Best Practices in Lead Generation

53% to 88% of business to business professionals are prepared to switch to new

service providers.1 While this can be a headache to the incumbent service providers,
new service providers would be more than willing to grab these opportunities.
However, here comes the catch. A lot of these buyers are handling their needs and
problems internally rather than seeking services from outsiders.

While service providers can add value to the companies and save millions of dollars
which further help to create growth, a large proportion of buyers are unconvinced of
the value you bring to them. To tap this potential market and convert these
opportunities into revenues, you have to get them see the value you add to their
organizations. And for this, you need to generate leads.

A successful lead generation identifies the potential buyers, gets their attention with
engaging pitch, seduces them with an attractive value proposition, connects them with
an engaging discussion and propels them to enlist your services. This white paper
outlines some of the best practices employed by high performing sales organizations
in generating and nurturing leads.

Short Term Leads and Long Term Leads

Any investment in lead generation programs should have three objectives – to

generate short term leads, to generate and cultivate long term leads and to add to the
brand awareness. Most firms focus too much on short term leads, which are often
more actionable, at the expense of long term leads. But the conventional wisdom says
that in most lead generation campaigns only a quarter of the leads are short term while
the remaining are long term leads.

Successful organizations thrive on repeat business and steady clients. Most of them
are the result of a robust long term lead generation strategy. You just can’t seduce all
your clients to buy now. Most clients buy according to their needs and buying cycles.
You need to be able to nurture your leads until they arrive at the proper decision-
making stage of their buying cycle.

A third outcome of your lead generation campaign should be to increase brand

awareness. When done right, lead generation creates more brand awareness than many
of the traditional brand awareness channels which rely heavily on graphics.

Know Your Outcomes and Calculate ROI

Ensure that your lead generation campaign’s effectiveness can be reliably measured
with appropriate metrics. Do not spend on marketing programs that do not target the

1
http://www.raintoday.com/howclientsbuy.cfm
right audience or produce measurable ROI. Poor implementation of marketing
program, over-reliance on few tactics, failure to nurture the generated leads, poor
marketing communication, poor value proposition and inability to sustain the
campaign over a long time are some of the frequent reasons why most lead generation
programs do not achieve their outcomes and deliver acceptable ROI on your
campaigns.

Estimate your outcomes beforehand. Calculate the targeted suspects, probable

percentage of leads that would be generated from them, percentage of qualified
opportunities from those leads, and the percentage of leads that would turn into
clients. And based on the investment in lead generation campaign and the potential
revenue achievable from the likely clients nurtured by the campaign, you can easily
calculate the ROI of the campaign.

Demonstrate Value in Your Marketing and Selling Efforts

Understand the value you are offering in your lead generation campaign. Avoid
abstract terms like ‘innovation’, ‘the best’ and ‘creative’. Instead use terms that are
easily identifiable by your target audience. Make it tangible. “You can save up to $1.5
millions dollars using our services” is more effective than “we offer innovative
solutions that decrease your operating costs”.

Clients expect you to be a resourceful person they can turn to when a problem arises.
Instead of focusing on benefits and promises, explain the process of how you can add
value to their organization. Then set the expected outcomes. Not the other way
around.

Use Enticing Offers and Reliable Experience

Many services suffer from tangibility problem. What they offer is difficult to
understand, evaluate and measure. This often creates roadblocks in realizing the
potential sales opportunities.

The best way to counter this is by creating offers and demonstrating your experience.
Consultations, seminars, webinars, sales calls, entry services, speeches, articles, white
papers, case studies, books, academic research and face-to-face meetings present a
chance to your potential customers to know how it feels like to work with you or use
your services.

Offers and experiences let people connect with your intangible offers in a more
personal way and generate better response. They also give you an opportunity to inject
a more effective call-to-action. By connecting with your target audience via non-
intrusive approaches, you can establish yourself as an expert and build upon your
brand value. These approaches are particularly effective in nurturing long term leads.
Make Your Lead generation Campaign Targeted, Direct and Sustainable

Making your campaign targeted involves identifying prospects who work at the right
levels of prospective organizations, hold right titles, possess the authority to make
decisions, have influence over the organization, and in the right industries. Obtaining
business development appointments with senior level executives in the targeted
companies is probably the biggest challenge faced by professional services companies
in generating qualified leads.

Once the targeted prospects are identified, then it’s time to roll in positioning,
branding and differentiating strategies into action. Lead generation demands an
organized sequence of planned events wherein the first step involves acquiring
targeted prospect lists, then using a mix of direct options such as mails, emails, phone
calls, trade shows and networking or indirect options such as advertising, PR and SEO
campaigns to reach them. The third stage involves offering value in your products and
services.

To get the best returns on your lead generation investments, you need to sustain the
campaign over the long term. It takes multiple touches with the prospects at multiple
points with enticing value proposition to turn a greater share of leads into customers.

Nurture Your Leads with Care

Nearly 89% percent of business-to-business buyers take more than three months to
make a purchase.2 Think about all the opportunities you lost in the last 90 days which
you believed aren’t hot enough. Generating leads regularly through sustained
campaigns and nurturing the generated leads is the key to long term success of any
marketing campaign.

At times, the leads may feel more like referrals than potential customers. And yet, you
need to nurture these leads by building clean targeted lists, sending them marketing
literature that is high on value proposition and persistently maintaining contacts with
the leads.

Conclusion

Use a range of macro- and micro-level metrics to keep track of effectiveness of your
tactics, strategy, outcomes, and ROI. By fine-tuning your lead generation strategy
over time, and by sustaining it over an extended period, you would be able to get the
best of your leads. It needs continuous testing to identify the strategies that best suit
your organization and industry. Sooner or later, you will have your fair share of leads
becoming clients.
2
Kourtis, Spyro. “Sales or Marketing: Who Spilled the Leads?”, DM News, May 3, 2004.