Are You Ready to Scale Your Lead Gen?
Or are you having problems generating enough high-value leads in sufficient quantities so that sales can hit their targets?
Importance of Lead Generation
Without leads, there are no sales. It doesn't matter where those leads come from, as long as they can be turned into sales. That's a controversial statement, no doubt. But it is true. If sales brings in a lead, and they close it, your general ledger doesn't know who generated the lead that is now hitting the GL.
Cost of Lead Acquisition Does Matter
But Not How You May Think
No one wants to spend more to acquire a lead than is necessary. For small dollar purchases, you may indeed need to keep your Cost of Lead Acquisition very low. And if you have the right, end-to-end measurement system in place, all the way through to finance, you can come real close to knowing how every penny spent eventually turned into revenue (or not).
For large dollar deals, the 8 figure kind, where I have mostly specialized, you can afford to spend a lot more on leads, and should. Don't be surprised though, if you find yourself under increasing scrutiny as you rack up that Virtual Account Team spend.
It's why on at least a couple of deals, me and my team spent 100k plus between lead acquisition and pre-sales. It's also why you have to know your conversion rate numbers.
Do You Really Know Your Audience?
You will often hear marketers talk about knowing their Buyer Personas. These are, indeed, important to know and to update as your market, product and competitive landscape shifts.
Account Based Marketing is a Little Different
Where knowing your buyer persona gets really complicated is in the complex sale, where you often practice Account Based Marketing or ABM for short. It is not unusual for you to have 5, 6 or in one case 60 people involved in the sale. Here's where the mettle of the marketer as well as the sales team is truly tested.
Sales Enablement Content Produced in Advance
In my experience, the secret to success within these very complex sales scenarios is having a proven Sales Methodology, supported by pre-built but highly customizable sales enablement materials. These will often include custom marketing documents tailored to specific roles and as well, specific Sales Documents that are more than likely delivered by the sales persons directly.
Provide Value - Harder Than it Looks
As a practitioner of Inbound Marketing, you'll need to spend time developing content, for every stage of your marketing funnel. You may know these by various names, such as lead magnets, User Generated Content (UGC) and many other names. What's most important is to start with a content plan. All of successful Inbound Marketing Customers started with a comprehensive Content Plan, which was further elaborated as we started to receive feedback from marketing analytics system.
Be Data Driven
Digital marketing success, is, if anything, a data driven pursuit. As a Hubspot Inbound Marketer, it's a rate moment when you don't see me or my team do some sort of marketing analysis or planning. If you're aspiring lead gen ninja, you will be looking at everything, including landing pages and their forms, including how many fields in which order appear and what your team does with that data.
Data Driven Email Lead Nurturing Sequences
One of the 'biggies' is setting up and measuring email lead nurturing sequences. Email continues to be a primary revenue driver, especially among ecommerce clients. But getting your email into someone inbox, getting them to open it and then getting them to take a desired action is no mean feat. Data driven insights will light the way.
Sales - Are the Leads 'No Good'?
If you work in marketing as a lead generation expert, you won't be surprised to hear that most sales teams complain about lead quality - especially toward the end of the month, quarter or year. While the lead quality could always be better, lead scoring needs to be part of your approach to improving sales closure rates. Your CRM system needs to support both manual and predictive lead scoring.
Leave No Stone Unturned
When it comes to achieving the coveted sobriquet of lead ninja guru, you can't afford to leave any marketing channel fallow. You have to use a multi-channel marketing approach, including social media, content marketing and email marketing to drive people to your lead magnets.
Trust But Verify - Sage Advice
No matter how thoroughly you research your keywords, know your product and understand what you sell, you still have to assume there's plenty of 'hidden gems' to uncover. When it comes to being a certified lead gen ninja, you have to test, constantly and forever. While A/B testing is well known, there are many levels of intelligent testing available that well beyond this level of testing. Conversion Rate Optimization or CRO success depends on running statistical valid test, which although mathematically challenging, ultimately rely on your ability to come up with ideas to test.
Sales is Waiting On You - Not!
If you're generating leads but sales isn't generating sales, the first thing to check is whether your sales and marketing is unified, via a CRM. Whether you're a Hubspot Enterprise Marketing Suite User, where you have a single contact database that both sales and marketing use, or live in a hybrid environment such as Salesforce or SAP, you have to know where every lead is going and that is being worked as expected.
Ready to Test Your Lead Generation IQ as Lead Gen Ninja?
