
LeadG2 uses a 7-Step Lead Generation Process
to help our clients navigate and embrace an
inbound marketing culture.

Think of the following step-by-step guide as a

road map that can be used at any phase of your
inbound marketing efforts—not just during the
planning process. One of the best ways to use
these seven steps is to analyze your current
inbound marketing initiative and determine how
you are doing with each of the seven steps.

Plan Create Distribute Capture Analyze Cultivate Convert

Ready to learn more about how to effectively plan and implement an inbound marketing program?
Let’s get started with step one.

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STEP 1: PLAN
 7 Critical Steps We Guide Our Clients Through for Inbound Marketing Success.
STE P 1 : P L AN

STEP 1

PLAN
Success begins with building a plan.

?
Assess your Set objectives and Develop an effective
current needs measurable goals content strategy

Develop Define Brainstorm premium

personas responsibilities content ideas

STEP 2
The first step—Plan—is one of the most challenging
aspects of getting started with inbound marketing and
embracing an inbound culture. CREATE
Develop content that will
Why is this so challenging for companies to grasp? attract visitors,
and position you as a thought leader.
Well, for most companies, inbound marketing is a new
way of doing lead generation and it takes a fair amount
of education and understanding to truly see the
potential and how it can fundamentally change the way
a company markets itself.
Videos
Crucial at this early stage is not just buy-in from
management but also buy-in from everyone within
the company that has something to do with sales and
Blogging
marketing. Because inbound marketing works so much
better when it’s part of a company’s DNA and not just
a program, it’s important that everyone has a very
good understanding of what inbound marketing is—the
Webinars
benefits and the challenges. Getting everyone on the
same page and using the same terminology can really
lay the groundwork for what’s to come. STEP
After a solid base of knowledge is in place, it’s then
important to identify and delineate responsibilities
for certain key roles, such as “Inbound Marketing
Manager,” and to establish who your team of bloggers
will be.convert visitors to leads,
While the “Inbound Marketing Manager” doesn’t
have to be an inbound marketing expert, they
should have a solid understanding of using a
COS (content optimization system) such as Wordpress
or HubSpot, social media publishing, the basics of SEO,
Podcasts
and a little bit of HTML. Having to learn your marketing
automation software, like HubSpot, in addition to
learning how to manage social media accounts all at
White Papers
the same time can sometimes be overwhelming. So
having someone as Inbound Marketing Manager who is
a “digital native” is recommended. This person would
be your point person if you decide to work with an
inbound marketing agency. Ideally, your agency would
E Books
be able to train them on best practices and uses of
tools and technology.
3

DISTRIBUTE
ShareT content
H E L E A D Gspecifically
E N E R AT I O N R designed
OA D M A P © to
2 0 1appeal
7 to your ideal customer. 6
 STE P 1 : P L AN
TARGET PERSONAS
The next step in creating your inbound marketing
plan is to research your target persona so that you
aren’t making any assumptions. Having an accurate
understanding of your target persona is vital to the
success of your inbound marketing efforts. The better
you know your prospects and customers, the better
you can generate content that addresses their needs
and questions.
After sitting in dozens of inbound marketing planning
meetings, you would be surprised at how many times
we have seen companies just guessing at who their
target persona is and not really have any data or
research on their most important prospects.
There are a number of ways to create Target Personas
including customer surveys, internal surveys, and
market research, to name just a few. We recommend
that this is done prior to building out your marketing
and content strategy so that you can use this
information in the next phase of planning:
content brainstorming.
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CONTENT BRAINSTORMING
Now that you have a good idea of who you are creating
content for, the next step is determining what content
you are going to create for them. The main types of
content that is created for inbound marketing includes
blog posts and offers.
Take note that a blog post could be more than just text
and include a video or podcast, and that offers can be
anything that you present as valuable, ranging from
white papers to signing up for a webinar.
At this stage of the planning process including
key players from sales, marketing, customer
service, and other areas of the company that
interact with prospects and clients is recommended.
Asking the team that you have assembled what
questions they frequently hear from prospects and
customers can help you get a better understanding of
what information you can provide.
Determining your content strategy is one of the most
important steps that you can do while mapping out
your content strategy, as 54% of companies surveyed
by Ascend2 said that “content creation is not only the
most effective tactic for inbound marketing purposes, it
is also the most difficult tactic to execute.”
Once you have determined what content your target
persona would be most interested in, you can start to
brainstorm blog post titles and offers with your team
and come up with your content strategy.
For each “offer” that you create, you will want
to have at least five to 10 blog posts that can
tie back to the offer. So if you had “Download a
Sample Widget” as an offer, you would want to have
several blog posts about “Why Widgets Matter,” “Top 5
Greatest Things about Widgets,” and so forth.
This is only step one in our greater seven-step
process—and it’s where companies come up short.
7
STEP 2: CREATE
 Develop Define Brainstorm premium
personas responsibilities content ideas
STE P 2 : CR E ATE

