How To Create the Best Lead Generation Process That Amplifies Your Growth

B2B companies need effective strategies to grow their brand and acquire more revenue to stay ahead of their competitors. Your sales and marketing teams must guide your prospects through your sales funnel to ensure they convert faster.

However, thousands of other brands are trying to target the same audience. Consumers need solutions to their pain points faster than ever, and they will turn to other alternatives if your company doesn’t actively showcase the solutions they seek.

Learning the best lead generation process will help you gather quality leads while ensuring you can retain existing leads to nurture them into paying customers to help drive up your ROI.

What are Leads?

Let’s start by defining the word “leads.” A lead is any person that displays interest in your company’s products or services by opening communications with you in some manner.

Filling out forms, signing up for webinars, submitting information for a free trial, etc., are all examples of leads reaching out to indicate interest in your solutions and learn more before they make a purchase, unlike reaching out to prospects through cold calls.

All leads who interact with your brand are considered to be inside your sales funnel. However, not all of these leads are the same. Here are the various kinds of leads you would find based on where they are in the sales funnel:

• Information Qualified Lead (IQL) – The first kind of leads are prospective buyers who have shown interest in your company’s solutions by following a call-to-action (CTA). These leads require more information before moving to the next stage of your sales funnel.
• Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) – A step further from IQLs, Marketing Qualified Leads are prospects who have interacted with your marketing efforts but have yet to be ready for a sales call.

Contacts interacting with your company by attending webinars, submitting forms, giving information to opt for offers, etc., are considered MQLs.

• Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) – SQLs are at the bottom of the funnel (BoFU) as they have shown explicit interest in making a purchasing decision for your company to convert. Despite their interest, you are still at risk of losing these leads to competitors.
• Product Qualified Lead (PQL) – Contacts who have used your product during a free trial or limited version and are now interested in upgrading to a full product after payment are labeled PQLs.
• Service Qualified Lead – Similar to MQL and SQL, Service Qualified Leads are prospects who have indicated an interest in your products to your service teams. These teams can guide your leads to the appropriate sales reps.
• Sales-Ready Lead – Also known as “accepted leads,” sales-ready leads have reached the bottom of the funnel and must be guided to close a deal.

What is Lead Generation?

“Lead generation,” or “lead gen,” refers to filling your sales funnel by gathering people who show interest in your company to nurture and eventually convert them into paying customers.

Lead generation targets specific content to prospects who fit your ideal customer profile (ICP) to earn their trust and nurture them into making a purchasing decision from your company, making it a part of your inbound marketing strategy.

Lead generation can be done through blogs, SEO, email marketing, ads and retargeting, social media, product trials, etc.

Lead Generation Strategies That Actually Work

Before we jump to how you can create the best lead generation process for your company, let’s take a look at the various strategies you can implement to gather leads and nurture them into making a purchase:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Understanding keywords is crucial to utilizing a lead generation strategy with one of the highest ROIs, owing to its low customer acquisition cost (CAC) since you’re not paying for every link.

Search engines like Google and Bing are platforms your prospects are directed to your website. In today’s digital age, prospects are more likely to search on Google as their first step to looking for solutions.

Objectively speaking, keyword research aims to improve your website’s ranking on the SERP by including words relevant to your business prospects’ search the most, enabling you to target them better and achieve brand visibility.

Social Media Marketing

Similar to search engine marketing, your prospects are present on social media platforms, making the lead generation process much easier from the overall traffic. You can communicate with customers in addition to targeting them with relevant advertisements.

• Facebook lead generation used to rely on outbound links in posts and bios before Facebook Ads were launched. The Facebook algorithm began to push paid ads first, prompting businesses to change how they approach lead generation.

• Twitter Lead Gen Cards provides a simple method of acquiring leads from Tweets after users click the “Submit” button. Lead Gen Cards store names, email addresses, and usernames to add them to your sales funnel.
• B2B businesses can leverage LinkedIn’s vast population of business users to search and identify leads that fit their ICP. LinkedIn offers Lead Gen Forms that automatically fill out a form when a user clicks on a specific CTA.

Content Marketing

Content marketing is attracting leads to your website through engaging and relevant content. Content marketing has worked for traditional and digital marketing by providing customers with content such as blogs, newsletters, webinars, podcasts, etc.

Your content, driven by meticulous content modeling, can introduce new products or technology to consumers, act as a technical guide that provides in-depth information to your leads, motivating them to make a purchase.

Relevant content can also help you improve SEO and build customer trust, as your leads rely on you to provide the information required before they consider making a purchase.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) Ads refer to paying for ads to appear on search engine results (SERP). Unlike SEO marketing, you must pay for every link on PPC ads, making it crucial for your outbound marketing strategy.

PPC ads can place your products and services before particular leads to ensure better visibility and traffic on your landing pages.

Product Offers and Free Trials

Offers and free trials are incredibly lucrative opportunities for customers to try your product risk-free and form a more informed opinion based on their user experience.

Showcasing what they can expect with your product and how to use it is a reliable method of gathering leads who can upgrade into paying customers if they had a satisfactory experience with your company.

Retargeting Campaigns

Only some of your leads are willing to convert the first time they visit your landing page. In reality, most leads will leave your website without converting despite finding their solutions.

Retargeting campaigns can put your brand in their focus again and guide them to your website with relevant ads and content on social media sites, emails, and other platforms.

What An Optimal Lead Generation Process Looks Like

Now that you understand lead generation and the techniques you can utilize, let’s look at what the best lead generation process for your company should consist of, so you can go out and create your very own to garner more revenue:

Research the Market and Define Buyer Persona

When structuring your lead generation process, the first step is to identify the target audience. Creating an ICP or buyer persona is essential as it informs the strategies you need to employ to gather these prospects as leads.

