Top tips for successful lead generation
The term ‘lead generation’ means different things to everyone. Definitions span from ‘demand capture’ and ‘prospect hunting,’ to ‘conversations with people who may buy your product’ and ‘everything up until the first meeting.’ However, lead gen isn’t just getting contact details, it’s about generating engaged prospects that fit within your ICP and have understood enough about what you do that they’re interested in having a conversation.
The most effective lead gen will be different for each company, there is no one size suits all strategy. It depends on your target market, product / service, the macroenvironment and how you operate as a team. There are an abundance of lead gen activities including outbound calling and email, conferences, syndicated content, referrals and paid advertising. To find out what works for your product you must continually test, feedback and refine.
To help you do this, we’ve created a list of top tips for building an effective lead gen strategy:
1. Have a hypothesis in place for each lead gen activity and before you test it, know what the leading indicators of success are for the next 2/4/6/8 weeks. It’s also important to remember that the longer the buying cycle, the longer the test period needs to be.
2. Know your audience: if you’re focusing on enterprise clients you can afford to spend more time and resource on prospects, creating a personalised experience for your targets. However, if your audience is more SME based, you will get the most value from using tools to identify prospects (such as goodfit.io) and then automating a ‘customised’ experience — this will ensure that cost per prospect is as efficient as possible when reaching a wide audience.
3. There are so many different metrics that you could track to show ‘success’ and often multiple parties are telling you exactly what they think they should be. So work out which metrics matter for your business and why and then build a dashboard from this. When you present this to the team and board, clearly define why they are important and the right metrics that will drive success.
4. Have a clear distinction between goals and KPIs. Things like cost per click or number of demos done per £ spent are good leading indicators but don’t look at them as a target, they simply demonstrate that you are on the right path. Don’t let KPI’s become ‘the thing,’ they’re a tool that you test and learn with.
5. Inbound and outbound are not actually separate. In an ideal world, the marketing team are attracting a distinct set of customers with clear messages, resulting in early engagement. Outbound is then informed by successful marketing — so be careful about separating them.
6. Make the most of referrals from your team’s network or existing clients — don’t be afraid to ask, as these are often some of your strongest prospects!
7. Content creation is a vital part of successful lead generation — it’s important your company is the one talking about your sector / solution and becomes a valuable source of knowledge within the industry.
8. Events can generate great leads (although often it’s a long game over multiple years), but ensure you have a tight conference process in place and when you follow up, follow up on a leads specific problem, not just with your solution.
9. Cold calling can be a very effective tactic but the most common reason it fails is due to execution. The first engagement with a prospect is the most important communication and yet often the least experienced BDRs are doing it. So make sure you have people who are knowledgeable on the customers problems and why your solution is the right one to solve them to maximise the chances of a successful interaction. It’s also helpful to use tools like Gong for visibility and to share learnings across the lead gen team.
10. There are an abundance of tools available today to help with lead gen from prospecting to data enrichment, call recording and pipeline analysis. This means sometimes teams deploy them because they feel like they should and results in spending unnecessarily and not seeing results. Again, test tools in relation to your use case. Know what you want to get out of them and have feedback loops in place to ensure they are actually adding value to the process.
11. Ensure there is alignment between Sales and Marketing, and that they are operating as one team in terms of goals, revenue, comp etc. Have someone from both Sales & Marketing across all projects and implement reporting as combined activities rather than individual functions. This will help build a GTM machine and rather than teams focusing on their individual attribution, will allow them to see the bigger picture and achieve the end goal.
Thanks to Ben Miller @ Miller Growth Advisory for hosting a brilliant lead generation workshop at our portfolio Go-To-Market Day, which was the catalyst for this piece.