STEP 2

CREATE
Develop content that will attract visitors, convert visitors to leads,
and position you as a thought leader.

Videos Podcasts

White Papers
Blogging

Webinars E Books

STEP 3
The second step—Create—is sometimes one of the you with a number of great ideas for premium content
most challenging aspects of inbound marketing and and blogs. It’s very important to then narrow them
embracing an inbound culture. Why? Because like down to ideas that would not only resonate with your
inbound, content marketing is a new way of doingDISTRIBUTE target persona but also align with your products and
lead generation for many
Share companies.
content There may not
specifically designed toservices.
appeal to your ideal customer.
be many internal resources to guide the efforts and
to ensure best practices are being followed, and that Remember, the primary goal of content marketing is to
content is being created in the most efficient way. generate leads and increase revenue—not just come
up with blog posts and premium content. We have
For many new inbound marketers, this is their first seen all too often that companies have some great blog
foray into blogging, creating white papers, and post ideas but when asked how they tie back to the
distributing content via social media. This is why company’s products and services, there is no linkage.
companies with limited internal resources find a lot of Be sure to spend most of your time creating content
Use
value in a Content
hiring Calendar
freelance Get found
writers or partnering withfirst
a Promote
that your
is not just Utilize
interesting to your email
target persona but
marketingto agency
schedule strategic
to help through
with content keywords
creation. posts
also on social
relevant. marketing to bring
content distribution for SEO media and beyond visitors back
Your content doesn’t always have to be a blog
CONTENT MAPPING post or a whitepaper. It‘s best to embrace the
In step one (Plan) we discussed the importance of STEP concept of target personas and create content
4
that resonates with them. If your target persona would
getting your team together and coming up with a long
list of premium content and blog posts to support be more interested in videos or infographics, then
them. The content brainstorming process will provide spending your time on those content areas makes
CAPTURE more sense.

Convert visitors to leads to generate a list of qualified prospects.

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 STE P 2 : CR E ATE

THE INBOUND MARKETING MANAGER’S

ROLE IN CONTENT CREATION
Here’s a list of different types After it’s determined what you are going to create, it’s
of premium content offers: important that you have someone designated as the
person who will be responsible for making this happen.
• Case studies In most cases this will be the person that we have
• Contact pages designated the “Inbound Marketing Manager.”

• eBooks It’s the Inbound Marketing Manager’s responsibility to

• Free demos determine if the content will be produced internally
• Free trials or created with the help of a marketing agency or a
team of freelancers. Regardless of how the content is
• Original reports produced and who produces it, what’s most important
• Podcasts is making sure it’s something your target persona
would be interested in, is professional looking, and is
• Press releases
created within your budget.
• Training materials
• Tutorials So far we have looked at the importance that the
development of an inbound strategy plays in the
• Videos success of inbound marketing efforts, and how to
• Webinars create content that’s relevant to your target audience.
• Whitepapers
The next step—Distribute—is one that we see
companies under-emphasizing and expect that “if they
build it, they will come.” This is one of the myths of
content marketing, that by creating content you will
automatically become thought leaders and increase
traffic to your website. Truth is, this doesn’t happen
automatically, and some content marketers go as far
as to say that you need to spend less time creating
content and more time promoting it.

