Valuable customers come from high-quality lead generation. The question is, how can you optimize your process to make sure you’re getting the most out of your lead generation strategy?
Many businesses face the same challenges, and while they’re not necessarily easy to solve, the right strategies can make a huge difference to your customer acquisition.
Balancing Volume with Personalization
Lead generation isn’t just about reaching people - it’s about reaching the right people with the right message. If you’re just trying to reach as many people as possible, you’re spreading your resources thin, and risk not giving your target audience the level of personalization they need.
Modern consumers are so used to receiving unsolicited messages that they’re great at filtering them out. One of the few ways through this is through personalization.
This takes research though, and it will require a change of focus. The question is, how do you find the right balance between outreach at volume and personalization?
Our ability to personalize has been greatly enhanced by technology, and this is probably where the answer lies. You’ve got to have the right software to make it simple to research your prospects and effortlessly add personalization into your processes.
This can be a costly investment but if you get the balance between volume and personalization right, it can pay off in a big way. At SalesHive, our technology is woven into our processes to make personalization simple, and it has a big impact on response rates.
Following Up in a Timely Manner
If someone fills out a form on your website, replies to your email outreach, or picks up the phone and calls you it’s an obvious sign of intent. You need to be able to capitalize on this by getting back to them quickly with the right information.
The difficulty is, if you’re sending out thousands of emails a day, getting form submissions on your site, and receiving lots of calls, it can be very difficult to keep up. Sometimes your lead generation can be too successful and you just don’t have the time and resources to follow up as you would like.
This is where your processes come in.
When someone comes into your sales pipeline, they need to be assigned to an available salesperson who has easy access to all the relevant information. Reminders should be automatically created to ensure leads are followed up on within a certain timeframe and notes consistently updated after each interaction with the prospect.
A good outreach platform should give you all the tools you need to help organize your follow-up.
Focusing on the Hottest Leads
One of the most important things about lead generation is recognizing that not all prospects offer the same value. A good way to look at it is from Pareto Principle or “the 80/20 rule” - 20% of the prospects become 80% of your business.
If you take this ratio, then it’s clear that you’ve got to find a way of focusing your resources on the hottest leads.
This isn’t always easy, but the key is understanding your target audience. If you can work with your salespeople to create a clear picture of what your ideal customers look like, the questions they ask, and the objections they have, then you make it easier to spot the hottest leads.
Learn when to remove someone from your sales funnel, and focus on those prospects who show the most potential.
Optiminzing Processes
To turn prospects into leads, you need to have a lead generation strategy. It’s not about putting as many names as possible on a list and having a hit and hope approach - it’s about understanding who you want to reach and how you want to reach them.
There will be lots of questions you have to ask about your strategy:
- What channels do you want to focus on?
- What software will you use?
- What sales strategies will you employ?
- Will you use scripts for cold calls?
There are an endless number of points to be decided, but the important thing is that you’re being led by the data. All the information is in your analytics and contained in the knowledge of your salespeople so put it to use.
Small changes can make a big difference in lead generation, so always keep an eye on the data, and keep testing your processes. This is one area where it pays to use outside help. When you work with an external company like SalesHive, you benefit from all the data they’ve amassed over the years, helping you to perfect your processes more quickly.
Measuring Success
Lead generation comes in many different forms. You might be doing email outreach, Linkedin messaging, direct mail, cold calling, or any other number of lead generation techniques. One of the difficult things to do is understand which ones are bringing you the most success.
For example, when you’re sending direct mail, how are you measuring your success? This isn’t always as easy as it might seem.
The important thing is that you’re planning ahead. If you’re trying to measure everything retrospectively, then it’s much more difficult. You need to have strategies in place to track your lead generation and establish KPIs to measure your success against.
Ultimately, you want to show a return on investment, but tracking each lead all the way through the sales process isn’t easy. To do so, you’re going to have to have robust systems in place from the beginning.
Conclusion: Lead Generation
Lead generation is extremely important for any business. You need to keep your sales pipeline stocked up and this means bringing in new leads is a never-ending job.
As with anything worthwhile, there are plenty of challenges to lead generation though!
Five challenges that seem to come up most often are the ability to personalize at scale, following up quickly with leads, identifying the most promising leads, optimizing processes, and measuring success.
If lead generation is just one small part of your business, then it’s natural to run into these challenges. This is why we recommend looking at outsourcing.
When you work with a trusted company like SalesHive, you’ve bought into a ready-made strategy, processes that have been optimized over years, and the leading industry software. Not only is this a way to cut your learning time significantly, but it’s also likely to result in many more leads.
View our variety of lead generation services!
