A B2B company relies significantly on its sales representatives to generate income, and the sales team, in turn, relies on the b2b marketing team for qualified sales leads. A qualified b2b lead is a prospect who is prepared to hear a product pitch and be closed as a sale.
Marketers frequently give a large quantity of b2b leads to their sales staff in order to prevent losing high-quality prospects. A high amount of unwanted contacts, on the other hand, might compel b2b sales professionals to spend time screening out low-quality leads from marketing qualified leads (MQLs) and creating connections with prospects who do not meet the ideal client profile.
To generate high-quality leads, marketing must collaborate with sales to determine what qualifies as a lead in the first place, and then tailor their demand creation approach to the most critical buyer attributes.
What exactly are high-quality leads?
High-quality b2b leads are outstanding prospects with a high conversion rate. The higher the quality of a lead, the more probable a consumer is knowledgeable about the product or service and ready to make a purchase.
An excellent technique to identify high-quality leads is to assign values to their qualities or activities, such as job title, budget authority, interest in marketing material, and match to the ideal buyer persona.
1# Determine the best content kinds and channels for conversion.
The next step is to determine which sorts of content and marketing channels have a high association with prior purchases.
B2B companies that prioritise content pieces that are related to previous sales have a 12% higher sales acceptance rate. In fact, firms who do not prioritise lead engagement by content type saw a 10% decrease in MQL sales acceptance.
Downloading content isn’t enough to qualify a contact as a high-value lead. B2B marketers must discover and deploy high-performing b2b content kinds where their potential buyers are likely to find them.
Determine which marketing channels (Like LinkedIn) have the highest likelihood of obtaining high-quality leads. These are often the websites where your target customers spend the most time while performing purchasing chores ranging from recognising an issue and seeking solutions to reading software reviews.
Learning which channels the buyers utilise and acquiring leads from those channels is a simple method to improve lead quality.
2# Create a buyer profile.
Who should companies target? This is the first question to ask in order to choose the best b2b buyer. Recognizing the best buyer personas will help businesses one step closer to creating a high-quality lead for the b2b company.
Define the ideal clients’ qualities by specifying the most important business attributes, such as job title and decision-making power, as well as implicit elements that reflect the expected online behaviour.
The former specifies the qualifying parameters for determining the fundamental fit of the leads, while the latter establishes specific thresholds that a prospect must reach in the purchasing journey to qualify as a high-quality lead ready to become a paying client.
One may also create ideal buyer profiles using historical conversion statistics, or compare the newly specified qualities to past sales records to verify business is not missing anything.
3# Use buyer intent data to boost lead quality.
Once all questions have been answered, use buyer intent data to rank leads and add more information to the ideal buyer, content, and channel benchmarks. Intent data collects an individual’s or company’s behavioural information, such as the sites or pages they visit, reviews they read on third-party platforms, or the material they spend time exploring.
Marketers may target customers when they are actively seeking for the solutions and determine whether a lead has reached a stage in the purchasing journey where they qualify as a qualified prospect by gathering intent data.
B2B companies may use proprietary third-party buyer intent data to target high-value, in-market buyers and convert them into high-quality leads, in addition to their first-party data sources (emails, website, social media).
4# Determine the efficacy of quality-based lead generating.
Increasing lead quality involves rejecting the goal of supplying as many leads as possible. Because the aim is to limit leads to just high-quality leads with greater conversion rates, the metrics for monitoring and reporting should reflect this.
Keep track of these conversion metrics to determine success in quality lead creation. To assess conversions holistically, data from sales and marketing may be linked in CRM software.
Curating a high-quality lead generation strategy can take time and involves a lot of trial and error. As you understand the ins and outs of identifying high-quality leads for your company, classify the marketing initiatives that have most connected with the target demographic and resulted in conversions.
To refer to these campaigns in the future, they might be labelled differently depending on ideal buyer profiles, high-performing content, or best-converting marketing channels. Wherever a company’s finest clients originated from, there are many more that may be reached in the same manner.
5# Create an ongoing partnership between sales and marketing
Even with well-defined customer criteria and lead scoring techniques, B2B marketers may have low conversion rates if they are not linked with sales. When the qualifying criteria are agreed upon in advance, more than 60% of B2B sales professionals are more inclined to follow up on MQLs.
Effective lead creation starts with marketing and sales working together to co-create lead qualifying techniques, from defining a high-quality lead to selecting lead scoring systems and incremental improvements.
If you want to get quality leads for your B2B business, Sales Demand can help you with its lead generation services. To learn more contact us now.