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 STEP 3:
DISTRIBUTE
 Webinars E Books
STE P 3: DI STR I B UTE

STEP 3

DISTRIBUTE
Share content specifically designed to appeal to your ideal customer.

Use a Content Calendar Get found first Promote your Utilize email
to schedule strategic through keywords posts on social marketing to bring
content distribution for SEO media and beyond visitors back

STEP 4

Creating content is just the first step in getting leads. So how do you get thousands of visitors to
Getting your content in front of your target personaCAPTURE your blog each month?
through social media, organic search optimization,
Convert visitors to leads to generate a list of qualified prospects.
and link building is the next and sometimes most It’s been said by many content marketing and inbound
difficult step. marketing experts that you should spend 20% of your
available time writing blogs and 80% promoting your
Turning your blog into a lead generating machine blog. At LeadG2, we believe strongly in this philosophy
and getting thousands of visitors to your blog doesn’t have come up with several proven ways to promote
just happen overnight or by itself. It can take months your blog.
or even years for some of your blog posts to be
Premium
become popular with Google Compelling calls
or to be found by those Landing pages and
in your industry. content offers to action contact forms

On our own blog, we regularly see certain posts

that begin to get shared more frequently and start STEP 5
to move up quickly in the search rankings. When
you can combine great content, solid search engine
optimization, links on other sites and social media,
you can create an awesome content machine. ANALYZE
Review the data to determine
what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust.

Use Hubspot tools to identify:

• Top lead sources
• Which topics/posts are read most
• Which offers are converting readers to leads

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 STE P 3: DI STR I B UTE
3 STEPS TO PROMOTE YOUR BLOG:
While these are some of the key ways to promote your blog,
this is not an exhaustive list.
1. Get your team behind the effort.
Your blog should be analogous to a sales library. This
sales library is where you archive the most common
questions asked by your clients and prospects and
can email these resources to them when appropriate.
The best blog posts come from interactions that you
have with your clients and prospects, the objections
they have, and the questions they ask. So, what better
way to serve your clients and get new business then
by sending them information from this sales library to
answer their questions?
2. Get links to your blog on as many websites
as possible.
Most businesses are members of various associations,
chambers of commerce, and other civic organizations.
Don’t be shy in asking them to link to your blog, or
asking to guest post on their blog if they have one.
The more incoming links to your blog and website,
the better.
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3. Get social.
Make sure that you are engaging in social media where
your clients and prospects are online. Not all social
networks make sense for every company, so establish
yourself and promote yourself on the networks that
make the most sense for your target persona.
You have a choice in the matter. You can either have
a beautiful garden that you water, spend time pulling
weeds every week, and spend money fertilizing every
quarter, or you can neglect your landscaping, take a
vacation, and come back to weeds and dead grass. Just
as you can with the maintenance of your yard, if you
can’t spend the time to do the job properly, you can
hire an expert to do it for you.
Let’s face it, not everyone is cut out for gardening and if
inbound marketing is not your main job it’s best to hire
someone with a green thumb to do it for you. This is
especially true if you or someone on your team doesn’t
have the skillset required to conduct an inbound
marketing program.
13
 STEP 4:
CAPTURE
 to schedule strategic through keywords posts on social marketing to bring
content distribution for SEO media and beyond visitors back
STE P 4: C AP TU R E

STEP 4

CAPTURE
Convert visitors to leads to generate a list of qualified prospects.

Premium Compelling calls Landing pages and

content offers to action contact forms

STEP 5
Now that you are getting some traffic to your website
from your content marketing efforts, it’s important to
ANALYZE
make sure that you are capitalizing on this traffic by
effectively capturing leads using various Review
methods. the data to determine
what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust.
The basic mechanics for capturing leads are to have
some type of “offer” or call to action on each page
of your website that directs your visitor to a landing Use Hubspot tools to identify:
page to fill out a form or to enter their email address. • Top lead sources
Yes, you read this correctly. If you are truly looking to • Which topics/posts are read most
generate leads from your website, each page of your • Which offers are converting readers to leads
website should have some type of call to action or way
to capture leads.