Once a buyer persona is ready, you can acquire contact information for leads with people finder tools like Swordfish AI to enhance your buyer database. Once a database has been created, conduct regular reporting to keep track of incoming leads.

Form Consistent Messaging in Content

Messaging related to your company appears in several channels like emails, landing pages, social media posts, etc. The language should be clear and concise while guiding your leads on the next step.

Content that provides value to your leads must reflect what appears across your website and the product you wish to sell. Without consistent messaging across the sales funnel stages, you risk losing out on leads during the lead generation process.

Pre-Targeting Ads

As mentioned earlier, not all leads are ready to go through the stages of your sales funnel the moment they join it.

Pre-targeting ads is an effective way to increase brand awareness while presenting your solutions to prospects who need it but don’t know your company yet. These ads can warm up leads to a cold outreach instead of wasting time on failed cold calls.

Optimizing Landing Pages

Dedicated landing pages are vital for every brand offering to provide leads with more information and the option to continue the buyer’s journey with your brand. As a business, your landing pages aim to make leads move further in the sales funnel.

Landing pages need a particular CTA that leads the prospect to them instead of your homepage. Since your homepage has a variety of information, dedicated landing pages focus on a single solution and remove irrelevant information for the lead.

Sending appropriate leads to the correct landing pages guarantees you a conversion. Attention-grabbing headlines and CTAs ensure better retention rates and fewer bounces.

Nurturing Existing Leads

Not all leads you generate have to be new prospects. Stagnant leads that have been present in your sales funnel for extended periods must be reached out to with re-engagement campaigns and guided through the different stages of the funnel.

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring is essential to identify the high-value leads you need to focus on to close deals with them quicker. Your sales team determines lead scores based on your leads’ actions, the information provided, engagement metrics, and so on.

Lead scoring places leads on a quantitative scale to place them on a scale between “interested” and “ready for a sale.” Scoring leads can inform you of the correct channels and content to use for them to make them convert.

Email and Call Outreaches

Cold outreaches are one of the most critical stages in the lead generation process. Cold calling and cold emailing usually go hand-in-hand. Your sales reps use CRM software to track the emails sent to prospects for variables like click-through rates.

The engagement activity of different leads based on the cold emails gives your sales reps a list of prospects to reach through cold calling. When everything goes perfectly, sales reps contact the lead with the highest activity to qualify them and set up an appointment.

Qualified leads are prepared to follow the customer journey down your sales funnel. While the method works for general use cases, remember that some prospects prefer email communication only. You also need to maintain a report for stats regarding leads.

Although cold outreaches are essential to the best lead generation process, your sales and marketing teams could be forced to search for contact information to communicate with leads.

Hunting for contact information takes away time and resources from your teams, who could have focused on qualifying high-value leads and guiding them through the sales funnel to close more deals.

Trust Swordfish AI to remove the hassle of manually searching for contacts and prospective customers with our automation and database enrichment features.

Swordfish AI: Find Prospects Faster for Effective Lead Generation

Swordfish AI is a comprehensive and robust prospect finder tool that automates searching and gathering verified contacts that fit your ICP to enable B2B businesses create the best lead generation process.

Swordfish AI collaborates with 200+ data to provide and maintain verified contact information for over 3.1 billion profiles for data such as names, residential addresses, email addresses, social profiles, etc., to reach your leads early in their customer journey and guide them to convert faster.

Features

• Swordfish AI’s Chrome Extension feature allows you to bypass the hassle of manually searching for prospects on social platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter by automatically curating a list of prospects to add to project lists in bulk.
• Reverse Search provides all the verified publicly available contact information for integral decision-makers in prospective companies after you input a single credential. Our service automatically displays the remaining missing credentials.

Swordfish AI lets you prioritize your data requirements by specifying contact information as a “must-have.” We charge you based on the “must-have” contact information we provide. No matches? No charges!

• File Upload appends missing data in your CRM, ATS, and other databases for names, job titles, locations, contact numbers, mobile numbers, business emails, etc., after you upload your files in Excel and CSV formats.

• We introduce the Refresh Job Title + Company to save you time from wasting resources on failed cold calls to outdated or inactive contacts by enriching your databases with updated information for prospects in target organizations after you input their LinkedIn URL.

Pricing

Swordfish AI offers customized pricing plans tailored around your company’s informational needs for the optimal lead generation process that caters to the needs of different teams working in your sales funnel. Our services integrate seamlessly into your CRM/ATS and workflows.

Sales and marketing teams can spend less time hunting for correct contact information for prospects and communicate with them effectively to nurture sales-ready leads faster.

Contact us to try our features risk-free with a free trial, or talk to us about the requirements to create your lead generation process so we can help you achieve your goal with verified contact data right when needed.

Conclusion

An optimized lead generation process enables businesses to acquire more revenue while increasing their brand presence. There are several lead generation strategies that you can implement to achieve your goal.

When it comes to the lead generation process itself, you need to plan out exactly the kind of message you provide your prospects so they can take the desired actions that will eventually convert and make a purchase from your company.

Swordfish AI can simplify your cold outreach strategy by providing you with contact information for billions of profiles worldwide, so you don’t have to waste time hunting for contacts and reach your leads early in their customer journey and guide them through your sales funnel faster.

Contact us to try our features or talk to us about your personalized data requirements so that we can create a customized pricing plan that can help you make the best lead generation process today!