Leads, Leads, Leads. Today's B2B marketer is constantly bombarded by with ways to drive new and engaging experiences for lead generation. Sales has an insatiable appetite and revenue is only limited by the ability to create more demand.
What happens in these moments of pressure? All too often a marketing team will work to do more, add more, qualify more, and spend more in an effort to quench this appetite. They will create engagements/experiences that look like this.
The challenge with more and added pressure is marketers can forget the basics. More often than not, less is more.
Recently, a software company asked us to review their product go-to-market strategy and determine what was preventing them from reaching their sales goals. What we uncovered was something every team can benefit from. Here are some tips to get out of your own way and drive demand for your sales and marketing teams.
Focus
Create, create, create. The pressure of creating and delivering "things" can distract a team from their best work. Getting the most out of your demand generation efforts requires focus. If the goal is more ready-to-buy leads, then your marketing efforts should be laser focused on actions to deliver these.
A small software company was acquired by a large enterprise and all paid marketing efforts were stopped. No more Google Ads, no more PPC through Bing, no budget for freelance writers to create new content, and absolutely no money to be paid for 3rd party leads. What the digital marketing manager did during this time was take their leads from under 1000 a month to more than 3000 a month.
How did they do it? They focused on what they could control - the website. They honed their message, website copy and content with assets already created. Then they spent hours pouring over the visits they were getting, and tested, optimized, and tested. With 3 months of focused effort they had dramatically changed their organic demand generation and their sales team began hitting their targets.
Not all marketers will have the skills necessary to achieve this outcome, but with focus - any marketer can improve the ways your company drives lead generation.
Remove Friction
Visitors to your business want something, they are looking for information and possibly a solution to a problem they are facing. Every click, field, next step, and hoop they have to jump through to move the process is a reason for them to leave - quit - abandon - or worse turn to a competitor.
Too many companies require a substantial amount of information in exchange for what the prospect or customer wants. Think about the amount of information required to return a package to Amazon, or pay a utility bill. All you want to do is solve your problem, but the process to pay a bill or return something you don't want takes as much personal information as you need to apply for a marriage certificate. Paying a bill and getting married don't seem like they should require the same effort to complete.
Likewise, neither should your online forms. One of the best software experiences for getting access to a free trial is delivered by Tableau. One field and you get the download. Is your experience this simple?
Anything more than these required fields is likely impacting your lead total.
Name
Email (business email)
Phone
Get the rest of the information you need through:
Lead Enrichment/Data Augmentation - Append company and contact information to new leads, contacts, and accounts to get a more comprehensive picture of your data.
Progressive Profiling - set up iterative forms enabling you to designate which fields appear based on what you know vs what else you want to know about a particular lead.
BDR Sales Calls - create human interactions with your leads to get the most important information and follow up on the value you are providing to the prospect.
Email Signature Scrape - If you use an AI tool, or automated email assistant - replies and email correspondence can be scraped for the additional fields you may want from a contact.
Common Sense
Driving demand isn't easy. If it were, there wouldn't be thousands of strategies and companies would always have more leads than they know what to do with. Getting the most out of your limited resources should be common sense. Think like your prospect. Put yourself in their shoes. If you won't do it, it's unlikely they will either.
Build experiences you would want to engage with and focus on the customer/prospect. What seems like common sense, is not always common. Stand out in a crowd because you and your team focus on creating unforgettable lead generation programs and make it easy to do business before a check is ever written. Get out of your own way and watch your leads grow.
For more information or for an assessment of your lead generation systems and processes contact us today.