STEP 6

4 Common Ways to Capture Leads:

CULTIVATE
1. SubscribingMaintain
to your blog
leadornurturing and marketing
3. Signing automation
up for a webinar
to
e-newsletters continue to establish trust 4. and
Filling
creditability. form
out a contact
2. Downloadable PDFs (guides,
how-to’s,
Usewhitepapers, etc.) (email campaigns and
marketing automation
work flows) to help the visitor:
• Get to know you better
• Learn more about your company and products
• Move through the sales funnel

STEP 7
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 STE P 4: C AP TU R E
REMEMBER WHERE A PROSPEC T IS IN
THE BUYING CYCLE
Everyone coming to your website is not at the same
point in the buying cycle.
• Visitors to your site that are in the initial stages of
research might just want to subscribe to your blog to
learn more. That’s Top of the Funnel, or TOFU.
• Another visitor might have already subscribed to
your blog and has done additional research and is
ready to get some answers to specific questions that
will be covered on one of your upcoming webinars.
They’re in the Middle of the Funnel, or MOFU.
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• Bottom of the Funnel (BOFU) offers are for those
prospects that have already done their research,
had most of their questions answers, and moved
through the buying cycle. They are now ready to
speak to someone about specific services or pricing
and are literally at the bottom of the funnel. The only
place they have to go is into the customer column,
lost deals, or put back into the funnel for additional
nurturing in order to provide them with additional
information that might change their decision making
process this time through the funnel.
It’s not a typical situation that someone goes through
your sales funnel multiple times, but sometimes it
does happen.
16
 STE P 4: C AP TU R E

WHAT QUESTIONS TO ASK IN

FORMS AND WHEN
One of the areas that we are constantly optimizing
for ourselves and for our clients is the questions
being asked and information being captured on our
conversion forms. The reason for this is because it’s
extremely important to make sure that the questions
you are asking are appropriate for the stage of the
funnel your prospect is in.

For instance, top of the funnel offers are more general

in nature and should not have as many required
questions or ask for very much detail. At this point, you
simply want to get the person’s email address. As you
move deeper into the funnel, you can require additional
questions and ask for more in depth answers.

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 STEP 5:
ANALYZE
 Premium Compelling calls Landing pages and
content offers to action contact forms
STE P 5: ANALY ZE

STEP 5

ANALYZE
Review the data to determine
what’s working, what’s not, and how to adjust.

Use Hubspot tools to identify:

• Top lead sources
• Which topics/posts are read most
• Which offers are converting readers to leads

STEP 6
One of the greatest feelings for an inbound marketer OVERALL TRAFFIC
CULTIVATE
is when leads start converting and you start to hear
that sales is getting close to closing on a few inbound The first thing you need to do in terms of analysis is
leads. While some mightMaintain lead
start thinking nurturing
about to look at your
popping and marketing sources of traffic
automation to from a historic basis
the champagne cork and celebrating those early wins, (to your website and to your specific landing pages)
continue to establish trustand
and creditability.
determine if there are areas for improvement or
it’s probably best to hold off for awhile until you make
sure that you have the formula dialed in and you have concern. Looking at your traffic from a historic basis
Use marketing
optimized everything that you can. automation (email campaigns
canand
help with understanding your long-term trends and
work flows) to help the visitor: isolating any seasonal or short-term issues.
• Get to
This is where the Analyze know
step youand
begins better
the
fun starts… • Learn more about your company and products
Areas of improvement for website traffic include
• Move through the sales funnel sources of traffic that either have little traffic, have
low traffic to contact rates (low conversions), or are
not growing month over month. Even if you see large
increases in overall traffic, it’s best not to just stop
5 Metrics to Analyze Each Month: STEP 7 there and determine that all is good. You need to dig
a little deeper and determine the causes for these
1. Overall traffic increases so you can possibly replicate this in the
2. Traffic by source future. The same with decreases. You want to know

