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How do I Plan the Best Lead Generation Process from Start to Finish?
No business can grow without continually increasing their customers. How do you increase the number of customers or users of your services? Lead generation is the very first step that a business can do to increase sales. How is it done and what are the best approaches for lead generation? Stay tuned to learn all that in this article.
Lead generation is the process of making prospective customers interested in buying from you. A lead is, therefore, anyone who is potentially your customer. Your work as a businessman or head of a sales team is to know how you will attract leads and then convert them into sales. It will be of no use to attract so many leads if you cannot convert a good percentage of them into sales. That means you will also devise strategies that can generate high-quality leads.
What is the difference between sales qualified leads and marketing qualified leads?
Before we get to the lead generation process, we need to understand what these two terms mean. Some people have commonly used them to mean the same thing, but these are two distinct entities. It is important to understand their difference as that is key to what we are going to discuss next.
Conversion of leads to sales
Once you already have that list ready, you can proceed with the lead’s conversion strategy. And by list, we mean a list of sales qualified leads. Once again, your team needs to be very strategic in the way they will turn the SQL into hungry buyers. The success of this process depends on the methods used. So, you can consult specialists that we mentioned earlier if you are not sure of your next move.
Lead generation process evaluation
This is the last step in the lead generation process and it is to give you an idea of how the whole system performs. With an appropriate tool, this evaluation and analysis can be performed by just a click on the button. You need to know how you performed along the way. How many leads were generated, how many qualified as SQL, and how many were actually converted. Check out this against the timeframe and make adjustments as necessary. You can think of changing your lead generation strategies to capture higher quality leads.
A Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) is generally anyone out there who might be interested in your product and services. It can be an individual or an organization. So, your marketing strategy will be targeting such persons and organizations to turn them into leads.
A Sales Qualified Lead (SQL), on the other hand, is a sorted or vetted lead. Once you have attracted leads to your website or make them aware of your business, you will need your sales team to vet them and know who is ready to move forward in the sales process and those who are not. The group that is ready to move forward forms the sales qualified lead.
What is the Lead Generation Process?
For you to generate high-quality led for your business, you will need to know how to do it right. Otherwise, it will be a wasted effort and company resources. In the following sections, we are going to discuss the basic process of lead generation. We have broken these into five basic steps and all of them are easy to follow. Stay with us!
Inbound Marketing
This is the very first step that will get you leads. This process should be designed to capture as many leads as possible as not all of them will pass as sales qualified lead. Your marketing strategies should be top-notch to capture high-quality leads.
While working on the marketing strategies, you need to have a lead management system already in place since you can be overwhelmed with the influx. We have many CRM tools out there that are very helpful. The good thing about these tools is that they can be automated. So, you don’t have to worry about doing all the manual work. Your marketing team only needs to settle for the best tool to use.
Inbound marketing for leads generation requires expertise. If you and or your staff have no much experience in this field, then you can consider reaching out to service providers such as NXT LVL ROI Business Consulting Services. We have business consultants with many years of experience and are ready to help you out. In fact, we can help you through all the processes that will be discussed here.
Nurture the existing leads
You are actively looking for new leads as that is what the first step is all about, right? What are you doing about the leads that you already have? You need to engage them so that your list can grow. Without proper engagement, you can realize that your list is not growing as the new leads only replace the leads that are unsubscribing from your mailing list.
The digital systems that we use in leads management give us many different ways of nurturing the existing leads. In some cases, you will have your leads sending inquires that you need to respond to. Email autoresponders can work great to keep your leads on board before you take the actual actions to respond to their inquiries. We know that these autoresponders cannot provide specific answers that they may be looking for, but you can use it to acknowledge the receipt of their inquiry and to give them an assurance that you are working on it.
Scoring or profiling your leads
Once you have captured just enough leads (leads cannot be enough for an actively-growing business), you now need to know who is who. You need to understand more about your leads. Other personal information such as where they come from, what they do, business tittles that they hold, what business they run or won, etc. are key in better understanding them. Tools such as HubSpot and others can help you in gathering this information, thanks to their integration to LinkedIn.
Your sales team, armed with this information, can now work towards converting your lead. They will not waste time and resources on the leads that are unlikely to convert.
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