Back to School: Trends for B2B Lead Gen 2022
B2B lead generation processes have changed a lot in a short period of time. Nowadays, prospects have easy access to a lot of high-quality data, which means that buyers need less support from sales representatives to make their decisions.
Handshakes are becoming obsolete. A McKinsey & Company survey found that 70% of B2B decision-makers are now open to making self-service or fully remote purchases. A Gartner report stated that sales reps have roughly 5% of a customer’s time during their B2B buying journey.
That said, the end goals for B2B marketers and sales are still the same: finding qualified leads, streamlining sales, and enhancing businesses. Account-based marketing (ABM) tactics are a great way to create crafted, personalized experiences, but the real challenge consists in standing out while all your competitors are following the same playbook.
There are new rules in the B2B lead gen game. Consider these top trends for the rest of 2022 and integrate them into your 2023 strategies so your business can stay at the top of its class.
Top B2B Lead Generation Trends
As we go into the last quarter of the year, these top 2022 lead gen trends remain as relevant as ever. Ensure that your B2B sales and marketers are well-schooled in the following practices:
1. Data-driven sales
Data and analytics are crucial for sales and decision-making: High-quality data increases the efficiency of your sales, improves the company’s cost savings, and enables informed strategic decisions. Besides that, most C-level executives in B2B companies highlight the significance of a data-based approach.
Clean, fresh data allows your sales representatives to maximize their prospecting efforts and fill your pipeline with qualified opportunities. Such benefits prompt leaders to invest in tools such as customer data platforms (CDPs) to hold, organize, and leverage their prospects’ records in the most efficient manner. These platforms accurately handle customers’ data in real-time while providing a 360-degree view of their leads and existing customers.?
Read More: Customer Data Platforms: Your Guide to CDPs?
CIENCE’s GO Data sales intelligence platform offers more than 300 million lead records that are constantly enriched and cleansed so customers can rely on trustworthy data to build personalized campaigns to reach their most desired prospects.
2. Targeting decision-influencers
A Gartner research report stated that the current decision-making process now involves six to ten people. Thankfully, it is not necessary to convince them all. The new approach is reaching those “decision-influencers” inside an organization who are more attainable than chasing the high-end decision-makers. Here’s how you can differentiate between the two:?
3. Outsourcing lead gen experts
Outsourcing lead generation is a trending practice that has shown a number of benefits for B2B companies. This works for businesses that want to focus on closing deals rather than just getting leads. Here are just a few reasons outsourcing still works:
Trusting a well-positioned lead gen service and data provider to take care of generating warm leads and engaging prospects doesn’t only accelerate conversions, but they also give trusted insights on how to optimize your outreach.
4. Account-based marketing
Account-based marketing (ABM)—or key account marketing—has gained increasing popularity in 2022. In fact, 70% of marketers have reported implementing ABM in their workflow, up 15% in the last two years.?
The success of the ABM strategies lies in combining sales and marketing forces to target the best-fit accounts with customized campaigns. ABM concentrates on a select group of high-value accounts within a specific market that have the greatest revenue potential. Here’s why ABM continues to gain traction:?
ABM allows sales and marketing teams to personalize, target, and manage accounts for a higher return on investment (ROI), making it a desirable option to drive successful campaigns and profitable outcomes.?
5. Sales specialization
We’ve been talking about sales specialization for a while now because we know how great it works. Individual salespeople are not able to cover all the sophisticated tasks in front of them: If they spend half the day on research, writing, and personalizations—who’s closing the deal?
领英推荐
That’s why specialization is so vital; it gives you the ability to divide and conquer. Copywriters produce templates and scripts, researchers take care of leads, SDR callers are responsible for cold calling while messaging specialists take care of emails and other outreach.
Sales specialization helps teams develop job-specific skills, keep their focus on a couple of tasks instead of a dozen, and just do their job better. And all of that, of course, improves the results you get.?
Eric Quanstrom, CMO at CIENCE, believes that the sales specialization trend will continue to rise: “Most fast-growing companies have adopted sales specialization as a core strategy of their go-to-the-market,” said Quanstrom. “And the reason for that is that the employees performing distinct roles in a team can actually be better in each task of that chain than one person responsible for everything.”?
6. Marketing automation
Marketing automation makes it possible to drastically slash the time and money needed to perfect marketing pushes in real-time. It’s also possible to utilize accounting templates or online accounting software to assist with organizing marketing-related business.??
Using marketing automation practices has helped companies to streamline their marketing processes, ensuring the system not only runs smoothly for clients and team members but is also far more likely to create an ROI that can then be siphoned back into the marketing cycle.
Automation tools in general help sales and marketing teams check available data more effectively, assign certain tasks to the computer, set specific times for email delivery (perfect for international businesses), reach out to more leads, spend more quality time on personalization, customize the outreach process, and keep track of the progress made.?
7. Omnichannel outreach
Multichannel outreach uses multiple available channels to contact leads (email, phone, social media, ads, blogging) and focuses on selling. On the other hand, the omnichannel strategy focuses on the value proposition and benefits you can bring to the customer.?
Although both are a must for a modern salesperson due to the increased use of more channels by decision-makers, omnichannel could be favored a bit more due to its client-oriented nature. Obvious, straightforward selling is so last decade, so you might as well mix it up with different channels and maximize the results with updated pitches.
Before You Go
Check out our favorite content this week to get your sales and marketing juices flowing.?
Blog of the Week
We’ve seen sales change drastically over the course of a couple of years—just the COVID-19 pandemic alone brought out higher buyer awareness, altered the decision-making process, and introduced fully remote work.
Sales experts didn’t fall behind at different ways to adapt to the trends: omnichannel outreach, digitalization, AI integrations, and much more. Keep reading to discover all of the trends that should be on your sales radar in 2022 and beyond.?
Podcast of the Week
In this episode of Enterprise Sales Development podcast, we speak with Kevin “KD” Dorsey, one of the leading voices in the sales development space. KD shares lots of insights on the 8 Mile method, questions SDRs should be asking to drive conversations, proper messaging, and philosophies around prospecting. Check out everything he has to say in this amazing podcast.??
Get B2B Solutions with CIENCE
Have any thoughts or ideas you want to share? Reach out to us at [email protected].
Are you passionate about B2B solutions like us? Then subscribe to this newsletter, so we can keep on chatting about these always astonishing, larger-than-life topics.