3. # of leads (broken into MQL

CONVERT why the traffic has decreased so you can do something
about it.
and SQL) Get visitors to raise their hand and ask to be contacted.
4. Conversion rates Implement a plan of approach and
5. Page performance
“!”“!” conversion strategy to close new
customers through the use of:
• Lifecycle stages
• Segmented lists
• User history

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 STE P 5: ANALY ZE
TRAFFIC BY SOURCE
A good rule of thumb is that each source of traffic—
organic, direct, social, referral, paid, and direct—should
for the most part be growing and increasing every
month, or you should have a valid reason for lack of
growth or inactivity.
For instance, if you are seeing your social media traffic
decrease from month to month, it’s important to dig
a little deeper and determine the cause. Did you stop
publishing to Google+ for a few weeks, or did your
social media tool disconnect from HubSpot and you
stopped auto publishing? Finding the answers to each
of these monthly swings can help with making sure you
are seeing progress in the right direction.
For most inbound efforts, decreases in traffic are
usually accompanied by a decrease in content
production during that month (publishing fewer
blog posts) or other factors that are predictable. For
instance, if you are publishing an email newsletter to
your marketing database on a quarterly basis, you
should see increases in email traffic during the month
you publish. Once you know the impact that it will have
on traffic and leads, you can factor that in each month
when reviewing your results.
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NUMBER OF LEADS
This is a rather obvious analysis that you would want
to conduct on a monthly basis and discuss between
sales and marketing. Are leads increasing from previous
months or are they decreasing?
To determine the reasoning for this you often have to
go back to your source reports and see if you received
enough traffic and then check your conversion rates.
If you receive the same traffic each month and your
conversion rate is the same, you should have the same
number of leads. So something must have changed in
one of those two areas to impact the overall number
of leads. Reviewing your traffic and conversion rates by
source can help give you the answers.
Besides measuring the total number of leads during
this analysis, you will also want to measure the number
of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) compared to
previous months, as well as sales qualified leads (SQLs)
compared to previous months. This will help you gauge
the quality of your lead flow and help you determine
if you need to adjust the questions you are asking on
forms to get better leads or make other adjustments.
Sometimes a decrease in leads can also be attributed
to a decrease in publishing blog posts or new offers. If
you are not bringing new prospects to your website and
showing them something new that they are interested
in, your leads can dry up rather quickly. Creating a new
marketing campaign or call to actions on your website
can help increase leads each month.
20
 STE P 5: ANALY ZE
CONVERSION RATES
As we talked about in the section with analyzing overall
leads, it’s important to look at the sources for each lead
and to review how each landing page is doing. If you
have several under-performing landing pages (whether
based upon your own performance or industry
benchmarks) this is where you want to focus your
efforts on increasing conversions.
It’s also important that you find the top performing
landing pages and make sure that you continue to
promote them. If these are truly your best sources of
leads, you will want to make sure that you have steady
traffic to them from new campaigns. You want to make
the under-performing landing pages convert better and
to drive more traffic to your performing pages.
A good way to analyze conversion rates is to do some
A/B testing of creative, copywriting, and even the
form prospects fill out. But remember, only test one
component at a time so you can know what the real
impact of your changes.
While landing page conversion rates are incredibly
important to measure, your overall conversion rates
are equally important. Knowing your visitor to lead, and
lead to customer conversion rates for example can help
you determine success as a whole.
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PAGE PERFORMANCE
Digging into the content that visitors are finding most
useful or interesting on your website is something that
should be done on a monthly basis. If you know what
your top 10 visited pages are, you can analyze each
of those to make sure that you have optimized them
for SEO and the keywords you are targeting, as well
as make sure they have some type of call to action on
them. One of the biggest mistakes that we see from
companies is not having any visible call to action on
high-performing pages.
Another benefit of regularly reviewing page
performance is to gauge what your visitors interests
are and providing more of it. You can also review
the conversion path and making sure that your visitors
are seeing the right pages in order to becoming
new clients.
As you can see by the amount of data you should be
analyzing on a monthly basis, skipping step five isn’t
an option. Analyzing your performance on a monthly
basis and making changes can only improve the quality
of your content, user experience, and ultimately the
number of leads you are receiving.
21
 STEP 6:
CULTIVATE
 • Which offers are converting readers to leads

STE P 6: CU LTIVATE

STEP 6

CULTIVATE
Maintain lead nurturing and marketing automation to
continue to establish trust and creditability.

