How to Get Your Next 1,000 Customers without Breaking Your Bank

The Business of Generating Business is Getting More Expensive

If making money is a top priority of every business then there should be no dispute how much more important an efficient business prospecting process is. After all, who doesn’t want more market share and revenue growth? Nevertheless not all businesses understand how to leverage on technology to break out of the ad-spend rat race nor harnessing it to help marketing and sales teams to be more effective.

Research¹ has shown that lead generations tactics remained relatively unchanged over time as the world embraces high level of digitization. Moreover, online advertising spend is expected to grow at an amazing 40% CAGR from 2019–2025². This means businesses will be facing greater headwinds in getting their voice heard online and needing to constantly bump up resources just to play catch-up.

Quality Leads Come at a Price

Another research in B2B lead generation shows that outbound tactics such as events and trade shows generate the highest quality leads³. However, there are always constrains such as seasonality and the associated costs of manpower and logistics which are usually very high. Hence even though the lead quality is high the cost efficiency is pretty low.

Lead Generation Channel Expansion Adds Resource Pressure

In the same research, marketing and sales team face over a dozen of lead generation channels (see diagram below) and this coverage will continue to expand over time adding more pressure to resource needs as these teams struggle to perform.

More importantly, more than half of these lead generation techniques are outbound focused. This means finding the right audience is paramount for downstream sales conversion to work and therefore should be in no way left to chance. Sadly many marketing and sales team are still hinging obsolete tactics such as bulk email contact purchases and hamster farm -like approaches of rummaging telephone directories to do telemarketing.

An example of outsourcing lead generation without context, leading to poor quality leads and spams.

Likewise, despite inbound marketing techniques of generating content has its merit of drawing qualified leads however the process of creating lead magnets can be expensive not to mention the cost implications on distribute over multiple channels.

New Paradigms in Business Prospecting

So how can businesses break through the barriers on cost and efficiency in using today’s common lead generation tactics? We believe they can look at three areas in which technology can be leveraged to create higher quality leads faster and cheaper.

Aggregation and Enrichment

Instead of acquiring contacts, businesses can focus more on aggregating contextual information about their prospective clients in order to qualify leads at an earlier stage. For example, companies can discard old ways of amassing blind contact data through directory services and channel their attention to finding out attributes of potential clients and certain industry players that might require their products and services.

Natural Language Processing (NLP)is a technology that fits this bill. As machine learning continues to mature, particularly accelerated by ever-increasing computing power, it is now possible to parse text content at scale and extract contextually relevant semantics. This means businesses can understand quickly where and how to find prospective customers as they increase their digital footprint on the Internet.

Furthermore, imagine NLP technology as an agent who can help in supplementing appropriate information about a business entity by triangulating data from multiple sources in a short amount of time. In contrast, when done by a human manually this enrichment process could take weeks or months.

Smart Business Matching

Top salespeople have deep understanding of their markets and this is premised upon experience built over time. However as business landscapes evolves, this forte often gets locked into small cohorts of individuals which inhibits growth especially in highly competitive environment.

Machining learning technology empowers a new generation of marketing and sales teams to become gurus in their fields by capturing insights on potential business opportunities quickly. This may be achieved by having platforms that allow matching of company profiles, their product and services and respective value propositions with those of others. The result — a compelling ocean of qualified leads with much less effort and at lower cost compared to current methods of business lead generation.

All-round Engagement

With today’s multi-faceted communication universe, engagement is no longer single directional (such as TV, newspapers, radio) and it has become more measurable with increased digitizing happening to our economies. The average adult spends over three hours on the mobile phone⁴ alone and this excludes other devices (notebooks, tablets, smart TVs) and plethora of communication software (such as messaging apps and social networks).

This explosion of contact points poses a greater challenge to sales and marketing teams in terms of finding the most effective channel for communication. What would be ideal is a single communication hub that automatically sources, listens and broadcasts messages to prospective customers using the most appropriate and available channels. With such a setup, businesses can enjoy 24/7 engagement without loss of fidelity with their leads and clients.

Benefits of Deploying Machine Learning in Lead Generation

From aforementioned research, a summary of current lead generation tactics’ costs and set up time characteristics is shown below to underscore the inefficiencies which businesses are facing today.

Automation in this field through the deployment of machine learning techniques such as NLP and contextual deep learning can help businesses improve tremendously on both their top-lines and bottom-lines. A tool⁵ that is designed to support the critical elements of the lead generation process: aggregation, smart matching and multi-channel communication, can be a game changer for startups and businesses looking to gain strong traction in their markets and to build sustainable growth.

The Promising Digital Future

According to McKinsey Global Institute’s research⁶ close to 50% of the world’s industries is still undergoing the digital transformation. From a value chain perspective, as the world further digitizes we would only observe greater integration of businesses across other domains such as with consumers and public services both horizontally and vertically.

This presents massive opportunities for companies who understand how being an early adopter of machine learning in business prospecting can help to scale their growth ahead of competition for the long run.