Use marketing automation (email campaigns and

work flows) to help the visitor:
• Get to know you better
• Learn more about your company and products
• Move through the sales funnel

STEP 7
Cultivation is one of the least understood parts of the Social Media
lead generation process. It also requires the most care. Due to the fact that the buyer is in control of the sales

CONVERT
By definition, cultivating is a farming term that refers
process, it is important that you are showing up in key
places along their personalized buyer’s journey. Many
to delicately taking careGet
of a crop until itto
visitors reaches
raiseitstheir hand and ask to
companies be contacted.
greatly benefit from having a presence on
full potential. When we discuss the term cultivate social media, specifically LinkedIn and Twitter. As social
relative to lead generation and business development, mediaa becomes more engrained
we are focusing on the activities that move a prospect
Implement plan of approach and in our daily lives, it’s

“!” “!”
from being “just another lead” on their personalized
buyer’s journey to becoming a customer. Cultivate is
wherestrategy
conversion
social
prospectsto are
connections
spending
close
customers through the use of: and
new more time establishing
looking for answers to their
questions
• Lifecycle stagesduring the buying cycle.
synonymous with the sales term “nurture.”
• Segmented lists
• UserThere is a saying that fishermen have been using for
history
centuries: “If you want to catch fish, go where they
EFFEC TIVE NURTURING TECHNIQUES are.” That is exactly the concept behind being visible to
Before we discuss several of the most common your leads on social media.
effective techniques, it’s important to remember
that the buying cycle has changed from the linear Having a presence on social media by regularly posting
sales funnel where prospects moved in an identical and using paid ads on social networks that your
manner from the top of the funnel to the bottom of leads are using is a great way to stay visible to them
the funnel, thereby becoming a customer. Today’s throughout their buyer’s journey. You not only want
B2B buying cycle is less of a linear path and more of to be posting on social media but also listening for
a personalized buyer’s journey, with multiple touch conversations that your prospects are having by doing
points and influencers. things such as following each lead on Twitter.

Because of this change, it has become increasingly

difficult to nurture leads the same way that was
common in the past. We have listed the four lead
nurturing techniques we recommend most, and will
discuss each in detail.

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 STE P 6: CU LTIVATE
Automated Workflows
Simply a series of emails sent to a lead, automated
workflows are one of the easiest lead nurturing
techniques to use and can be implemented using
most email systems. However, because automated
workflows typically follow a linear path, they have
become less effective due to lower email open rates
and the changing buying cycle discussed earlier.
Another challenge to the effectiveness of automated
workflows is that there is no guarantee a lead will
open each of the emails within the workflow. One
way software companies like HubSpot have been able
to get around the issue of leads not opening emails
is including branching methodologies within the
workflows. This enables a decision tree to be set up
and workflows sent based upon the outcomes of the
inherent logic.
For example, if your lead doesn’t open email #1,
the workflow sends them a different email #2 than
originally planned, with a different and possibly more
provocative subject line enticing them to click. By using
this type of branching logic, automated workflows can
do a better job of becoming a part of the personalized
buyer’s journey rather than simply being tied to the
linear sales funnel of the past.
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Templated Emails
Another form of lead nurturing is using templated
emails to send standardized information to leads.
A great example of using templated email is also
an example of how you can use content in the lead
nurturing process. If your company has produced
a whitepaper about a certain topic of interest to
a majority of your leads, you can write a standard
email and save it as a template that references this
whitepaper and lets your lead know that you thought
they might be interested in it. These types of templated
emails are not sent within a workflow but are sent on
an ad hoc basis—but with similar content each time.
One of the benefits to using templated emails is that it
saves your sales reps time and gives you the ability to
test different emails to see which prove more effective.
Personal Emails
Last but not least is sending personalized emails to
nurture leads. These emails are typically sent based
upon actions that your lead has taken. If a salesperson
sees that a lead came back to your website and viewed
a specific product page, it makes sense to send them
an email a few days later with additional information
about that product.
Another great use of emails is as a personal follow-up.
For example, if you run into a lead at a conference and
simply wanted to say “hello,” instead of simply checking
in you can send them a personal email and include
a link to your company’s recent blog post about a
product they mentioned they are interested in.
While not automated, sending personal emails to
leads that are in the decision-making process is a
great way to connect with them on their personalized
buyer’s journey.
In conclusion, the most important thing to remember
about nurturing your leads is to focus on building a
relationship and establishing a level of trust that makes
them want to do business with you and your company.
Without that, it doesn’t matter how sophisticated your
lead nurturing process is.
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 STEP 7:
CONVERT
 STE P 7: CO NVE RT
STEP 7
CONVERT
Get visitors to raise their hand and ask to be contacted.
“!” “!”
Congratulations! The conversion step is the final step.
It’s where you find a percentage of your leads truly
raising their hands and asking to speak with someone
about how your product or service can solve their
specific challenges.
Determining what to do with leads that have self-
identified themselves is the easy part. Because they
have, in essence, raised their hands, you know that
they are ready to be contacted. The difficult part is
determining what to do with the leads that have not
converted or have yet to raise their hands and asked to
be contacted.
SEGMENTATION AND LEAD SCORING
A key part of the conversion process is segmenting
and scoring your leads so that you know which ones
have a true interest in your product or service and
which ones are just window shopping. Segmenting your
leads can be as easy as putting them into different lead
categories, such as marketing qualified leads (MQL),
sales qualified leads (SQL), or subscribers. The three
basic categories should cover the majority of your leads
and give your team the ability to focus specifically
on the MQL and SQL categories while continuing to
nurture those that are not MQLs or SQLs.
If you are dealing with a large number of leads and are
struggling with knowing which ones are worth further
contact at this point, having a lead scoring process in
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Implement a plan of approach and
conversion strategy to close new
customers through the use of:
• Lifecycle stages
• Segmented lists
• User history
place makes sense. Lead scoring allows you to provide
a numerical score for different activities that your leads
are taking. These activities can include the number
of pages viewed, specific downloads, specific pages
viewed (like pricing or services), or other criteria. The
main benefit of lead scoring is that it helps to uncover
leads that may have not self-identified at this point
based on filling out a BOFU contact form. Those with a
high lead score are those that have conducted enough
activities to possibly make them an MQL or SQL and are
in need of further nurturing or to be contacted.
While some think that lead scoring is a totally
automated process, that is far from the truth. Each lead
that rises to the top of your lead scoring criteria needs
to be reviewed by a human being who understands the
true dynamics to what qualifies someone as a
good lead.
WHAT TO DO WITH THE REST
OF THE LEADS
One question that consistently comes up when meeting
with clients is, “What do we do with leads that have not
converted but are still MQLs and SQLs?”
The simple answer is that you recycle these leads into
new lead nurturing campaigns or simply change them
to a subscriber if they have no potential to become a
customer or client.
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ABOUT LEADG2:
LeadG2 is a digital marketing agency specializing in helping staffing agencies,
recruiting firms, and other B2B companies get more visibility, leads, and new business.

At LeadG2, we understand the importance of attracting the right visitors and

converting them into leads. We live and breathe the art of unforgettable content. We’ve
mastered SEO and social media campaigns. We also have serious skills and expertise
in the area of sales strategies, sales enablement, and sales training with the support of
our parent company, The Center for Sales Strategy.

Our areas of specialty include:

● • Development of strategic marketing plans and strategies
● • Marketing tools and technologies including HubSpot (we are a platinum
HubSpot partner)
● • Lead generation campaigns
● • Social media marketing
● • Content marketing
● • Lead nurturing including marketing automation
● • Marketing metrics and analysis

Please contact us here or call Dean Moothart, our Director of Client Solutions
at 407-913-7091.